He took the message. Folded it. Put it in his jacket pocket.
“Clear my two o’clock,” he said.
“Sir?”
“I need the afternoon.”
✦ ✦ ✦
He drove himself again. He had been doing this more — taking the car without the driver, which his security team found professionally alarming and which he found necessary in ways he couldn’t adequately explain to people whose job was to explain things.
He did not drive to Senter Street. He drove, instead, to the office of his family’s lawyer, a man named Gerald who had handled Cole affairs for thirty years and who received Lucien’s unscheduled appearances with the equanimity of someone who had long since accepted that the Cole family operated on their own timetable.
“The divorce papers,” Lucien said, sitting down across from Gerald’s desk without removing his coat.
Gerald’s expression did not change. “Yes?”
“Walk me through what happens if they’re never filed.”
A pause. Gerald was a man who understood that the questions clients asked in his office were sometimes not the questions they were actually asking. He had learned to answer both.
“If neither party files,” Gerald said carefully, “the papers exist as a private document only. There is no legal separation. The marriage remains intact in the eyes of the law.”
“And if she files independently?”
“She would need her own copies. Did she take a copy?”
“Yes.”
“Then she can file at any time. The process would proceed without your participation if you decline to engage.” Gerald paused. “Lucien. Is there something specific you’re trying to understand?”
Lucien was quiet for a moment.
“She thinks she’s free,” he said. Not bitterly. Just factually, in the way he stated numbers. “She believes the papers were legitimate.”
“And are they?”
“They’re real documents. My signature is real. I simply—” he stopped.
“Haven’t filed your copy,” Gerald finished.
“No.”
Another pause.
“Lucien,” Gerald said, in the tone he used when he was about to say something his client might not want to hear, “I’ve known you since you were twelve years old. I’m going to ask you something and I’d like you to think about the answer before you give it.”
“Ask.”
“Do you want her back because you love her, or because you’ve never had something refuse to stay where you put it?”
The room was very quiet.
Lucien stood up, buttoned his coat.
“I’ll let you know,” he said, “when I’ve figured that out.”
He left Gerald’s office and sat in the car outside for eleven minutes.
He did not have an answer. He was not used to not having answers. He was not used to questions that couldn’t be resolved by the application of sufficient intelligence and resource.
He drove home. He ate dinner alone. He looked at the white lilies in the main hall, which had been replaced with fresh ones that morning because he had asked for them to be replaced weekly.
He poured a whiskey.
He looked at the whiskey.
He thought: Gerald’s question is the right question.
He thought: I don’t know the answer yet.
He thought: that is, possibly, the most honest thing I have admitted in years.
He poured the whiskey down the sink and went to bed.
He slept poorly.
This was, he was beginning to understand, going to be a recurring condition.
By thirty-two weeks, Lina had developed what Carla described, with characteristic economy, as “a presence that the camera has decided is non-negotiable.”
What this meant in practice: she had three confirmed bookings for after the birth, two brand contacts who had specifically requested her for spring campaigns, and a growing file of correspondence that Carla was managing with the barely-contained energy of someone who has backed a winning horse and is trying not to let on.
What it also meant: she was thirty-two weeks pregnant, and the booking she had today — a jewellery brand, upper body, close crop, the kind of shoot where what was below the collarbone was largely irrelevant — was going to require a certain amount of logistical grace.
She arrived eight minutes early. She had not stopped arriving eight minutes early. This was, she had decided, the one professional habit she was going to maintain as an absolute because it cost nothing and communicated everything.
The set was a clean white studio with careful directional lighting and a photographer she hadn’t worked with before — a woman named Bex who had a reputation for jewellery work and strong opinions about negative space. Jo, the stylist from the Kova shoot, was already there, which was a good sign. Jo moved around her now with the efficiency of someone who had recalibrated entirely: the looks were constructed from the neck up, with the lower portion of the frame handled by careful angling.
“You’re enormous,” Jo said, without judgment, adjusting the collar of the blouse Lina was wearing.
“Eight months,” Lina said.
“I know. I’m accounting for it.” Jo stepped back. “Turn.”
Lina turned.
“Good. The neckline is doing the work. Bex shoots tight on jewellery anyway so we’ve got room.” She pinned something at the shoulder. “Does she kick?”
“Constantly. She has opinions about lying down.”
“Smart girl.” Jo unpinned and repinned. “What’s her name?”
“Ivy.”
Jo nodded once, the way Jo acknowledged most things — briefly, completely — and moved on to the earrings.
✦ ✦ ✦
Bex shot for three hours.
She was precise and she was fast and she communicated almost entirely through small adjustments — a finger under Lina’s chin, a redirect of her gaze by touching her own face in the direction she wanted. It was, Lina thought, the cleanest working dynamic she’d experienced so far: no wasted language, no performed enthusiasm, just two professionals doing the work.
At the two-hour mark, Ivy kicked.
Not a small kick. A significant one — the kind that registered visibly, briefly, through the fabric of the blouse.
Bex lowered her camera.
Lina looked at her. “Sorry. She has—”
“I saw,” Bex said. She looked at the screen on the back of her camera. Then she looked at Lina. “Can she do that again?”
A pause. “I can’t exactly request it.”
“Talk to her,” Bex said, as if this were a standard technical instruction. “People say it works.”
Lina looked down at her own abdomen, which felt faintly absurd. Then she thought: I have already spoken to this child in scan waiting rooms and at three a.m. and over tea at the window on Senter Street. I have already told her everything I am planning to do. This is not strange.
“Ivy,” she said quietly. “If you’re comfortable.”
A pause of four seconds.
Ivy kicked.