The first week after the gala was, by any objective measure, a success.
Lyra had not approached Vivian again, though she had made pointed comments during two subsequent editorial meetings that Vivian interpreted as passive-aggressive but chose to ignore. Catherine Vance had apparently removed herself from the picture—or at least from Sebastian's immediate orbit—after a telephone conversation with Richard Ashford that Diana described, in a moment of uncharacteristic candor, as "a shouting match that could be heard through three walls and two floors."
Richard himself had not contacted Sebastian, which was either a sign that he approved of the relationship or a sign that he was planning something significantly worse. With Richard, it was always difficult to tell.
Vivian had returned to her desk on Monday morning with a composure that Sebastian found both impressive and slightly concerning. She had greeted Maya with a coffee and a brief summary of the gala ("fine, fancy, mostly survived"), confirmed with Chloe that her first-month paperwork was in order, and attended the ten o'clock editorial meeting without incident, and spent the rest of the day behaving exactly as she had before the fake relationship had begun—which is to say, professionally, competently, and with absolutely no acknowledgment of the fact that they had spent two hours at a charity event performing the role of a romantic couple.
She had not mentioned the car ride home. She had not mentioned his laugh. She had not mentioned any of the moments that Sebastian had found himself replaying in the small hours of the night, when he should have been sleeping but instead found himself staring at his bedroom ceiling and thinking about burgundy dresses and the way she had said I won't look at you differently.
He was not supposed to be thinking about those things.
The arrangement was strategic. The arrangement had clear terms. The arrangement did not include lying awake at three in the morning wondering what she was thinking, or whether she had also found it difficult to sleep, or whether the moments at the gala had landed for her the way they had landed for him.
The arrangement was business.
The arrangement was not supposed to feel like this.
On Thursday evening, Sebastian stayed late at the office to review the autumn issue's final galleys—a tedious but necessary task that required his full attention and which he was therefore failing to provide, because his attention kept drifting toward the editorial floor, where Vivian was still at her desk, working through a fact-checking backlog that Maya had mentioned during lunch.
She was still there at seven. Still there at seven-thirty. Still there at eight, when Sebastian emerged from his office to find the rest of the floor empty and her hunched over her computer with an expression of concentrated frustration.
"You should go home," he said, from the doorway of his office.
She looked up, startled. "I didn't realize anyone was still here."
"Diana left an hour ago. I assumed you had too."
"I got caught up in this fact-check. There's an inconsistency in the sourcing for the sustainable fashion piece that I can't resolve without the original data set, but the data set is apparently in a shared drive that no one has updated in three years, and I—" She stopped, pressing her fingers to her temples. "Sorry. I'm complaining. It's fine. I'll figure it out."
"It's not fine. It's eight o'clock on a Thursday and you're still here working on something that can wait until tomorrow."
"It can't, actually. The autumn issue launches in two weeks, and if I don't resolve this tonight, it goes to print unresolved, and then it's my fault."
"Vivian." He walked over to her desk, leaning against the partition in what he hoped was a casual manner. "The autumn issue will survive one unresolved fact-check. Go home. Get some sleep. Come back tomorrow with fresh eyes and solve it then."
She looked at him with an expression that was somewhere between grateful and resistant. "You're the boss."
"I'm also right. Take the win."
She saved her work with a sigh of resignation, gathered her bag, and stood up. "Okay. Going home. You should too, though I assume you won't listen to me."
"I never listen to anyone."
"That's very on-brand."
He walked her to the elevator, a gesture that felt simultaneously natural and charged with something he could not quite name. The building was quiet at this hour—just the security guard on the ground floor and the cleaning crew who worked on the upper floors after hours—and the silence made everything feel more intimate than it should have.
"I need to go over some things with you," he said, as they waited for the elevator. "The gala was successful, but Lyra's not going to give up. We need to plan our next public appearance."
"What's the next event?"
"There's a media dinner next Thursday. Industry people, mostly. It's less formal than the gala, but Lyra will probably be there, and Catherine—" He paused. "Catherine won't be there, but her mother might. Her mother is considerably more persistent than she is."
"Your life is very complicated."
"It's getting more complicated by the day." The elevator dinged and the doors opened. They stepped inside, and Sebastian pressed the lobby button, and the doors closed, and suddenly they were in a small enclosed space that smelled faintly of her perfume—something light and floral that he had noticed at the gala and had been trying not to think about ever since.
