And I don’t know if that’s something to guard against—
or something I should be brave enough to trust.
Chapter twenty-three
Seamus
The city sprawls beneath my home office window—thousands of lights blinking and pulsing in the darkness.
I should be working. The quarterly reports are waiting on my desk, Malcolm's latest projections for the downtown development, three contracts that need my signature by morning.
Instead, I stand here with a scotch I poured an hour ago and haven’t touched, watching traffic bleed red and white far below.
Rosanna is in her studio next door. I can hear the faint scratch of pencil on paper, the occasional soft sigh when something doesn't come out right.
She's been working on illustrations for a new children's book. Her own book this time. It's about a girl who plants a garden in the city and watches it grow despite the concrete and steel trying to crowd it out. She told me about it over dinner, her whole face lighting up as she described the color palette she's planning.
The penthouse feels different since she moved in. There are sketchbooks on the coffee table, a bright blue cardigan drapedover the back of the couch, her favorite tea taking up an entire shelf in the kitchen.
Small invasions of color and warmth that should feel intrusive but instead make the space feel like a home.
I've lived here for five years, and it took Rosanna days to make it feel lived-in.
But there's a hollowness underneath it all, following me from room to room like a shadow I can't shake.
Because every time she smiles at me, every time she reaches for my hand or laughs at something I've said, I wonder if she'd still do it if she knew the truth.
If she knew that the childhood pen pal she's been writing to—the one she trusts with her doubts and dreams—is the same man she's sharing a breakfast table with every morning.
I told myself I'd tell her after things felt more stable. But there's always a reason to wait. And they're all lies I'm telling myself to avoid the moment when she looks at me and realizes I've been deceiving her since the beginning.
My phone lights up with a notification—some society blog has posted photos of Rosanna and me. I swipe through them without really looking until I stop on one: Rosanna's hand on my arm, both of us smiling at something someone said. The caption reads: Reformed playboy Seamus O'Malley and his artist wife prove that some leopards really can change their spots.
Reformed. That word again. Like my past is something I've recovered from, a disease I've been cured of through the miracle of marriage and respectability.
The truth is messier.
Once upon a time, I made a decision.
If people were going to use me anyway, I'd control the terms. That meant casual relationships with clear expectations.
It worked. I knew what I was getting—temporary, surface-level, nothing real.
Honest, in its dishonesty.
The problem was that everyone assumed I loved it. The boards, the press, even my own team—they all saw the headlines and thought Seamus O'Malley was living his best life, charming his way through an endless parade of beautiful women. No one asked if I was happy. Probably because they assumed the answer was obvious.
No one noticed I was empty. That I’d decided this was all I deserved.
And then ERS matched me with the one woman in the city who'd publicly told me exactly what she thought of me and everything I represented. The woman who'd looked at my company's development plans and seen destruction instead of progress. Who'd stood up at a community meeting and called me power-hungry and soulless without a trace of fear.
I should have hated being matched with Rosanna. Instead, I felt something I hadn't felt in years: hope.
I sit down at my desk and open my laptop, pulling up the email thread. Shay and Anna. The names we chose as kids when our schools paired us for that pen pal project.
I was eight and terrible at spelling. She was seven and already attaching drawings to her letters.
We were supposed to write for one school year. We never stopped. Through middle school, high school, college.
