Chapter 5: Isabella's Penthouse

Isabella had been planning this dinner for four days.

She called the caterers herself, gave them a new menu, told them to scrap whatever they had on file. She moved the dinner setting from the formal room to the open space by the windows because she wanted people to see the view. She ordered white centerpieces, tall and architectural. Clean lines. Nothing like the loose, soft flowers that had been sitting on the sideboard when she first walked through the door.

By six-thirty, the caterers were visibly uncomfortable.

"The glassware," the lead caterer said, when she asked what the hold-up was. He was a careful man, the kind who picked his words like he was defusing something. "Ms. Ashford had specific preferences on file with us. Crystal for dinners over six. The Bordeaux stems for red, the other set for white. We've always worked from that arrangement."

"I want the tall modern ones," Isabella said. "The thin stems."

"Those aren't on the account, I'm afraid." He said it gently, which was more irritating than if he had just said it flat. "Ms. Ashford set the account preferences three years ago. We've never brought anything different."

Isabella looked at him for a moment. "Well, I'm telling you something different now."

"Of course." He nodded and turned back to the kitchen. But she caught the look he exchanged with the woman arranging the side table. Quick and sideways. The look of people who knew the original and were politely tolerating the revision.

She went to find Roman.

…

He was in the study with his jacket already on, laptop closed, ready in the way he was always ready, assembled and present and somehow still slightly elsewhere.

"The caterers are being awkward," she said.

"They'll sort it out." He checked his watch. "Who confirmed for tonight?"

She listed the names. He nodded through each one without adding anything. Sera, she had learned, used to adjust the guest list quietly. Small suggestions that Roman adopted without realizing they had been suggestions. Isabella did not work that way. She put what she wanted on the table and said so.

"The lighting in the dining room is off," she said. "Too yellow. Can someone fix it?"

Roman glanced up. "There's a panel in the hallway. Sera had it calibrated for evenings."

The name sat in the room for half a second.

"I'll figure it out," Isabella said.

She didn't. The light stayed warm and amber all night, the kind that made the room feel smaller than it was, like being inside someone else's idea of cozy.

…

Guests arrived at seven.

Isabella was good at this. She always had been. She greeted people at the door with her hand out and her smile easy, remembered the right details, asked the right questions. She was the kind of warm that filled whatever space it walked into, present and loud in the best way, pulling the room toward her naturally.

The dinner moved. Wine went into the wrong glasses but nobody said so. Conversation ran from business to a board member's lake house renovation to a film everyone had an opinion about. Isabella kept the table alive. She was genuinely good at it.

Roman sat at the other end and did what he always did in social settings, which was participate correctly without letting anyone too close to anything real.

Felix Carrow arrived twenty minutes late, jacket slightly creased, slightly out of breath, the way Felix arrived everywhere. He shook Roman's hand, dropped into his seat, and scanned the table the way he always scanned rooms, looking for the specific arrangement of people he expected.

"Where's Sera?" He said it without thinking, already reaching for his wine. "She always separates the people who can't stand each other. Last time I ended up next to Mercer for three hours and I nearly." He looked up. Found Isabella watching him from the other end of the table. His face moved through four different expressions in about two seconds. "Oh." He picked up his glass. "Sorry. Right. Sorry."

Roman's jaw tightened. Just once. Just slightly.

"Tell me about the lake house," Isabella said to the board member on her left, and the table moved again, smooth and immediate, because she was good at this.

But Roman had caught himself looking at the hallway door when Felix walked in. The way his eyes had gone there automatically, before his brain had caught up, looking for something that wasn't there.

He had done it once before that too, when the first couple arrived and the front door opened.

He stopped after Felix's comment. He was careful about stopping.

…

The last guests left just before ten.

Isabella moved through the apartment on the leftover energy of a successful evening, already reshaping it in her head into the story she would tell tomorrow. She had carried the whole night. She knew it and it felt good to know it. She dropped onto the sofa and pulled her heels off, one then the other.

"That went well," she said.

"Yes," Roman said.

"Felix was embarrassing."

"He didn't mean it."

"I know." She looked at him. He was standing near the window with his drink, not sitting, not settled anywhere particular. "Are you coming to sit down?"

"In a minute."

She watched him for a moment. She was tired and the night had taken what she had, and she was not going to spend what was left of it pulling at something she couldn't see clearly in the dark.

She said goodnight, kissed his jaw, and went to bed.

…

Roman stood at the window.

He turned his glass slowly in his hand. The apartment was quiet, the caterers gone, every surface back to clean and still.

After every dinner they had ever hosted here, he had come to bed and found Sera already there, reading, sometimes already asleep. He had never asked how the evening had gone from her side of the table. Whether it had been work. Whether she had been tired. Whether the caterers had been difficult.

His phone buzzed on the side table.

He reached for it automatically.

*Montague Industries Heiress Emerges: Who Is Seraphina Montague?*

He stood there in the dark with her name bright on his screen.

His thumb hovered over it for a long moment.

Then he opened it.

…