Caught Between Ice and Fire

Chapter 8 The Woman Who Knew Him First

Her name was Celeste Vane.

I learned this from the receptionist on forty-three, who mentioned it with the carefully neutral tone of someone who had learned, through experience, that the safest approach to Celeste Vane was complete emotional transparency about nothing whatsoever.

She arrived on a Wednesday morning in a car that cost more than most people's apartments, wearing a coat the colour of expensive cream and the kind of effortless composure that came not from trying but from never having had a reason not to. She was beautiful in the way of a very well-maintained building — all the right proportions, nothing out of place, the distinct impression that significant resources had been directed toward the result.

I knew none of this when I first encountered her. I was coming out of the stairwell on forty-three with a roll of updated corridor drawings under my arm, on my way to drop them at Roman's assistant's desk, when I nearly walked directly into her in the hallway.

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

"Sorry," I said, stepping aside.

She smiled — the particular smile of someone who has assessed you in under two seconds and found the assessment satisfactory, which somehow felt worse than if she'd found it unsatisfactory. "Not at all." Her eyes dropped briefly to the drawings under my arm. "Are you one of the design team?"

"Junior designer," I said. "Aria Wells."

"Celeste Vane." She extended a hand and I shook it. Her grip was firm and brief and told me nothing. "I'm an old friend of the Kade family. I try to check in when I'm in Velmoor."

"I'll leave you to it," I said pleasantly, and went to the assistant's desk, left the drawings, and took the stairs back down to forty-one.

I did not think about Celeste Vane.

Much.

* * *

I heard about her from three separate people by lunchtime.

The first was Roman's assistant, who mentioned, while dropping off a revised materials schedule, that Ms. Vane would be joining Mr. Kade for lunch and that the building's private dining room on forty-four would need to be made available — purely logistical information, delivered in the same neutral tone as before.

The second was one of the site engineers, who told Davies during a break, loudly enough that I could hear from across the canteen, that Celeste Vane had been practically engaged to Roman Kade two years ago before whatever had happened had happened — he was vague on the details in the way of someone who knew the details but had the sense not to repeat them in a busy canteen.

The third was Marcus.

"Don't," I said, when he appeared at my desk at half past twelve with two cups of coffee and a expression.

"I haven't said anything."

"You have a face."

"I always have a face. It's a condition." He set my coffee down and sat in the spare chair. "How's the lobby concept coming?"

"Fine. Marcus."

"Aria."

I looked at him. He looked back, patient as a man who had nowhere to be, which was never true of Marcus and we both knew it.

"She's very beautiful," I said, because acknowledging it seemed preferable to performing indifference about it.

"She is," Marcus agreed.

"And she's known him for years."

"She has."

"And I have been here for," I checked my watch, "fifteen days."

"Sixteen," Marcus said. "But who's counting."

I picked up my coffee. "I'm not counting anything. I'm just establishing that I have no — there is no — " I stopped. Arranged my thoughts. "I work here. That's all. Whatever Celeste Vane is or was to Roman Kade is entirely not my business and has absolutely no effect on me."

Marcus nodded with the expression of a man filing something away for future reference.

"Good," he said. "Then you won't mind that she's coming down to see the site this afternoon."

I minded considerably.

* * *

She arrived at three o'clock with Roman beside her.

I was at my desk when they came through — I heard them before I saw them, her voice light and social, his the same low register it always was but with a different quality to it. Less contained, I thought. Something slightly looser, the way people sounded around someone they had a long history with. Not warm, exactly — Roman didn't do warm — but familiar. The ease of a person who didn't have to explain himself.

I kept my eyes on my monitor.

"This is the design floor," Roman said. "Marcus Chen leads the architecture team. Most of the interior work is coordinated from here."

"It's wonderful," Celeste said, in the tone of someone who thought it was adequate. Her heels were quiet on the floor — expensive shoes, I noted, make a different sound than cheap ones. I had learned this early. "And who's this?"

A pause.

I looked up.

They were standing three desks away. Celeste was looking at me with the same assessing smile as before. Roman was looking at me with the particular quality of stillness I'd come to recognise as him processing something he hadn't anticipated.

"Aria Wells," I said, saving everyone the beat. "Junior designer. We met this morning."