"About the gala," Vivian said, staring at the elevator doors. "What I said. About not looking at you differently."
Sebastian went very still.
"I've been thinking about it since," she continued, her voice carefully neutral. "And I want you to know that I meant it. I'm not going to pretend I understand everything about you—I'm not sure anyone does—but I'm not going to treat you like a headline or a boss or a Ashford Media heir. I'm going to treat you like a person. That's what I meant."
The elevator descended.
Sebastian did not look at her.
He was afraid that if he looked at her, she would see something in his face that he was not ready to acknowledge.
"That's—" His voice came out rougher than he intended. "That's what I needed to hear."
The elevator reached the lobby.
The doors opened.
They stepped out into the marble lobby, which was empty except for the night security guard, and Sebastian walked Vivian to the building's exit, where a line of yellow taxis was crawling through the evening traffic.
"Let me call you a car," he said.
"I can take the subway."
"At eight-thirty on a Thursday? After the day you've had?" He was already pulling out his phone. "I'll have my driver pick us up. It'll be here in ten minutes."
"You don't have to—"
"I know I don't have to. I'm choosing to." He glanced at her, finally, and found her watching him with an expression he could not quite read. "It's part of the arrangement. Boyfriends don't let their girlfriends take the subway alone at night."
The word girlfriends sat strangely in his mouth.
The word boyfriends sat strangely in his mouth too.
He was not sure anymore which version of the conversation was the performance and which was real.
His phone buzzed. The driver was two minutes away.
They stood on the sidewalk, waiting, and the October air was cold enough that Vivian pulled her jacket tighter and Sebastian found himself thinking about whether she had eaten dinner, whether she was tired, whether she was going to go home and fall asleep the way normal people did instead of lying awake thinking about things they were not supposed to think about.
"About the arrangement," he said.
"What about it?"
"We're three weeks in. We've hit our first public event. Lyra's been neutralized, at least temporarily. The question is—" He paused. "The question is whether this is working."
Vivian considered this. "What does working look like?"
"It looks like you being able to do your job without my family breathing down your neck. It looks like me being able to deflect my father's pressure without complying with his marriage timeline. It looks like—" He stopped, because the next words were too revealing. "It looks like what we planned."
"And does it?"
"Does it what?"
She was quiet for a moment, and Sebastian found himself thinking about what Marcus Webb would say if he could hear this conversation—the protective older brother energy that Vivian's references had mentioned, the sense that Marcus was the kind of person who showed up when things got complicated. He wondered if Marcus already hated him. He suspected he probably did.
"Work. The way we planned."
He looked at her. She was standing on the sidewalk in the cold, her breath visible in small clouds, her face lit by the passing headlights of taxis and delivery trucks. She looked tired. She looked thoughtful. She looked like someone who was asking a real question and not just performing her role.
"I don't know," he said honestly. "I thought it would be simpler than this."
"Simpler how?"
"I thought I would be able to keep it separate. The professional and the personal. I thought I could do this without—" He stopped again, unable to finish the sentence.
"Without what?"
The driver pulled up in the black car, right on time, but Sebastian did not move toward it.
"Without whatever this is," he said quietly. "Without you making me think about things I haven't thought about in a long time. Without wondering what you're thinking when you look at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you're trying to figure out if I'm worth trusting."
The words hung in the cold air between them.
Vivian did not respond immediately. She was looking at him with that same expression—searching, evaluating, trying to determine something that he was not sure he wanted her to find.
"Get in the car," she said finally.
"What?"
"Get in the car. Both of us. I'm not letting you take a separate cab home after you just said something like that." She opened the back door of the car and gestured for him to get in. "We're having this conversation properly. Not on a sidewalk in the cold."
Sebastian hesitated.
This was not in the arrangement. The arrangement did not cover late-night car conversations in which he admitted to thinking about her more than was professionally advisable. The arrangement was supposed to be boundaries and rules and clear terms, and instead he was standing on a sidewalk in October saying things he had not planned to say.
He got in the car.
She got in after him, closing the door, and the driver—who had the professional sense not to ask questions—pulled away from the curb and into traffic.
"Where to?" the driver asked.
"Queens," Vivian said. "And then back to his place after."
Sebastian looked at her. "You don't have to—"
"I know. I already said that." She turned to face him in the back seat, her expression serious. "You said something. I want to understand what you meant."
