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The strip of pool and sea beyond it.

The path she just walked.

Yesterday, choosing this room as an office felt practical. Contained. Efficient.

Now it feels like a glass box.

A place to watch life happen just outside my reach.

I sit down, open the Pierre file, and realize almost immediately that I'm not reading a word.

Because all I can think about is Aria yesterday, coming back through these same doors with paint on her fingers and sunlight on her face and something loose and alive in her expression I hadn't seen in Seattle.

She looked happy.

Not fine.

Not grateful.

Happy.

And that is the problem.

Not that she's beautiful here. She is. Every hour here peels back another layer of the woman she became out of necessity. Underneath is someone brighter. Less careful. The version of her that existed before the accident took everything and told her to live smaller.

It's that she fits.

As if this place reached into her and found the part that had been asleep for years and knew exactly how to wake it.

Seattle makes her sharp with effort. Responsible. Held together with guilt and quiet sacrifice.

France makes her glow.

That should make me happy for her.

Instead it makes me afraid.

The brighter she gets here, the more obvious it becomes that she doesn’t belong in the machinery of my life.

I know what my life does to people.

It turns everything into structure, pressure, obligation, and constant prioritization. What matters most is almost never the soft thing. Never the beautiful thing. Never the person waiting in the next room hoping you'll close the laptop and come sit beside them instead.

If this marriage became real—if the contract fell away and what was left was just us—I know exactly what would happen.

At first I would make room for her.

Tell myself I could protect the light in her.

Tell myself I could keep her separate from the worst of it.

Then the board would need something. The company would need something. My siblings would need something. Some crisis would start bleeding time and urgency, and I’d do what I always do.

I’d work. I’d push hard like I always do. I’d prioritize the crisis over her.

And she’d get quieter. Dimmer. So gradually neither of us would notice until it was done, until it was already gone.

Not out of malice because I wouldn't know how to. Knowing that should make it easier to create distance. It should help me remember that wanting her doesn’t make me good for her.