Beckett's POV
The absence of a person is louder than most people give it credit for.
I notice it before I'm fully awake on Friday morning — the particular quality of silence in a house that had, for three weeks, contained someone who argued back.
Waverly's shampoo is gone from the guest bathroom. Her laptop no longer occupies the kitchen counter. The chair she favored on the patio sits at a slightly wrong angle, and no one has moved it back.
I move it back. Then I hate myself for noticing it needed moving.
By seven in the evening, I've arranged my face into something appropriate and stationed myself in the entrance hall as the Duvals' car pulls through the gate. Father is already seated at the head of my table when I walk in, which tells me everything I need to know about how this evening is going to go.
"You're late," he says.
"It's my house." I pull out the chair across from him and sit. "I'm exactly on time."
"You're in a mood."
"I'm always in a mood when someone rearranges my furniture."
He looks at me over the rim of his glass. "Sit somewhere else, then."
I smooth my tie and reach for the wine as the thought runs its usual lap around my skull.
Say it. Tell him you're not doing this.
Tell him the engagement is dead and he can take his board seats and go—
I pour the wine instead.
That's the thing about Collier Morrow: he doesn't need to threaten you more than once. He said his piece a week ago in that club, and now he doesn't have to say any of it again.
He just has to sit there. At the head of my table, in my house, with his glass and his patience, and wait for me to perform. And I will perform, because twenty years of conditioning doesn't dissolve because you moved out at twenty-five and told yourself you were free.
"The Duvals are good people," he says.
"I'm sure they are."
"Eleanora is exceptional."
"You've mentioned that." Four times, in four separate conversations.
"And yet." He sets his glass down. The base meets the table and the sound is a period at the end of a sentence he hasn't finished saying. "Here you sit, looking like a man who'd rather be auditing spreadsheets."
Here I sit, because you have enough board seats to bury me and we both know it. "I'm fine, Father."
His eyes narrow as he studies me like I'm a balance sheet with a line item he can't account for. The chandelier light catches the silver at his temples, and I think, not for the first time, that my father is a handsome man.
It's annoying. It would be easier if he weren't.
"You can dislike the arrangement," he says finally, his voice dropping into something that almost resembles acknowledgement. "That's allowed. What's not allowed is letting her see it."
I reach for my wine glass with a steady hand. I've had a lot of practice making my hands steady around this man.
"Noted," I say just as Eleanora Duval enters on her father's arm.
She is striking by any reasonable measure — tall, with dark hair swept over one shoulder and a dress the color of champagne that fits like couture. Her smile arrives fully formed when her eyes find mine, warm and calibrated in equal measure, and I stand because my mother raised me to.
"Beckett." She extends her hand, and her grip is confident. "I've been looking forward to this."
"Eleanora." I hold her gaze and find it steady, direct. "The pleasure is mine."
Henri Duval shakes my hand with both of his — silver-haired, patrician. He was old-world before old-world became a compliment. He speaks to Father first before we sit.
The food is excellent because my chef is excellent, and the conversation moves the way these dinners are built to move. Gracefully, efficiently, from pleasantry to agenda without anyone acknowledging the gear change.
Eleanora compliments the estate. She has done her research — mentions a piece from Architectural Digest about the restoration of the east wing, gets the year right, asks a question that signals she read more than the headline.
She defers to her father when Henri steers toward business but adds a word at precisely the right moment, enough to signal she is not decorative.
Every gesture is pre-approved. Every response lands where it was aimed.
She is, I recognize, doing exactly what she was trained to do, and doing it flawlessly.
I test her during the appetizer course.
"I've been reconsidering the Lisbon property," I say. "Coastal acquisitions in that corridor feel oversaturated. I'm thinking we redirect the capital north."
Eleanora tilts her head as though weighing this seriously. "That's such a smart approach," she says. "The northern markets are really undervalued."
The northern markets are not undervalued. I know this.
Anyone in this industry for more than six months knows this. The northern markets are exactly where two of our largest competitors are quietly hemorrhaging capital.
Waverly would have laughed at me.
The thought arrives uninvited and I fold it away before it can land on my face.
I try again over the main course. I float a strategy about the Eastern Seaboard that I know has at least two visible structural problems. Eleanora nods as I speak, her attention warm and attentive and entirely absent of friction.
"Brilliant," she says.
Collier catches my eye across the table and his expression says: ‘See? I told you she was intelligent.’
Actually she looks like someone who has learned that agreeing is safer than being right. I know that particular curriculum because I once sat at this man's dinner table and studied it myself.
Henri steers us toward the merger timeline. He lays out terms like has given this speech before — phased acquisition, brand integration, family equity stake, combined board seats.
Eleanora's hand settles on my forearm while her father talks. Light, warm, practiced. Her fingers rest against my sleeve and the pressure is exactly calibrated — intimate enough to suggest investment, not so firm as to presume.
I think of Waverly's hand under mine on a candle during a blackout, neither of us pulling away for several seconds that dismantled an entire week of careful distance.
I think of her in my kitchen at midnight, the storm making the walls smaller. Her flinching at thunder she refused to admit frightened her. And the way she kissed me back when I gave her every opportunity not to.
Eleanora's touch is professionally warm. Waverly's was involuntary.
The difference is not subtle.
Henri is explaining the coastal expansion strategy when my patience folds. I reach for my napkin and set it on the table, and the sound of linen against linen is the loudest thing in the room.
"I appreciate everything you've both brought to this evening," I say. My voice is even. "Eleanora, you're an extraordinary company. Henri, your family's legacy speaks for itself." I push back from the table and stand. "But I have somewhere I need to be."
The silence has texture as Father’s face closes, jaw set, eyes going flat in the way that used to make me reconsider everything.
Eleanora's smile holds — one second, two — before it registers that I'm not sitting back down, and something underneath it falters. Henri's gaze moves immediately to Father as if he expected a different host.
"Beckett." Father’s voice carries a frequency I've been hearing since childhood.
"I'll call you tomorrow," I tell him.
I walk out of my own dining room.
The driveway is cool and the estate blazes behind me with the light of a dinner I've just abandoned. I sit in the car with the engine running and my hands on the wheel and think about what the last hour actually proved.
No woman who agrees with everything I say will ever be enough.
I don't need a partner who mirrors me back at myself. I have a mirror.
What I need — what I apparently cannot stop needing, regardless of how inconvenient the timing — is someone who tells me the northern markets aren't undervalued and then explains exactly why, while barefoot in my kitchen at midnight.
I pull out of the driveway. Father’s disappointment follows me through the gate and down the road, and I let it fall behind.
The penthouse is fifteen minutes from downtown.
I haven't opened its door in weeks. And tonight seems like exactly the right time to remember who I've always been.