"I don't know what I meant."
"Yes, you do. You just don't want to say it."
He was quiet for a long moment. The car moved through Manhattan traffic, stop-and-go, and the city lights slid past the windows in streaks of gold and white.
"When my mother died," he said finally, "I was seventeen. I had just started to think about who I was as a person, separate from being Richard Ashford's son, and then she was gone, and Richard decided that the best way to handle his grief was to double down on making me into his heir. I went to business school because he wanted me to. I came back to Ashford Media because he expected me to. I took this job because it was the logical next step in a plan I had nothing to do with."
He paused.
"I don't know how to want things for myself. I don't know how to be anything other than what Richard designed me to be. And then you—" He stopped, searching for words. "You refused my money. In that lobby. You looked at me and you saw someone who was trying to buy his way out of a problem, and you refused to participate. And I thought: who is this person? And then you were on my interview roster, and I thought: this is a coincidence. And then you were at my desk, and I thought: this is dangerous."
"Why dangerous?"
"Because I wanted to know you. Not as a employee or a strategic asset or a solution to my Lyra problem. Just—you. The person who called me out in a lobby. The person who writes quiet stories about loneliness. The person who looks at me like I'm a person instead of a position."
The car slowed at a red light.
Vivian was looking at him with an expression he had never seen before—something open and vulnerable and unexpectedly tender.
"That's what you meant," she said quietly. "About not being able to keep things separate."
"Yes."
"And you're telling me this because...?"
"Because the arrangement was supposed to be simple. And it's not. For me." He met her eyes. "I'm not asking you to feel the same way. I'm not asking for anything. I just—" He stopped. "I need you to know that this is real. For me. That's all."
The light turned green.
The car moved forward.
Vivian was quiet for a long time, and Sebastian found himself holding his breath, waiting for a response that he was not sure he wanted to hear because he was not sure she was going to say anything that would make this easier.
She reached over and took his hand.
It was a small gesture—her fingers threading through his, a gentle pressure—and it was also, Sebastian realized, the first time she had voluntarily touched him since the arrangement had begun.
"The first night after the gala," she said, "I couldn't sleep. I lay in bed for two hours thinking about mint-green eyes and a burgundy dress and whether I had just made the biggest mistake of my life by agreeing to this."
"You didn't."
"I know. That's the problem." She looked at their joined hands. "I've been telling myself that this is performance. That the way I feel when you touch me—when you put your hand on my back at a party, or when you look at me like you did just now—is just the physical response to good acting. But that's not true, is it?"
"No," Sebastian said quietly. "It's not."
The car turned onto the Queensboro Bridge, the city skyline falling away behind them, and they were moving through the dark toward her neighborhood, and neither of them had let go of the other's hand.
"I'm not ready for this to be real," she said. "I'm not sure I can afford for this to be real. You have your family and your company and your expectations, and I have my career and my dignity and my need to prove that I belong here on my own terms, not because the Editor-in-Chief is protecting me."
"I know."
"And I'm still going to say yes anyway, aren't I?"
"To what?"
She looked at him, and her expression was something complicated—a mixture of fear and determination and a warmth that he had not expected and did not deserve.
"To whatever this is becoming. To the part where I can't tell anymore where the performance ends and the real feelings begin." She squeezed his hand. "I'm going to say yes, Sebastian. But not tonight. Tonight I just want to go home and think about this like a rational person."
"Okay."
"You'll wait?"
"For as long as you need."
She nodded, and she did not let go of his hand until the car pulled up to her building, and even then, even when she was getting out, even when she was standing on the sidewalk in the cold with the car waiting to take him back to Manhattan, she looked at him like she was trying to memorize something.
"Thank you for the honesty," she said. "That's—that's not nothing."
"It's something."
"It's a start."
She went inside.
He went back to Manhattan.
He did not sleep that night either, but it was a different kind of sleeplessness—the kind that came from hope instead of uncertainty, from the feeling of her hand in his and the look in her eyes when she said I'm going to say yes.
He was not sure what that yes would look like.
He was not sure what came next.
But for the first time in as long as he could remember, he was looking forward to finding out.
The arrangement was no longer just strategic.
That terrified him.
That was also, he suspected, exactly what he needed.
He lay in the dark and thought about her all night.
He did not mind.
Not even a little.
Not anymore.
