The photographs were everywhere by morning.Elise saw them first on her phone at six-fifteen, before the alarm, in the way she saw most things she would have preferred to encounter with more preparation. Someone had tagged her company's account in three separate posts and the notifications had accumulated overnight into a small insistent pile that she could not ignore once she was awake enough to register it.She and Erik on the red carpet. His hand at the small of her back, her dress catching the light at exactly the angle that made it look intentional, both of them turned toward the cameras with the synchronized ease of two people who had practiced this without ever discussing it. The headline on the largest entertainment platform read simply Amsterdam's New Power Couple and beneath it a photograph that Elise looked at for a long moment with the particular experience of seeing yourself from the outside and finding the image both accurate and entirely foreign.She put the phone face

The car to Brussels left at nine in the morning and Erik was in the lobby of her building at eight fifty-two, which was the kind of punctuality that expressed itself as a form of pressure without ever acknowledging that it was doing so."You look wonderful," he said, when she came out of the elevator."Thank you," Elise said, and smiled, and they went to the car.The drive took just under two hours. Erik spent forty minutes of it on calls, his voice carrying the particular quality of someone performing competence for an audience of one, and Elise looked out of the window at the flat winter landscape moving past and thought about nothing in particular and everything at once, which was the mental state she had been operating in for the past two weeks."You are quiet," Erik said, when he finished his calls."I am thinking," she said."About?""The foundation's spring calendar." It was not entirely a lie. The spring calendar had been present in her thoughts at some point that morning. "Th

Elise told herself it was staying informed.That was the first version of it, the version she offered herself when she opened her laptop at six in the morning and typed his name into the search bar before she had finished her first coffee. Staying informed about someone who had been part of her life, whose situation had intersected with her company's operations, whose professional difficulties had originated in part from her own household. It was due diligence. It was responsible awareness.She maintained this version for approximately four days.By the fifth day she had set up a search alert for his name and was checking it three times before noon, and the due diligence explanation had become too thin to hold the weight of what she was actually doing, which was watching. Watching from a distance with the specific intensity of someone who has removed themselves from a situation and discovered that removal does not produce the detachment it promises.The alerts came in clusters. A ment

Elise looked at the old man for a moment."A young man," she said, keeping her voice even. "When was this?""Tuesday," the shopkeeper said. He was already wrapping her purchase in the methodical way of someone who had been wrapping things for decades and had arrived at the most efficient version of the motion. "He comes in regularly. Has done for some years, before I knew his name. Now I know it." He folded the paper with one precise crease. "Lukas. He always knows exactly what he wants, which I appreciate. Some people come in here and want me to solve their lives. He comes in and asks for specific things and we talk about the botanical properties and he leaves. That kind of customer I enjoy.""You said he seemed troubled," Elise said.The shopkeeper looked at her with the assessing patience of someone deciding how much to share with a stranger. "He is thinner than he was six months ago. He used to come in here and there was a quality to him, a kind of settled energy, like a man who k

Elise did not sleep that night.She lay in the guest room of Erik's family estate with the ceiling above her and the frost outside the window and the words still arranging and rearranging themselves in her mind. My mother is already designing the engagement announcement. Not I want to spend my life with you. Not I love you and I am hoping you feel the same. The announcement. The document that would tell other people a thing had happened before the thing had actually been discussed with the person the thing was supposed to happen to.She got up at six and dressed and went downstairs and made coffee in the large kitchen that smelled of old wood and money and found that being vertical did not help the way she had hoped it would.Erik came down at seven-thirty with the easy confidence of a man who had slept well and considered the previous evening's conversation to have gone well, which told her everything she needed to know about how differently they had received it."Good morning," he s