In her car, she checked her phone. Sage had sent three messages over the course of the day, increasingly anxious as Elizabeth failed to respond:
Are we still on for tonight?
Elizabeth?
Just checking in. Hope your day is going well.
Elizabeth smiled at the predictability of it. Sage was becoming dependent on her attention, anxious when that attention was withdrawn. This was excellent. Dependence meant control.
She typed a response: Occupied with acquisitions. Will contact you tonight.
The vagueness was deliberate. Sage would spend the afternoon anxious about what "acquisitions" meant, what Elizabeth's priorities were, whether she still mattered.
Sage read the message three times and felt something crystallise inside her chest. It wasn't new, this sensation of being secondary, of mattering only when Elizabeth had time to allocate attention. However, it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
She sat in her office at Sterling Holdings, surrounded by vintage business texts she'd brought from home, and tried to focus on work. But her concentration scattered like startled birds. Elizabeth's message kept echoing: Occupied with acquisitions.
The phrasing was so typical of Elizabeth that Sage could almost laugh. Everything was an acquisition. The Johnathan Thrace manuscript. The auction house bidding. Sage herself, probably, though Sage tried not to think about that implication too directly.
Because the thing about collecting people, Sage thought, and she remembered Elizabeth's barely concealed reaction to that comment in the auction house, that flash of something almost like surprise before the masks slipped back into place, the thing about collecting people was that people weren't objects. People developed awareness of their own instrumentalisation. People developed feelings about being treated as acquisitions.
Sage was developing feelings about it.
She'd been patient. God knows, she'd been patient. Three months of Elizabeth arriving and leaving on Elizabeth's schedule, three months of conversations that felt real until Sage tried to have them twice, and Elizabeth responded with cold disinterest. Three months of watching Elizabeth's face shift into something mechanical when she thought Sage wasn't paying attention, as if the expressions of care were simply another performance in Elizabeth's carefully curated repertoire.
The auction house moment had been real, Sage thought. That moment when Elizabeth had said, "That's collecting people," and something flickered across her face - surprise at being seen, or maybe something closer to alarm. It was the only moment in their entire relationship where Elizabeth had appeared to be something other than a perfectly calibrated strategic operator.
Sage wondered if Elizabeth was even capable of something real, or if everything, the manuscript purchase, the intimacy, the "I want to build something with you" - was just another acquisition strategy.
She tried to work. She really did. She reviewed acquisition proposals for Sterling Holdings, responded to emails, and attended a meeting about market expansion. But beneath all of it ran a current of exhaustion and something closer to resentment than she wanted to admit.
Around five o'clock, her phone buzzed. Elizabeth: Dinner. My apartment. Seven. Don't be late.
Not a request. A summons. Sage had become so accustomed to this tone that she'd almost stopped noticing how often Elizabeth spoke to her like she was an assistant rather than a partner.
'Almost' being the operative word.
Elizabeth's migraine began during the car ride to Morrison Industries and had intensified steadily throughout the meeting. By the time she left James Morrison devastated in his grandfather's office, the pain was a living thing behind her left eye, sharp, insistent, increasingly difficult to ignore.
She took ibuprofen at traffic lights. She took codeine when she reached her office. The pain didn't diminish. If anything, it intensified, as if her body was staging a revolt against her will.
The numbers on her screen began to swim. She tried to focus on the Morrison Industries personnel files and tried to calculate termination costs and severance minimums, but the concentration required felt like trying to maintain a grip on something fundamentally slippery.
"Cancel everything after five," she told her assistant curtly, not bothering to explain. Explanations were for people who felt obligated to justify their choices.
She drove home through the pain, her vision blurring at the edges, her hands gripping the steering wheel with intensity born from the need to maintain control over something when control over her own body was fragmenting.
She'd told Sage seven o'clock. She arrived at her apartment at six-fifteen and immediately regretted not cancelling. Cancelling would have required admitting weakness. Instead, she sat in her darkened bedroom and tried to will the migraine into submission through sheer force of determination.
It didn't work.
Sage arrived at six-fifty-five with wine and takeaway from the Thai place Elizabeth enjoyed, not that Elizabeth cared about such gestures; Sage had learnt. Elizabeth accepted them the way she accepted most things: as tribute owed, not as kindness offered.
She opened the door at seven, and the first thing Sage saw was that Elizabeth was in pain. Genuine, physical pain, not the carefully controlled version Elizabeth usually permitted the world to witness, but something rawer, more honest.
"What happened?" Sage asked, stepping inside, and immediately reached for her.
Elizabeth pushed her away with more force than necessary. "Nothing. I have a migraine. We're still going out."
"Elizabeth, you're in pain…"
"I said we're going out," Elizabeth repeated, her voice carrying the kind of edge that ended conversations. "I didn't ask for analysis or concern."
But her voice wavered slightly at the end, just a fraction of a second where control slipped, and something almost like desperation showed through. Sage caught it because she'd learnt to watch for those moments, the rare instances where Elizabeth's armour became briefly permeable.
This was why she stayed, Sage thought. Not because she was trapped, but because underneath the mechanical coldness, there was someone else. Someone real. Someone who was clearly struggling with being real and losing the battle.
Sage didn't argue. She simply accepted her jacket being rejected and watched Elizabeth move through the apartment like someone operating underwater. Every movement required visible effort. Every expression required recalibration.
"We could reschedule," Sage offered quietly.
"No," Elizabeth said, but the certainty had drained from her voice.
They went out anyway. Dinner was a disaster. Elizabeth snapped at the waitstaff with unusual venom, barely touched her food, and spent most of the evening silent and obviously suffering. Any normal person would have suggested cutting the evening short, going home, and resting. But Sage had learnt that Elizabeth interpreted suggestions as challenges to her autonomy.
So Sage simply sat beside Elizabeth and endured the hostility without complaint, clearly visible in her willingness to be present without demanding gratification or acknowledgement.