Chapter 4: The Art of Pretending

Anastasia’s POV:

Simone called at exactly eight forty three the next morning while I was standing in my kitchen in my pajamas staring at the coffee machine like it had personally offended me.

“Tell me everything,” she said before I finished saying hello. “And I mean everything. Dean told me Lucas came home last night and sat in his car in the parking garage for forty five minutes before going upstairs and I need the full story behind that information immediately.”

“Dean told you that?”

“Dean has been calling me every day for two weeks under the guise of asking about you.” A pause. “He thinks he is being subtle. He is not being subtle. Now stop deflecting and tell me about the meeting.”

I poured my coffee and sat down at my kitchen table and told her everything. The lobby. The elevator. The conference room. The presentation. The moment Lucas turned around and looked at me like I was something he had lost and only just understood the value of. I told her about the conversation after the room emptied and the thing he said in the doorway about the papers and I heard her sharp intake of breath through the phone when I got to that part.

“He never filed them,” she said slowly.

“That is what he said.”

“Ana. Do you understand what that means?”

“It means there is paperwork that needs to be sorted out,” I said, in the voice I used when I needed Simone to follow my lead and not the one belonging to the part of me that had been turning those five words over in my head since the moment I walked out of that building yesterday. I found the papers, Ana. I never filed them. “It means nothing else.”

Simone was quiet for exactly three seconds which was her version of a very loud opinion.

“And Renata?” she said finally.

“Smiled at me like she had been expecting me.”

“That is not normal behavior for a woman who should be hiding.”

“No,” I said. “It is not.”

We sat with that for a moment.

“Be careful, Ana,” Simone said, and the lightness was gone from her voice completely. “Something about this does not feel right and I don’t just mean Lucas. I mean all of it. The project landing in your lap. Renata’s face. Something is being arranged and you are standing in the middle of it.”

I thought about that for a long time after we hung up.

The first official project meeting was on Wednesday and I arrived twelve minutes early because arriving early to things was a habit Celeste had installed in me with the quiet efficiency of someone reprogramming software. The Salvatore Enterprises conference room was fuller this time, project managers and architects and two members of Lucas’s personal team whose names I catalogued and filed away because knowing the room was something Celeste had also taught me.

Renata was not there.

I noticed that immediately and filed that away too.

Lucas arrived at exactly nine and the room shifted the way rooms always did when he walked into them. That particular quality of his had never annoyed me before. Standing on the other side of a professional table from it I found it considerably less charming than I used to.

He greeted everyone with the efficient warmth of a man who had learned that people worked better when they felt seen and then his eyes found mine across the table and stayed there for exactly one beat too long before he looked away.

I opened my portfolio.

We worked for three hours and I will admit, begrudgingly and only to myself, that he was extraordinary at it. Lucas Salvatore in a room full of problems that needed solving was something I had forgotten about him in the business of grieving everything else. He was sharp and decisive and genuinely listened to every person at that table including me, especially me, in a way that was so different from the man who used to sit across from me at a dinner table and look through me that it created a dissonance I had to keep firmly managing.

People changed. I knew that.

I also knew that knowing someone had changed and trusting them with anything important were two entirely different things and I had not come this far to confuse the two.

We broke for lunch and I stayed at the table reviewing specs while the room emptied and I was so absorbed in a floor plan that I did not hear him until he set a coffee down beside my elbow and sat in the chair across from me and I looked up and there he was, close in a way he had not been since the conference room the day before, with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled to the elbow and an expression on his face that I recognized from a long time ago.

He was trying to find the right words. Lucas who never struggled for words anywhere else always struggled for them with me and once upon a time I had found that endearing.

“You do not have to do that,” I said, before he could start.

He looked at me. “Do what?”

“Whatever you are about to do.” I kept my eyes on the floor plan. “We are colleagues on a project. That is a clean and simple arrangement and I would like to keep it that way.”

“Ana.”

“Anastasia,” I said quietly. “In this building I am Anastasia.”

Something crossed his face that I did not let myself examine.

“Anastasia,” he said, and the way he said it, carefully, like he was handling something he understood was fragile, did something to my sternum that I addressed immediately. “I am not trying to make this complicated. I just want to know that you are okay.”

“I told you. I am better than I have ever been.”

“I know what you told me.” He leaned forward slightly, elbows on the table, and I became very interested in a section of floor plan that I had already memorized. “I am asking what is actually true.”

I looked up at him then because not looking at him felt more telling than looking.

“What is actually true,” I said evenly, “is that I have a life I built from nothing that I am very proud of and a project I intend to deliver at the highest possible standard. Everything else is not your concern anymore.”

He held my gaze for a long moment.

“I know,” he said quietly. “I know it’s not. I just.” He stopped. Started again. “I need you to know that I’m aware of what I did. Not what happened. What I did. The difference matters to me even if it does not change anything for you.”

I looked at my husband. The man I had not legally stopped being married to. The man who had sat at a kitchen counter with my signed divorce papers and could not bring himself to file them and had carried that for eight months without telling me.

“It does not change anything,” I said.

It was not entirely true. But it was true enough for a Wednesday afternoon in a conference room forty two floors above a city we had both been trying to survive.

I went back to my floor plan. After a moment he went back to his laptop. We worked in silence for twenty minutes that felt like something other than silence, something fuller and more complicated, and when the rest of the team filtered back in I was almost grateful for the noise.

Almost.

I was packing up at six when his new assistant appeared at the conference room door looking slightly breathless.

“Ms. Voss? There is someone downstairs asking for you. He says he is not here to see Mr. Salvatore. He says he is here specifically for you.” She hesitated. “He would not give his name. He said you would know who he was when you saw him.”

I looked at her.

“What does he look like?”

“Tall. Dark hair. He has a folder with him.” Another hesitation. “He looks like he has not slept in a while. And he looks.” She searched for the word. “Urgent.”

I felt something shift at the base of my spine.

I did not know anyone who fit that description.

But something about the word urgent, the way she said it, quiet and certain, made me close my portfolio and pick up my bag and follow her to the elevator without stopping to think about it too carefully.

The lobby was emptying out with the early evening flow of people heading home. I stepped out of the elevator and scanned the space and found him immediately, standing near the far wall away from the foot traffic, dark hair, dark circles, a manila folder held against his chest with both hands like it contained something he was not sure he should be carrying.

He saw me at the same moment I saw him.

He crossed the lobby in long strides and stopped two feet away and looked at me with eyes that were doing several things simultaneously, apologizing, calculating, deciding, and underneath all of it, frightened in a way that people only looked when they had been carrying something alone for too long.

“You do not know me,” he said. “My name is Adrian Cole. Renata is my sister.”

The lobby noise continued around us. Someone’s heels clicked past. An elevator dinged.

“And I need you to read what is in this folder,” he said, “before she realizes I’m here. Because what she has done to you is only the beginning and the person she is really trying to destroy is standing forty two floors above us right now with no idea it’s coming.”

He held out the folder.

My hand reached for it before I made the conscious decision to move.