I grabbed it, ignored the notifications, and called Sable.
Ring. Ring. Ring. Nothing.
I tried again. Ring. Ring. Ring. Voicemail.
“Sable, it’s me. I need you. I’m trying to surprise Caelum at work and I don’t know where he works and I left my phone in the bathroom and Sterling won’t stop texting me and I’m standing in my bathroom in a blue dress and heels feeling like the most incompetent wife in the history of marriage. Call me back. Or just – appear. Like you always do. Please.”
I hung up. Took a breath. Decided that waiting was not an option, because the surprise had a shelf life and mine was expiring rapidly. I’d go downstairs and find someone on staff who could help – a driver, a butler, literally anyone with access to the information I needed.
I was halfway down the staircase, moving with the urgent energy of a woman on a deadline, when I nearly collided with a body coming up.
“Whoa-“
“Sable!”
She was right there, on the step below me, her eyes wide with surprise, one hand on the banister. She looked like she’d been coming to find me, which meant the universe had decided to throw me a single, solitary bone, and I intended to gnaw it to dust.
“Where’s the fire?” Sable asked, steadying herself.
“I need to get to Caelum’s office. Now. It’s a surprise. I don’t know where he works. I don’t have a car. I left my phone in the bathroom. Sterling is texting me. And I think the doorman thinks I’m losing my mind.”
Sable blinked exactly once, processing the avalanche of information with the efficiency of someone accustomed to crisis management. Then she nodded.
“Okay. I know where he works. I can drive. Let’s go.”
“You can drive?”
“Marlowe, I can do many things you haven’t discovered yet. Driving is the least interesting of them.” She turned and started back down the stairs. “But we need keys.”
As if summoned by the word itself, the butler materialized at the bottom of the staircase – a thin, precise man whose talent for appearing exactly when needed bordered on the supernatural. He held out a set of car keys on his open palm, without being asked, without a word, as though he’d been tracking the situation via some internal radar that detected automotive need within a fifty-meter radius.
“Thank you,” I said, snatching them.
“Ma’am.” He inclined his head with the ghost of a smile.
We moved through the building like women with a mission – which, to be fair, we were. Outside, Sable located the car with the confidence of someone who’d memorized the fleet, slid behind the wheel, and adjusted the mirrors in three quick, decisive motions. I dropped into the passenger seat, fumbled with the seatbelt, and barely had it clicked before we were moving.
The city opened up before us. Morning traffic, golden light, the steady rhythm of a world going about its business while I sat in the passenger seat of a car I didn’t know, being driven to an office I’d never visited, to surprise a husband I’d known for less than a week. My life, I reflected, had taken on the narrative structure of a telenovela – except the protagonist hadn’t read the script and was improvising badly.
“Hey, Sable?” I said, watching the buildings slide past.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For… all of this. For always knowing what to do when I don’t.”
She glanced at me, and her expression softened into something that wasn’t quite a smile and wasn’t quite anything else – just warmth, simple and genuine, the kind that comes from someone who’s decided you matter and doesn’t need to explain why.
“That’s what friends are for,” she said.
“Right.”
We drove on. The neighborhoods shifted – residential giving way to commercial, the buildings getting taller, the glass getting shinier, until we were deep in the business district, surrounded by towers that reflected the sky like they owned it.
My nerves were humming now, a low-grade electricity that ran from my stomach to my fingertips. In a few minutes, I was going to walk into Caelum’s world – the one he disappeared into every morning, the one he came home from smelling of decisions and responsibility. I was going to see where he sat, how he moved when he thought no one who mattered was watching, whether the man at the office was the same man who knelt on my bedroom floor and held a rose.
The anticipation felt like standing at the edge of a pool. You know the water will be cold. You jump anyway.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.