Chapter 30: Someday, apparently

Chapter 30: Chapter 30: Someday, apparently

The Uber pulled off the main road and onto something that could barely be called a road anymore, smooth, private, lined on both sides with trees old enough to have been planted for someone’s grandparents. Garrett watched them pass without saying anything.

The grounds unfolded slowly, hedges cut with a precision that had clearly cost someone real time, lawns so uniform they looked less like grass and more like something rendered. A perimeter wall ran alongside the car for longer than Garrett expected a wall to run, high enough that it wasn’t really a wall so much as a decision about who got to see what.

A gate came into view eventually, iron, taller than the car by a good margin, flanked by two men in plain dark jackets who weren’t dressed like guards exactly, but moved like people whose actual job was standing exactly where they were standing. A camera turned slightly as the car approached, tracking it without hurry.

The gate opened. Nobody checked anything Garrett could see. Someone, somewhere, had already known the car was coming.

The driveway kept going after that, longer than most streets Garrett had actually lived on, curving past more of the same trees before the house itself finally came into view.

It wasn’t one building so much as several buildings that had agreed to be photographed together. Wings stretched off in both directions from a central section, stone pale and even, windows arranged with the kind of symmetry that meant someone had drawn this on paper before anyone had ever laid a brick.

A separate structure sat further along, half-visible past a line of hedges, that Garrett suspected was a garage before he even spotted the two cars parked outside it. One of them was low, black, badged with something he didn’t recognise but was fairly sure cost more than his entire degree.

He’d spent yesterday arguing with a curtain rod. This family apparently had people whose actual job was making sure nobody got near the curtains.

He didn’t say that out loud. He just noticed it and got out of the car when it finally stopped.

---

’Im Here...’

●●● The reply came back within a minute.

’Coming down, give me a sec’

He stood by the car, flowers in one hand, trying to look like a person who belonged outside a house like this and mostly failing, when the front door opened and Emiliana stepped out.

She hadn’t sent anyone ahead of her. No assistant, no driver walking her down, just her, crossing the distance from the door to the car at a pace that suggested she’d been ready a while and was glad of the excuse to leave.

She’d clearly dressed for the occasion. Nothing dramatic, but not the version of herself he’d seen sitting around in old jumpers reading translation notes on a bench either. Something simple and put-together, the kind of effort that looked effortless because it had actually been thought about.

She clocked the suit before she said anything, and something in her expression shifted for a second. Not shock, nothing that dramatic, just a small adjustment, like she was updating a file.

"You cleaned up," she said, once she reached him.

"I have my moments."

"Rare ones, from what I’ve seen."

He held out the flowers before she could get further into that. "These are for you. Standard sort of thing to bring, I guess."

She took them, looked at them properly rather than just glancing, and something in her face softened for a second.

"Nobody has brought me flowers before," she said, like she was mildly annoyed at herself for admitting it. "People bring things for Emiliana Vane. Not usually just... flowers."

"They’re just flowers."

"I know. That’s the point."

She didn’t say anything else about it. She just held them carefully as they got into the car, the way you hold something you’ve decided, quietly, matters more than you’re going to say out loud.

"So," Garrett said, once the car pulled away from the gates, "where are we actually going?"

"You choose, you’re the man."

"Right, Okay..." He thought about it for a second. "...There’s that place on Deansgate, the one with the tasting menu Daniel won’t shut up about."

"No."

"No, as in you’ve been, or no as in..."

"No, as in someone will take a photo before we’ve finished the bread course." She said it plainly, no drama in it. "I’ll end up trending under some caption about who I’m apparently with, and neither of us wants to spend our first proper date pretending we can’t see people filming us."

Fair, he supposed. "Something quieter, then. There’s a decent Italian near the Northern Quarter..."

"Same problem, smaller restaurant."

"Okay." He ran through what was left. "Riverside place, out past the..."

"Also no."

"You’re not exactly narrowing the field for me."

"I know where I don’t want to go. I don’t always know where I do."

He was properly out of ideas by the third rejection, staring blankly at the roof of the car like it might helpfully suggest something.

Emiliana looked at him for a second, like she was deciding whether to say the thing she’d already half-decided on.

"Your flat."

"...My flat?!"

"Yes, your flat. We’ll have privacy. No one filming us over someone’s shoulder, no waiter interrupting every four minutes." She said it like it was the obvious answer, which, once she’d said it, it more or less was. "We can actually talk and I’d be comfortable there. With you, I mean."

Garrett needed a second to catch up with that.

Yesterday he’d spent an entire afternoon fighting a curtain rod partly, if he was honest with himself, on the very distant chance she might one day see the place and not immediately regret it. That had felt like a someday problem. A hypothetical.

Today, apparently, was someday.

"Sure," he said, once his brain had finished processing it properly. "My flat works."

She nodded like the matter was settled, which, as far as she was concerned, it clearly was.

---

The driver adjusted course without needing to be asked twice, and the car swung back toward Garrett’s side of the city, the sky outside doing that slow amber thing it did in the late afternoon, somewhere around half four sliding toward five.

Garrett sat there in his dad’s suit, flowers resting on the seat between them, and let the small absurdity of it settle over him properly for the first time.

Yesterday, he’d had the vague, half-formed thought that maybe, someday, Emiliana might actually see the place.

He hadn’t expected someday to be tomorrow.

He glanced sideways at her, flowers between them, city sliding past the window, and didn’t say any of that out loud.

He just let the car keep driving.