Chapter 3: She’s With Me

He didn’t say yes. He didn’t say no. He looked at me the way you look at a contract before you’ve decided whether to pick up the pen, and said, “Define real.”

I shifted in my chair. Ryan was still at his table, still pretending he wasn’t watching us, still doing the thing where his chin was angled slightly away but his eyes kept drifting back. I knew that angle. I’d watched it across dinner parties and work events for two years, Ryan cataloguing a room while performing disinterest.

“Convincing,” I said. “Nothing complicated. You treat me like someone you’re actually here with. I do the same. He watches. That’s it.”

“For the rest of the evening.”

“For the rest of the evening.”

Adrian was quiet for a moment. He turned his water glass once, a single slow rotation, fingers loose around the base. “And what exactly do you think that accomplishes?”

“He cheated on me,” I said. “Three days ago. He hasn’t apologised, he hasn’t called, and he just walked into the same restaurant and looked at me like I’m the inconvenient part of his evening.” I kept my voice even. “I want him to spend the next hour wondering.”

Something settled in Adrian’s expression. Not sympathy, not quite. More like he’d just located the specific shape of the situation and filed it appropriately. “Wondering what.”

“Whether he made a mistake.” I looked at him steadily. “Whether I’m fine without him. Whether the story he’s been telling himself this week, the one where I’m sitting at home falling apart, is wrong.”

The silence between us was different from before. Less like an obstacle and more like a room we were both standing in.

“You’re not falling apart,” he said.

“No. I’m not.” I picked up my menu. “But he doesn’t need to know when I figured that out.”

Adrian watched me for another moment. Then he reached across and took the wine list from beside my elbow, opened it without hurry, and said, “What do you drink?”

I blinked. “Sorry?”

“If we’re doing this, I should know what you drink. He’ll be watching our body language before the first course arrives.”

Something in my chest loosened slightly. “Red. Anything that isn’t too sweet.”

He turned a page. “Do you actually like wine or do you order it because it seems appropriate?”

“Both, depending on the evening.”

“Tonight?”

I glanced toward Ryan’s table. He’d leaned in to say something to the colleague beside him but his shoulders were still wrong, still carrying that tautness I recognised. “Tonight I actually want it,” I said.

Adrian called the waiter over without raising his hand, the particular gravity of someone accustomed to rooms rearranging themselves around him. He ordered without consulting me, which should have been irritating and was instead oddly efficient, because he’d ordered exactly what I would have chosen.

I didn’t say that.

The waiter left. Adrian leaned back in his chair and looked at me with that steady, undecorated attention. “He’s looking again,” he said quietly.

“I know.”

“Should I say something to you, or just look at you.”

“Don’t perform it,” I said. “He’ll see the seams. Just, talk to me like you’re interested in what I’m saying.”

“What would you like to talk about.”

“Anything. What do you actually want to know.”

He considered this with the seriousness of someone who didn’t ask questions they didn’t mean. “What did you want to be when you were ten.”

I laughed before I could stop it, a short, genuine sound that I immediately felt Ryan clock from across the room. “That’s your question.”

“It tells me more than asking what you do for work.”

I turned my wine glass by the stem, an unconscious mirror of what he’d done a moment ago. “A journalist,” I said. “I wanted to write things that made people uncomfortable in useful ways.”

“And instead.”

“I’m in communications. Which is, depending on the day, either the opposite of that or exactly that.” I looked at him. “Your turn.”

A slight pause. Like the question surprised him, or like he was deciding how much of an answer to give. “I wanted to build things. Actual things, not companies. Structures.”

“You became an architect.”

“My father had other ideas.”

I watched his face. There was nothing in it that invited further questions, but also nothing that was performing privacy. Just a fact, set down plainly and left there. “Do you regret it,” I said.

“Some days.”

The wine arrived. Adrian lifted his glass and tilted it slightly toward me, not a toast, just an acknowledgement, and I lifted mine and felt the specific strangeness of sitting across from a man I’d known for twenty minutes having a more honest conversation than I’d had across two years of Sundays.

“He’s shifted his chair,” Adrian said, without looking. “Facing this way more directly now.”

I didn’t turn. “Good.”

“You’re not tempted to look.”

“I spent two years paying attention to what Ryan needed,” I said. “I’m taking the evening off.”