"Of course." Celeste's smile widened fractionally. "Roman was just telling me about the lobby concept. The tree." She tilted her head. "Unusual choice."

"It's the right choice," I said. Not combatively — just as a statement of fact, the way Roman stated facts, and I was obscurely pleased with myself for it.

Something moved in Roman's expression. It was gone before I could name it.

"It is," he said.

Celeste looked at him. Just briefly — a flicker of attention, quick and sharp, before she turned back to me with the smile reinstated. "I'd love to see the sketches sometime."

"Of course," I said pleasantly. "Marcus can arrange that."

I looked back at my monitor.

I heard them move off toward the site stairs, Celeste's voice resuming its light social register, Roman's replies brief and measured. I stared at my screen and did not listen and did absolutely everything I had told Marcus I was capable of doing, which was treating this as none of my business.

I was fine.

I was completely fine.

Davies appeared at my desk twenty minutes later — enormous, good-humoured, still faintly smelling of cement — and set a paper bag next to my keyboard.

"From the canteen," he said. "You didn't eat lunch."

I looked at the bag. Then at Davies. "How do you know I didn't eat lunch?"

"Because I was in the canteen at lunch and you weren't." He shrugged with the simplicity of a man unbothered by complexity. "It's the beef pepper soup. You mentioned last week it was your favourite."

I looked at the bag again.

Something about the small, uncomplicated kindness of it — Davies, who had no ulterior motive and no agenda and simply noticed that I hadn't eaten — loosened something in my chest that I hadn't realised was tight.

"Thank you, Davies," I said.

He waved a hand and walked away.

I ate the soup. It was extraordinary. I felt incrementally better about everything.

* * *

They were on the site for two hours.

I knew this not because I was tracking it but because Marcus came back through the floor at five o'clock and mentioned it in passing, along with the information that Celeste had asked excellent structural questions and clearly knew the industry.

"She's an architect," I said.

"Interior designer, actually. Very successful firm in the north quarter." He paused. "She and Roman were — for a while — "

"I know," I said.

"Right." He picked up a file. "She asked about the cutting garden."

I stopped typing.

"What about it?"

"Where the idea came from. Roman told her it was a collaborative development between the design team." Marcus said this very carefully, with great attention to his file. "Which is true, of course."

"Of course," I said.

But it hadn't been. It had been Roman, alone in a corridor at six-thirty in the evening, telling me about his mother and a flower stall and the way you could taste the care in things. That was where the cutting garden had come from. That was the whole of it.

And he had described it, to Celeste, as a team decision.

I thought about why. I thought about the various reasons a man might decline to tell a woman he had a history with that he'd stood in an empty corridor and told a near-stranger about his mother.

I thought about it for too long.

"Go home, Aria," Marcus said gently, not looking up from his file.

I went home.

* * *

The text came at nine forty-seven that evening.

Not from the unknown number this time — I had saved it now, I noticed, under R, which was not a thing I examined — but from Kofi, asking if I could transfer his bus fare for the week because he'd lost his transit card and it was fine, he'd looked everywhere, could I transfer by tomorrow morning.

I sent the money immediately. Then I sat on my bed in my small apartment with my sketchbook on my knees and the lamp on and tried to draw, which usually worked, which tonight refused to.

I drew the rooftop instead. The cutting garden in the northeast corner. Lavender, roses, things that smell like something.

I drew it the way he'd described the flower stall — the sense of arriving somewhere. The way care made itself felt in things even when it wasn't announced.

I was three pages deep into the most detailed rooftop plan I'd ever produced when I realised what I was doing and put the sketchbook down and sat with the lamp on in the quiet apartment and had a very honest conversation with myself.

It went like this: this is the wrong direction. He is your employer. He had a life before you arrived in it and a woman in it who is beautiful and accomplished and knows what his silences mean. You have been here sixteen days and you have a mother in hospital follow-up and a brother with lost transit cards and a landlord with voicemails and you cannot afford, in any currency, to feel what you are beginning to feel.

It was a very good argument.

I picked up the sketchbook and kept drawing.

Because the heart, I had learned a long time ago, was not particularly interested in good arguments.

And somewhere on the forty-third floor of a building that smelled of new concrete and possibility, a light was still on.

I tried not to think about that either.