The Cost of Wanting You

CHAPTER 2 — The Cage Has Pretty Walls

ELARA'S POV

The Voss family townhouse on East 74th Street was the kind of home that made people pause on the sidewalk.

Four stories of pale limestone, iron-railed windows, a front door painted the particular shade of navy that whispered old money without ever having to say it out loud. Elara had grown up watching people slow their walk to look at it. She'd spent most of her life trying to understand why the inside never felt as solid as the outside looked.

The gala car dropped her at eleven forty-seven. She knew because she checked not out of habit, but because her father had said don't be later than midnight in the tone he used when a suggestion was actually a boundary, and Elara had spent twenty-six years learning the difference.

The house was quiet when she entered. The staff had gone to bed. Her mother's bedroom light was off. Her father wasn't home yet he rarely left events before one in the morning, needing every last minute to work whatever room he was in.

Elara set her clutch on the entry table, stepped out of her heels, and carried them up the stairs in her hand the way she'd done since she was sixteen and learned that the third step creaked and silence was its own kind of freedom.

Her room was on the third floor. It was large and tasteful and curated by an interior designer her mother had hired seven years ago, which meant it looked exactly like Elara and nothing like her at all. Ivory walls. Neutral linens. Art that matched rather than meant anything.

The only things in the room that were actually hers were the canvases stacked along the far wall and the small wooden worktable beside the window that was permanently stained with cadmium yellow and prussian blue no matter how many times she cleaned it.

She changed out of the gown, hung it without thinking, pulled on an oversized shirt and sat on the edge of the bed.

The gala replayed itself in the low-noise way events always did afterward fragments, impressions, the specific texture of boredom mixed with the low hum of always being watched. Her father's hand at her back steering her toward conversations she didn't want. Her mother's careful eyes checking Elara's posture, her expression, the precise wattage of her smile.

Not too eager. Not too distant. You represent this family.

She'd been representing this family since she was old enough to stand in a receiving line. She'd never once been asked if she wanted to.

Her mind moved past the gala past the senator who'd spoken to her chest instead of her face, past the woman who'd asked if she was seeing anyone yet in the voice people used when they meant why aren't you married and landed, without her permission, on the east wall of the Hargrove Ballroom.

On grey eyes. A still, unhurried quality. The particular tone of someone who said I know when most people would have said nice to meet you not to be arrogant, or it hadn't felt that way. It had felt like accuracy.

I know who you are.

She'd waited for the rest of the sentence, the part where people usually added something that made the knowing feel like an assessment. He hadn't added anything. He'd just looked at her like the knowing was neutral information and she was something else entirely something he hadn't categorized yet.

Elara lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

Adrian Cole.

The name had brushed something in her memory and she still couldn't locate what. Not from her father's world she'd absorbed enough dinners and boardroom talk over the years to have a rough map of who mattered in that landscape and she couldn't place him on it. New money, maybe. Self-made. There was something in the way he'd moved through the room not like someone who'd grown up in those rooms, but like someone who'd decided the rooms belonged to him and hadn't needed anyone's permission to believe it.

She'd noticed him before he came to her. She hadn't admitted that to herself until now.

She'd noticed him the way you notice something that doesn't fit the pattern standing apart, not performing, watching the room with a quality of attention that felt almost scientific. Most men at those events were always selling something, always angled toward the next conversation. He'd looked like he was studying for an exam.

The same reason anyone comes to anything they don't enjoy. Because it's necessary.

She turned onto her side and looked at her canvases in the dark.

There were eleven of them in various stages. She'd been working on a series for three months abstract, color-heavy, built around the feeling of space that exists just before something changes. Her therapist, the one her mother didn't know about, had said that was interesting. Elara had said she was just playing with color theory. They'd both known she was lying.

The series didn't have a name yet. She'd been waiting for the right one to arrive.

She thought about the art initiative she'd been quietly building for the last eight months. A small program a physical space in lower Manhattan where young artists from under-resourced communities could access studio time, materials, mentorship. It was the first thing she'd built that was entirely hers. Her father had nodded at it the way he nodded at things that didn't threaten him indulgently, with the faint approval of someone humoring a hobby.

He didn't know she'd already secured two small grants. He didn't know she'd been in conversations with a building owner about a lease. He didn't know, because she hadn't told him, because the moment her father decided something mattered he would put his hands on it and shape it into something that served him, and this one thing she needed to keep.

Her phone lit up on the nightstand.

CAMILLE: okay but the way you disappeared at that gala. one minute you're by the wall looking like a sad painting and then you're GONE

Elara smiled at the ceiling.

ELARA: I was there until midnight

CAMILLE: emotionally you left at nine. I saw your face when your dad steered you toward that senator. you went somewhere else entirely

ELARA: I was being polite

CAMILLE: you were being a Voss. different thing. did anything actually interesting happen or was it the usual

Elara looked at the ceiling again. At the dark. At the place where an answer was forming that she wasn't sure she wanted to send.

ELARA: someone helped me get rid of a drunk guy who wouldn't take a hint

CAMILLE: OKAY and?

ELARA: and nothing. He introduced himself and I went back to my family

CAMILLE: name?

ELARA: Camille

CAMILLE: his name elara oh my god

ELARA: Adrian Cole

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

CAMILLE: never heard of him. is he cute or billionaire cute

Elara laughed despite herself, quietly, in the dark of the room that didn't look like her.

ELARA: go to sleep

CAMILLE: that means both. goodnight you sad painting 🖤

She set the phone face-down and looked at the ceiling for another long moment.

Then she got up, crossed to her worktable, and stood in front of the canvas she'd been struggling with for two weeks large, mostly deep blue, with a center she hadn't figured out how to resolve. She picked up a dry brush and held it without touching the canvas.

She didn't know why she was thinking about grey eyes.

She didn't know why the name Adrian Cole felt like something she'd heard in a dream she couldn't fully remember.

She set the brush down.

Don't, she told herself. You don't know anything about him.

This was true. And it had never once stopped her before caring about something before she had good reason to. It was the thing her mother called naivety and her therapist called openness and Elara privately called the specific curse of being someone who felt things before she understood them.

She went back to bed.

She didn't sleep well.

In the morning the unresolved canvas would still be waiting, and she would stand in front of it with her coffee and look at the empty center and think, without meaning to, that she knew what color it needed now.

Something grey. Still. The shade of eyes that looked at you like you were not yet a conclusion.

She wouldn't paint it.

But she would think about it for longer than made sense.

And across the city, in a penthouse that looked nothing like a home, a man who had not allowed himself to want anything in thirteen years would be sitting at his desk at six in the morning staring at a file with her name on it and for the first time finding the file insufficient.