Terms & Conditions

Tribeca

# Chapter Eight: Tribeca

The wedding was scheduled for the following week — Harriet had moved with a speed that made Ivy's head spin, city hall paperwork expedited by someone who clearly had a favor or two banked with the right clerk's office — which meant that before Ivy could marry a man she'd known for exactly nine days, she needed to see, at least once, the place she'd be living in for the next two years.

Julian sent a car. He didn't come himself, which Ivy noticed and didn't fully know what to make of — whether it was consideration, giving her space to see the place without an audience, or simply the schedule of a man who ran a company and hadn't thought to block off the hour.

The building was on a quiet street in Tribeca, cobblestones underneath, a converted warehouse turned into six enormous residences, the kind of building Ivy had walked past a hundred times without ever imagining she'd have a key. The doorman knew her name before she said it — *Ms. Reyes, Mr. Cade said to expect you, thirty-first floor* — which told her something about how far ahead of her he'd already been planning this, arrangements set in motion before she'd even finished negotiating the terms that made them necessary.

The elevator opened directly into the apartment, no hallway, no other doors — the entire floor was his — and Ivy stepped out into a space so large and so quiet that her first instinct, absurdly, was to apologize for the sound of her own shoes.

It was beautiful. She could see that immediately — floor-to-ceiling windows facing the river, exposed brick softened by warm lighting, furniture that probably cost more than her mother made in a year. But it was also, she registered slowly as she moved through the main room, almost entirely empty in a way that had nothing to do with square footage. No photographs on the shelves. No books with cracked spines, no half-finished mugs abandoned on side tables, none of the small accumulated evidence of a person actually living somewhere. It looked, she thought, like a hotel suite designed by someone with excellent taste and absolutely no interest in being found in it.

"You're early."

Julian's voice came from behind her — he'd come home while she was still taking in the room, jacket already off, sleeves rolled to the forearm in a way that made him look, for the first time since she'd met him, like an actual person instead of a headline. Sadie was nowhere in evidence yet; Ivy wouldn't meet her for another week, though she didn't know that yet, standing there in the vast quiet apartment trying to catalog the strangeness of a place that was about to become, on paper at least, her home.

"The car was faster than I expected."

"That happens, with drivers who don't have to worry about being tipped well." He set his keys down on a console table by the door — the only personal object Ivy had seen so far, a small brass dish, worn at the edges, that looked older and more used than anything else in the apartment. "This is the main level. There's a guest suite on the east side, fully separate — that would be yours, if you're comfortable with it. Its own bathroom, its own entrance to the hallway if you want to come and go without crossing through here."

"You've thought about this."

"I've thought about very little else for the past week," Julian said, dry, and something about the honesty of it — offered so plainly, without performance — made Ivy's chest do something complicated.

She walked slowly through the main room, trailing her fingers along the back of a couch that had clearly never been sat on enough to soften, and stopped in front of a wall of bookshelves that held, she realized on closer inspection, almost no books at all — mostly art objects, a few awards, the kind of curated shelf a designer assembles rather than the kind a person builds over years of actually reading.

"Do you live here," she asked, "or do you just sleep here?"

Julian didn't answer right away, which was, she was learning, its own kind of answer.

"I work a great deal," he said finally. "I'm not often here to notice what it looks like."

"That's not what I asked."

He came to stand a few feet away, following her gaze to the empty shelf, and for a moment something moved across his face that she hadn't seen yet — not the careful stillness, not the flicker of dry humor, something closer to exposed.

"I moved in three years ago," he said. "After my father moved to the house upstate, before he — " He stopped. Started again. "I never got around to making it look like anyone lived here. I suppose I didn't see the point, when it was only ever going to be me."

Ivy thought about her own apartment, small and cluttered and loud with three people's worth of half-finished projects and photographs taped to the fridge, and felt something unexpected and unwelcome tighten in her throat on his behalf.

She moved down the hallway before either of them had to sit any longer with what he'd just admitted, glancing into rooms as she passed — a study, orderly to the point of sterility; a home gym, clearly used; a closed door she didn't open, out of some instinct she didn't examine too closely. At the end of the hall, on a low console table tucked into an alcove she almost missed entirely, she spotted a single framed photograph, face-down.

She reached for it before she'd fully decided to.

Julian's hand covered hers before she could turn it over — not rough, not even really fast, just there, suddenly, warm and startling against her fingers, and Ivy looked up to find his face gone carefully, deliberately blank in a way that told her more than any expression could have.

"Not that one," he said, quiet.

"Sorry." She pulled her hand back, genuinely embarrassed, the warmth of his palm still ghosting against her skin. "I didn't mean to snoop."

"You're not snooping. This is going to be your home too, for the next two years. You're allowed to be curious about it." He picked the frame up himself, turned it face-down more fully into a drawer instead of the tabletop, out of easy reach, and Ivy caught only the barest glimpse before it disappeared — dark hair, a woman's laugh, a much younger Julian standing beside her with an expression so unguarded it barely looked like the same person standing in front of her now. "Some things I'm not ready to explain yet. I'd rather tell you the truth eventually than make something up now."

"Okay," Ivy said, and let it go, because there was something in the careful way he'd said *eventually* that told her this wasn't a door she was meant to push on yet — that whatever was behind that face-down photograph mattered enough to him that rushing it would only make him retreat further behind the stillness she was slowly learning to read past.

They finished the tour in near silence after that, Julian pointing out practical things — the kitchen she'd probably use more than he ever had, the terrace with a view that made Ivy's breath catch despite herself, the guest suite that would be hers, tasteful and spacious and, like everything else in the apartment, entirely unlived-in.

"You can bring whatever you want," Julian said, standing in the doorway of what would be her room, hands in his pockets, something almost nervous in the set of his shoulders that didn't match anything she'd seen from him yet. "Furniture, art, whatever makes it feel like yours. I mean that. This doesn't have to look like the rest of the apartment."

Ivy looked around the empty, beautiful room, and then back at him, standing in a doorway of a home he'd built to be perfect and impossible to actually live inside.

"Maybe," she said, gently, surprising herself with the impulse, "we could both use a little more of that. Not just my room. The whole place."

Something shifted in his face — caught off guard, she thought, by an offer that had nothing to do with the contract, nothing to do with appearances for a board or a will or a cousin circling for an opening. Just an offer, plain and unprompted, the kind two actual roommates might make to each other, if roommates were ever quite this complicated.

"Maybe," Julian said, finally, and for the first time since she'd met him, the almost-smile made it all the way to something real.