“I’m staying through your mother’s birthday,” I said.
“But the arrangement is over.”
His expression didn’t change, although I saw the disappointment.
“No holding hands for the family.
No invented stories.
No pretending.”
“Agreed.”
“And when we return to Manhattan, I won’t continue as your direct assistant.”
That landed harder.
He looked at me for several seconds.
“Do you want to resign?”
“I don’t know yet.
I know I can’t explore anything personal with someone who controls my job.”
Marco nodded once.
“Then you won’t report to me.”
I studied him suspiciously.
“I’m not asking for a promotion in exchange for—”
“You’re not asking for anything.”
His tone sharpened, then softened when he saw my expression.
“I’ll arrange a transfer based on your work, with the same compensation or better.
Or I’ll give you a reference and severance if you prefer to leave.
Your decision about me will have no connection to your employment.”
For the first time since Rosa turned that phone toward me, I felt the balance between us begin to shift.
Not enough.
But begin.
“Why didn’t you simply ask me to dinner?”
Marco gave a short laugh at himself.
“I negotiate acquisitions for a living.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
His eyes met mine.
“Because if you rejected me, I still had to see you Monday morning.”
“So instead you invented a fake relationship?”
“When you say it like that, it sounds insane.”
“It sounded insane when you said it.”
That finally made me smile.
His relief was so immediate that I stopped smiling just to remind him he had not escaped yet.
The birthday celebration that evening was different from anything in the black folder.
There was no performance.
When relatives asked how Marco and I had started dating, he answered before I could.
“We didn’t.”
The first time he said it, the entire table went silent.
Marco continued calmly.
“I asked Emily to help me maintain a lie I should never have told.
She agreed because I put her in an unfair position.
That ends here.”
Nobody laughed.
Nobody rescued him.
He let the embarrassment belong to him.
That mattered too.
When Rosa opened the antique diamond necklace he had bought for her, she cried and slapped his shoulder before hugging him.
I stood with his sisters and watched Marco become somebody different around his family—not less powerful, exactly, but less armored.
Later, one sister nudged me.
“For the record, we tried to make him tell you.”
“I gathered that.”
“He’s an idiot.”
“I gathered that too.”
