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A text pings on my phone. It’s from Sienna: I hope your honeymoon was restful. Congrats on securing the France club with Pierre. Let me know when you’re back. We need to talk. Privately.

Privately?

It’s not as if most of our conversations are public. We’re usually discussing confidential mergers and acquisitions. So the fact that she’s specifying that she wants a private meeting has me considering the possible subject matter she wants to discuss.

Whatever it is, it will have to wait.

I glance over across from me where Aria is sketching. I know what she’s drawing before I lean forward enough to see the page.

Her mother’s apartment from memory. The balcony, and the curling ironwork… and the flowers spilling over the railing.

Her hand moves as she draws line after line like the image already exists and she’s only uncovering it.

I close the laptop.

The emails will still be there in an hour. In two. Even in ten.

I only have one wife.

The word lands differently now than it did on the wedding day.

My phone buzzes again.

Doug.

Furniture delivery confirmed. Henry’s apartment fixtures in. Therapy equipment arrives by seven a.m.

I glance up.

Aria is still drawing, lower lip caught lightly between her teeth while she shades the edge of the balcony.

I type back quickly.

Good work.

Then I pocket the phone again before she looks up.

Hours later she falls asleep somewhere over the Atlantic with the sketchbook still open on her lap and the pencil loose in her fingers.

I ease it from her hand, slide it into the spine of the book, and set the whole thing on the empty seat beside her. She shifts in her sleep but doesn’t wake.

I know I should work, but instead I sit there in the hum of the engine and watch the clouds drag past the window and think about Seattle.

About Monday.

About whether being the man my company needs and the man my wife deserves are actually incompatible or whether I’ve just spent years using work as an excuse not to find out.

Eleven thousand people depend on Kauffman Enterprises. I don’t take that lightly.

But I also can’t keep being only that man. The one who sleeps in an office, misses dinner, and calls a penthouse home because he doesn’t know what else to do with a life that has no room in it for softness. I can’t be that man if I want her to stay.

Seattle greets us with pale sun, a cold edge in the air, and the kind of clean blue sky that makes the city look more innocent than it is. We don’t get too many of these days.

The town car is waiting on the tarmac by the time we step off the jet.

Aria blinks against the light, portfolio case tucked against her side, and I have the sudden, irrational urge to turn around and get back on the plane before any of this can be tested. I know what we can be in France… I don't know how it all works here yet.

Instead I open the rear door for her and wait until she slides inside before following.