Chapter 8

Neo came home that evening looking like a man who had won something and was trying real hard not to strut about it.

Irina was in the library — her spot now, unofficially, and they both knew it — when he walked in, jacket off, tie hanging loose, wearing that particular expression of quiet satisfaction that probably cost lesser men a lot more effort to pull off.

 "The board ratified it," he said, dropping into the armchair across from her. "As of four-fifteen today, I'm officially CEO of McKinney Industries."

Irina lowered her book. "Congratulations."

"Thank you." He leaned back and stretched his legs out like a man whose bones had been waiting all day for permission to relax. "Tomorrow night there's a dinner. Celebration slash first public appearance as CEO. I need you there."

"Okay."

"And I need you to wear the blazer."

"Neo, I was already going to wear the blazer."

"Good."

"I just want it on record that I decided that on my own."

"So noted." The corner of his mouth did that thing. She looked back at her book.

The next morning she woke up with nowhere to be and nothing to do, which sounds like a dream until you're actually living it.

Back in her real life, her days had shape — classes to teach, errands, Allison's chaotic energy to manage, Zachary's equally chaotic energy to manage. Here, the staff handled everything before she could even think about it. Someone made her bed. Someone restocked her bathroom. Someone ironed things she hadn't asked to be ironed. It was lovely and deeply unsettling and she felt like a guest who'd overstayed without being told.

She wandered the east wing out of sheer boredom, which she was fairly sure hadn't been opened since the Bush administration. Room after dusty room until she found one with a piano sitting under a white dustsheet like it was in witness protection.

She pulled the sheet off, sat on the bench, and pressed a few keys. Perfectly tuned. Which somehow made its abandonment feel worse.

She was still sitting there, pressing random notes and thinking way too loud about way too many things, when Sasha appeared in the doorway.

Irina's hands froze.

Sasha looked at the piano. Then at Irina. Then back at the piano, the way you'd look at something that owed you an apology.

 "My dad used to play that," she said.

"I didn't know that."

"Why would you." Not mean exactly. Just straight. Sasha leaned against the doorframe with her arms crossed, staring at the piano. "Every Sunday morning without fail. Drove my mother up the damn wall."

Irina said nothing. She'd figured out fast that with Sasha, silence beat the wrong word every single time.

"Neo can't play for squat," Sasha continued, and something almost fond crept into her voice before she could catch it. "Tone deaf. Like, genuinely, embarrassingly tone deaf. Dad used to joke that it was the one thing he couldn't pass on to him." A pause. "He thought it was the funniest thing."

Then she seemed to catch herself. Realized how much she'd said and to who. The shutters came back down fast.

"Dinner's at eight," she said flatly. "Don't be late. Neo hates late." Gone.

Irina sat at the piano for a good minute after that, just processing. That was the longest Sasha McKinney had voluntarily spoken to her. Wasn't warm. Wasn't an apology. But it wasn't an attack either and at this point she was collecting small wins wherever she could find them.

The restaurant didn't have prices on the menu.

Irina had always found that particular brand of fancy deeply suspicious. Like, just tell me what the salmon costs, we're all adults here. But she kept that to herself, smoothed her blazer, and decided to act like she ate at places like this all the time.

She did not eat at places like this all the time.

Neo had booked a private dining room — just the two of them — which she hadn't expected. She'd mentally prepared for a table full of board members and firm handshakes and the performative version of their marriage. Instead it was quiet, candlelit, and lowkey intimate in a way that made her want to sit up straighter for reasons she refused to examine.

"You look good," Neo said, after they were seated. She glanced down at the blazer. "Don't make it weird."

 "I gave you a compliment."

"And I'm kindly asking you not to make it weird."

He picked up his menu with the patience of a saint and the expression of a man who was starting to understand what he'd gotten himself into. "You are something else, Irina."

"Been told that before," she said, opening her own menu. "Didn't slow me down then either." He laughed at that. A real one. And the evening kind of just.. went from there.

The food was outrageous — the kind of meal that made you briefly angry at every other meal you'd ever eaten for not trying harder. The conversation moved easy, from McKinney Industries to his father to her dance classes to a full-blown debate about whether Atlanta had respectable jollof rice that got way more heated than two people who'd known each other less than a week had any business getting.

By the time dessert showed up Irina had laughed three times without meaning to and forgotten to check her phone twice.

She also realized, somewhere between the main course and dessert, that she hadn't thought about Zachary once all evening.

She filed that under things to examine later and ate her dessert. Later never came that night.