LOGINAnastasia’s POV:Three years after I walked out of the penthouse, I sat in my studio on a Tuesday morning and drew.Not for a client. Not for a brief. Just for myself, the way I had been doing in coffee shops for two years before any of this started, the way I had always done when the need to make something got loud enough that ignoring it felt like a kind of damage.The house was quiet.Lucas had taken the children to school and I had an hour before my first meeting and I was using it the way I used every piece of time that belonged entirely to me, deliberately.The drawing was the community center.The one I had been sketching in pieces for three years, adding to, revising, throwing away sections and starting again. It had been a student project once, a B plus that I had argued into an A minus, and it had been a dream, I had buried when I became Lucas Salvatore’s wife, and it had been something I kept returning to in the margins of client briefs and the backs of meeting notes and no
Anastasia’s POV:Simone was the most beautiful person in the room.She would have said that was an obvious thing to say about a bride but it was true in a way that went beyond the dress, which was ivory and simple and exactly right, and beyond the way Diane had done her hair, which was pinned loosely with a few pieces falling the way they always fell because Simone’s hair did what it wanted and today even her hair had decided to cooperate.It was something in her face.She looked like herself. The fullest version of herself. The version that existed when she had stopped performing not caring and just let the thing she actually felt take up all the space it needed.I stood beside her at the entrance to the barn and she looked at me and I looked at her and neither of us said anything for a moment because there was nothing to say that the moment was not already saying.Then she said “is my lipstick okay” and I said yes and she said “check properly” and I checked properly and said yes aga
Anastasia’s POV:Simone called the night before her wedding.I was already in bed and Lucas was already asleep beside me in the way he slept, completely, like a man who had made peace with unconsciousness, and I grabbed my phone before it could ring a second time and went to the hallway.“I can’t sleep,” she said.“I know,” I said.“I’ve been lying there for two hours,” she said. “Dean is asleep. He fell asleep in eleven minutes. Eleven.”“He always does that,” I said.“It’s deeply irritating,” she said.“I know,” I said.“How does a person sleep the night before their wedding?” she said.“Apparently Dean does it in eleven minutes,” I said.She made a sound.I sat on the top stair the way I had been sitting on the top stair for important phone calls for two years now and pulled my knees up and leaned against the wall.“Are you scared?” I said.“No,” she said. “That’s the strange part. I’m not scared at all. I’m just awake.”“Maybe you don’t need to be scared to be awake,” I said.“Wha
Anastasia’s POV:Noah asked me where babies came from.Not in the way children sometimes asked, casually, as part of a longer conversation about something else. He asked it the way he asked everything, directly, standing in the kitchen doorway with his shoes on the wrong feet and his backpack half open, like it was a reasonable question that deserved a reasonable answer before school.“Where do babies come from?” he said.I put the coffee down.“Who have you been talking to?” I said.“Jacob at school,” he said. “He said they come from the hospital.”“Jacob is partially right,” I said.“Where do they actually come from?” he said.“Mamas and daddies make them together,” I said, which was both true and sufficient for a four year old on a Wednesday morning.He considered this.“How?” he said.“Your shoes are on the wrong feet,” I said.He looked down at his feet.“They feel fine,” he said.“Noah,” I said.He sat down on the kitchen floor and switched his shoes and stood back up.“How do m
Anastasia’s POV:Victoria called which was unusual because Victoria did never calls first. She called on Thursday evenings when she had finished whatever she was doing and had decided that communication was now appropriate.“I need you to come,” she said.“Is something wrong?” I said.“Nothing is wrong,” she said, in the tone that meant something was at least adjacent to wrong. “I need your opinion on something and I don’t want to discuss it over the phone.”“Victoria,” I said. “I have a client meeting at two.”“I’m aware of the time Anastasia,” she said. “Come at one.”She hung up.I texted Rosa.“If I’m not back by 1:50, call me.”Rosa texted back.“Should I be concerned?”“My mother-in-law,” I texted.Three dots.“I’ll call at 1:55,” she said.I drove to the northern house at twelve forty and Diane let me in with the expression she wore when Victoria had been doing something for several hours and Diane had opinions about it that she was professionally obligated not to share.Victor
Anastasia’s POV:Simone called me at seven in the morning on Thursday and I knew before I answered that something had happened because Simone did not call at seven in the morning unless something had happened.“He proposed,” she said.I sat up in bed.Lucas stirred beside me.“He proposed,” I said.“Last night,” she said. “After dinner. We were in the car outside my building and he just.” A pause. “He just did it. No restaurant. No speech. He said “Simone I love you and I have loved you since before I knew what to do with it and I would like to spend the rest of my life proving I deserve you and then he took out a ring.””“Simone,” I said.“It’s a very good ring,” she said.“What did you say?” I said.“What do you think I said?” she said.I looked at the ceiling.“You said yes,” I said.“Obviously I said yes!” she said, and her voice did the thing it did when she was feeling something large and had decided to let it happen. “Ana I said yes!”I got out of bed and went to the hallway so
Anastasia’s POV: The service stairs smelled like cleaning products and old carpet and the particular staleness of a space that existed only to be functional and had never been asked to be anything else. Elena went first with the fireproof box under one arm and her laptop bag over the other shoulde
Anastasia’s POV:I read the folder in my car.I did not go home first. I did not call Simone. I sat in the Salvatore Enterprises parking structure on level two with the engine off and the overhead light on and I read every single page while Adrian Cole sat in the passenger seat beside me and said n
Anastasia’s POV:“You have paint on your face.”I looked up from the mood board spread across my desk and found Celeste Dupont standing in my office doorway in a cream blazer and reading glasses pushed up on her head, looking at me the way she looked at everything, like she had already figured it o
Anastasia’s POV:“If you tell her about this meeting I will make sure you never work in this city again. Do you understand me?”I stood completely still in the entrance of my own home with my keys still in my hand and my heart doing something complicated inside my chest.That was my husband’s voice







