CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

His name was Roman, he looked like her husband except for the absence of stillness that her husband possessed. When Aria came down the stairs the next morning, there he was, leaning comfortably against the doorway of the main sitting room in the penthouse. Arms crossed, he was wearing a smile on his face the way a well tailored coat fits one who knows exactly how they look in it. Perhaps he was four years younger than Adrian, had the same dark hair and grey eyes, but while control had carved Adrian's face, Roman's face was more fluid, charm was just one of his tools, and warmth was given. without a promise. She knew the type. She had met him in different guises before. "You must be the wife, " he said. "And you must be the brother who was dead, " she responded with a friendly smile. He looked surprised by her response but soon laughed a natural laugh that showed his genuine self, and for a moment, she saw what he could have been if he hadn't been changed into the person he was now. "He warned you about me." "He warned me about the fire, " she answered. "Now I am figuring out the rest." Roman looked at her more closely than one would have expected from his informal style. "You're quite different from what I thought, " he told her. "I know, " she answered. "Nobody ever does." After talking to him a little, she went on to the kitchen. "If you're interested, there's coffee. Marianna made it before she left." She heard him behind her.

Adrian did not tell anyone about how Roman survived the fire, who found him, or where he had been for twenty-three years. The only thing he did was carefully introduce him into the penthouse as if the matter was so huge that it might get out of hand if he allowed himself to look at it directly. She observed him that first night at dinner ,Roman engaging the whole time, telling stories, making remarks, and generally filling the room with the very instinct of one who has learned young that being pleasant to people is a tool for survival  and then Adrian with the look on his face that slightly broke her heart. It was a face of a man who greatly desires to feel the simple joy of his brother's return but at the same time cannot completely trust himself to. She knew what that was like. She knew the feeling of being so exhausted by one's desires that one's disbelief in the idea of being allowed to have them becomes the very reason for the frustration and dissatisfaction. She did not reveal to Adrian what she thought about Roman's version of his survival. That someone had saved him, pulled him from the fire, and raised him all these years was too perfect a story. A little too convenient. The details that Roman gave sounded like a story made up rather than a lived experience, the kind of tale you come up with when you want to give someone an answer and not the truth.   At breakfast, she beamed at Roman, intently heard each of his words and kept them in mind with the same deep focus that had been gradually sharpening in her since her readings of her mother's diary. ... He made her laugh which was the troubling thing about it. In fact, it was his very humour, light but perfectly tuned to self-mockery, that betrayed a man who had resorted to it as a weapon to get across the rapport of estrangement. 

That fortnight, most nights he would be at their dinner table, Adrian had located him in a guest-room  and the very nature of the meals changed in a very unexpected and, yet in a way, quite welcome, manner. Roman narrated incidents. He showed real interest in Aria's profession. He was familiar enough with one's past to know the one or two occasions when Adrian could be teased and, to the surprise of even himself, Adrian sometimes gave forth with that small tight half-smile that one experiences when made to recall how they used to be a person who could actually laugh. Aria was far from being immune to the infectious laughter as well. In fact, she had not laughed this much for several months. One evening, she noticed that Adrian had silenced himself. She was in the middle of a sentence ,a morning incident when she had a draping disaster and the whole bolt of fabric went off the floor while Professor Delacroix was making a face of regal disappointment  and Roman was laughing and leaning forward on his elbows, and Adrian was very still, holding his wineglass and having an expression on his face that she had never seen before.

Not cold. Not controlled. A little rawer than that actually. She didn't really get it at the time. She told the whole story, after dinner. 

Roman, with quite a bit of charm in his gallantry which made it slightly suspicious, offered his help to Marianna in clearing the table while Aria went off to look for Adrian. He was on the terrace. Beneath them was the city at night with all its lights and motion, while he was facing away from the room, standing very still which was exactly how he looked when he was mulling over some kind of feeling he hadn't even allowed himself to have yet. "Are you uh okay?" she said. He came round. Then, as if by accident, without the usual deliberate half-second of holding his emotions in, he closed the distance between them and kissed her. It was neither the gentlest kiss nor the calculated act of a man sticking to his plan. It was, in fact, the complete negation of all that the gesture of a person who had been keeping his emotions at bay through distance for far too long and who had just temporarily lost the ability to keep the facade. She responded to him. She hadn't consciously made up her mind, however. Her fingers went up and gripped the collar of his jacket, and she returned the kiss and for the duration of that one, almost frozen and breathless instant, the city below them and the contract locked in the safe together with the journal and the photograph and everything else simply failed to exist. 

He stepped back, His face, at least the part she could see, was shut again like the shutters were back in place and the control was reassembled, but she could see the strain of it now when she couldn't two months ago, that was the thing. They looked at each other without speaking. Then he entered the house. Aria lingered on the terrace for a long time. The breeze coming from the Hudson was chilly and that made her skin fresh. She put her hand in front of her mouth and thought- huh. She had been telling herself she didn't feel anything. She had been lying.