Chapter 3: The Room Where Everything Changed

Anastasia’s POV:

I wore the burgundy dress.

Simone had picked it out three weeks ago during one of our Saturday shopping trips that were less about buying things and more about reclaiming the version of me that used to have opinions about what she put on her body. It was fitted without being aggressive, professional without being forgettable, and the color did something to my skin that made me look like a woman who had never once stood at a kitchen counter at midnight crying quietly into a dish she was washing by hand.

I needed that dress to do a lot of work today and I told it so while I was putting it on.

“You look like money,” Simone said from my bathroom doorway, eating an apple she had helped herself to from my kitchen without asking because that was simply how Simone operated in spaces she considered hers and she had decided my apartment was hers approximately forty eight hours after I moved in.

“I look professional,” I said.

“Same thing.” She took another bite. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“Ana.”

“Fine I’m nervous,” I said, because lying to Simone was an exercise in complete futility and I had stopped attempting it sometime around the second year of our friendship. “I’m very nervous and I’m also angry that I’m  nervous because I have done nothing wrong and I should not be the one walking into that room feeling like I need to prepare myself.”

“You are right,” she said simply. “And you are going to walk in there and be so extraordinarily good at your job that he is going to spend the entire meeting trying to remember how to breathe.”

I looked at her in the mirror.

“That is either very helpful or very unhelpful,” I said.

“Both,” she said, and finished her apple. “Call me after.”

The Salvatore Enterprises headquarters was a seventy floor column of glass and steel in the heart of Harlow City that I had been to exactly fourteen times during our marriage for various events and galas and the kind of corporate dinners where you smiled for three hours and came home with a headache that lasted two days. I had never once walked through those doors as anything other than Lucas Salvatore’s wife.

I walked through them now as Anastasia Voss, lead designer, Celeste Dupont Interiors.

The lobby was exactly as I remembered it. Marble floors, soaring ceilings, the quiet hum of a building that knew it was important. The receptionist directed me to the forty second floor with a smile that told me nothing about whether she recognized me and I stepped into the elevator and watched the numbers climb and did the thing Celeste had taught me in my first week, I found one fixed point in the room and I breathed toward it and I let everything else fall away until there was nothing left but the work.

I was good at the work. I had always been good at the work. That was the one thing this marriage had not managed to take from me even when it took almost everything else.

The elevator opened onto a wide corridor with floor to ceiling windows overlooking the city and a conference room at the end of it with glass walls through which I could see a long table, several people I did not recognize, and at the head of it, with his back to me, a man in a dark suit with dark hair that I knew the shape of as well as I knew my own hands.

My body recognized him before my brain finished processing the visual and did several unhelpful things simultaneously that I addressed firmly and without negotiation.

A woman I assumed was his new assistant, not Renata, I noticed that immediately, met me at the corridor and smiled and led me toward the conference room and I walked behind her with my portfolio under my arm and my shoulders back and my face arranged into the particular expression Celeste had once described as your most valuable professional asset, the one that says I am the most competent person in this room and I already know it.

The door opened.

Lucas turned around.

I had thought about this moment. I would be lying if I said I had not. Eight months of building a new life and I had still found myself, in the quiet corners of sleepless nights, constructing versions of this moment in my head and rehearsing how I would handle it. I had imagined feeling angry. I had imagined feeling sad. I had imagined the particular grief of looking at someone you loved for years and feeling nothing at all.

I had not imagined this.

He looked like he had not slept properly in eight months. There were lines around his eyes that had not been there before and a tension in his jaw that I recognized as the specific strain of a man holding himself together through sheer force of will in a public setting. He was still devastatingly put together in the way that came from money and discipline and a wardrobe curated by people paid specifically for that purpose. But underneath all of it he looked like someone had reached inside him and removed something load bearing and he had been redistributing the weight ever since.

He looked at me and something crossed his face so fast I almost missed it.

He had not expected me to look like this.

Good.

“Ms. Voss.” His voice was controlled. Impeccably, infuriatingly controlled. “Thank you for coming.”

“Mr. Salvatore.” I crossed the room and extended my hand and shook his with exactly the same firm professional grip I gave everyone and felt absolutely nothing. Or told myself I felt absolutely nothing which was close enough for a conference room with seven witnesses. “It is a pleasure.”

He held my hand for exactly one second longer than professional and then released it.

I set my portfolio on the table and introduced myself to the room and opened to the first page of the Celeste Dupont presentation and I went to work.

I was extraordinary.

I knew it in real time the way you sometimes know things while they are happening rather than only in retrospect. I knew the material the way I knew my own heartbeat and I spoke about space and light and function and feeling with the fluency of someone who had been thinking in these terms since she was nineteen years old and had spent six years being denied the chance to use it. Every question from the room I answered without hesitation. Every concern I addressed with precision. I watched the people around that table shift from polite attention to genuine engagement and it felt like standing in sunlight after a very long winter.

I did not look at Lucas directly unless I had to. When I did he was watching me with an expression I did not have the bandwidth to interpret and did not try to.

When I finished the room was quiet for a moment before one of the senior directors started clapping and the rest followed and I smiled and thanked them and began gathering my materials.

Lucas stood.

“Could I have a moment, Ms. Voss?” he said quietly. “Before you leave.”

The room emptied with the efficient speed of people who understood instinctively that they were not needed. I stood at the end of the conference table with my portfolio in my hands and waited while the door clicked shut behind the last person and suddenly it was just the two of us in a glass room forty two floors above the city and the particular silence of eight months of unfinished things.

He looked at me for a long moment.

“You are incredible at that,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

Something moved across his face. Not quite a smile. Something more complicated than that.

“Anastasia.” He took a step toward me and stopped himself, like he had caught the impulse before it could make a decision he had not authorized. “I need you to know that I did not request your firm because of what happened between us. The work genuinely speaks for itself and my team identified Celeste Dupont Interiors independently.”

I looked at him.

“I know that too,” I said.

He blinked.

“Then you will take the project?”

“Celeste will be in touch with your legal team by end of week.” I picked up my portfolio. “Is there anything else, Mr. Salvatore?”

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

“How are you?” he said finally and the question was so nakedly genuine after all the careful professional distance of the last hour that it landed somewhere unguarded before I could redirect it.

“Better than I have ever been,” I said, and meant every word.

I walked to the door and opened it and was halfway through it when his voice came from behind me, low and unguarded in a way it almost never was in public, in a way that stopped my feet without my permission.

“I found the papers, Ana. That morning.” A pause that had eight months inside it. “I never filed them.”

I stood in the doorway with my back to him and my hand on the frame and the city spread out through the glass walls around us and I breathed through the thing that did inside my chest when he said that.

Then I walked out without turning around.

But on the way to the elevator I passed Renata Cole coming out of an office at the end of the corridor.

She stopped when she saw me.

I stopped when I saw her.

And the smile that moved across her face was not the smile of a woman who was surprised or caught or ashamed.

It was the smile of a woman who had been waiting for me to arrive.