Something crossed his face then. Fast and almost imperceptible, but I’d been watching him long enough to catch it. Not quite a smile. Something quieter than that, and more genuine.

We ate. We talked. He asked two more questions that were sharper than they appeared on the surface, and I answered them honestly because something about his directness made performance feel like more effort than it was worth. He told me one thing about himself for every three he asked me, which was either calculation or habit, and I couldn’t yet tell which.

At some point I forgot to track what Ryan was doing.

I noticed that I’d forgotten, and I noticed the specific quality of what that felt like, and I filed it under: information.

The bill arrived without either of us asking for it, Adrian had presumably arranged it beforehand, and as he signed it I glanced toward Ryan’s table for the first time in an hour. He was watching us openly now, the pretence dropped, a glass held loosely in one hand and something in his expression that sat in the narrow space between anger and something he’d never admit to.

Good, I thought again. And meant it slightly differently than I had the first time.

We stood. Adrian came around the table to hold my coat, which was the kind of thing a man did when he wanted a room to see him doing it, and I let him, and the gesture was so smooth and unhurried that it read, I knew without looking, as completely natural.

In the doorway I glanced back once.

Ryan was still watching.

I turned away and walked out into the night air, Adrian one step beside me, and we stood on the pavement while the door closed behind us and the performance, technically, ended.

I took a breath. “Thank you,” I said. “That was, I know it was strange. But it helped.”

“You mentioned we could help each other.” He looked at me, hands in his jacket pockets, entirely unhurried despite the cold. “You were referring to more than one evening.”

I looked at him carefully. “I was.”

“Then tell me the rest of it.”

The street was quiet around us, the restaurant’s warm light spilling through the glass, and somewhere on the other side of that glass Ryan Blake was sitting with his colleagues and his taut shoulders and his recalculating expression. I thought about the bench outside his building. I thought about three days of that particular silence. I thought about what it would mean to walk back into my ordinary life and feel small inside it.

“I want him to think I moved on,” I said. “Not eventually, not in three months when I’m actually okay. Now. While it still stings him.” I held Adrian’s gaze. “And I think you need something too. I don’t know what it is yet, but you agreed to come tonight in place of a stranger, which means you had a reason.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“My parents,” he said finally, “have been pressuring me to settle down. There is someone in my life they find,” a slight pause, “complicated. They want me to end it. I’ve been managing that conversation for some time.”

“And a girlfriend would buy you time.”

“A convincing one.” His eyes held mine. “Which brings me back to you.”

The air between us was cool and specific and nothing like the inside of the restaurant. I was aware that this was the part where a reasonable person said thank you for dinner, called a cab, went home, and let the evening be what it was.

“How long would you need,” I said.

“Two months. Possibly three.”

“And what would it involve?”

“Family dinners. Company events. Enough public appearances to satisfy my parents and the press.” He paused. “You’d be compensated for your time.”

“I don’t want your money.”

Something shifted in his expression. “What do you want?”

I thought about Ryan’s face when Adrian said she’s with me. The rearranging. The colour that changed. Two years of being the woman he came home to while he quietly decided she wasn’t enough.

“I want him to spend the next three months watching me on the arm of the man who signs his paychecks,” I said. “That’s what I want.”

Adrian looked at me for a long moment. The street was quiet. Somewhere down the block a car moved through a puddle left by last night’s rain.

“Then we have a deal,” he said.

He said it without extending a hand. Without smiling. Without any of the warmth the evening had occasionally suggested was somewhere underneath the composure.

He said it like a decision that had already been made, which was somehow more unsettling than if he’d seemed pleased about it.

I nodded. “We have a deal.”

He called his driver. The car arrived in under two minutes. He held the door for me with the same unhurried precision as the coat, and when I was inside and the door had closed and the car was pulling away, I looked back through the window.

He was already on his phone.

I faced forward. The city moved past the glass. I thought about two months, maybe three. I thought about Ryan’s shoulders and his rearranging expression and the particular satisfaction of knowing he’d be thinking about this all the way home.

Then I thought about the question Adrian had asked me, the one about being ten years old and wanting to write things that made people uncomfortable in useful ways.

And the way he’d looked at me when I answered.

Like he’d found something he hadn’t expected to find, and hadn’t decided yet what to do with it.

I pushed the thought away and watched the street.

It was nothing. It was a transaction. I knew exactly what it was.

I just didn’t know yet what it was going to cost me.