Chapter 10
Celeste
My alarm goes off at six and I am already awake.
Not the productive kind of awake—not the kind where your eyes open and your brain is already three steps ahead, running the day’s agenda like ticker tape.
This is the other kind. The kind where your body woke you at four thirty and you’ve been lying here since, staring at the ceiling, cataloging every crack in the plaster like a woman conducting a structural survey of her own disintegration.
The Valencia call is at seven fifteen. Milan office, fabric development team, the final sign-off on the silk organza for the fall collection.
I’ve been chasing this particular silk for three months—a weight and luminosity that doesn’t exist yet, that I’ve been describing to increasingly frustrated Italian textile engineers as “moonlight caught in motion.” They think I’m being pedantic.
I think they’re being unimaginative…and lazy.
We’ve reached an impasse that can only be resolved by me, on camera, in a blazer, with swatches fanned out on my desk at a time when most of Manhattan is still asleep.
I cannot miss this call. This is the call.
If I miss it, the fall line stalls, production timelines collapse, and the Bergdorf exclusive I’ve been nurturing for eight months dissolves like sugar in rain.
My entire team has been building toward this moment.
Margot, in a rare act of competence, actually ironed out the scheduling mishap and I’m expecting my most important partners in my office well before I’m prepared for them.
I sit up.
The room tilts.
Not dramatically—not a movie swoon, not a hand-to-the-forehead collapse.
Just a slow, nauseating rotation, like the apartment has been placed on a turntable and someone is adjusting the speed, up and down, mercilessly.
My head is pounding. Not a normal headache—the kind that spawns behind your eyes and radiates, turning every source of light into a personal assault.
The kind that says: you haven’t slept properly in two weeks, you’ve been surviving on cortados and adrenaline, and your body has decided, without consulting you, that today is the day it collects the debt.
I lower myself back against the pillow.
The ceiling is still cracked. The light through the curtains is pale and thin and gray, the color of a city that hasn’t committed to morning yet.
My Tribeca apartment—the glass box, as I described it to Saylor—is perfectly climate-controlled, perfectly silent, perfectly empty.
Two thousand square feet of Italian marble and custom cabinetry and not a single person to hear me if I screamed.
This is the part they don’t put in the profiles.
The Forbes features and the Women in Business roundtables and the magazine spreads where I’m photographed in my atelier looking purposeful and backlit—none of them capture this.
The six a.m. version. The woman coated in anti-aging night creams and serums from a twelve-step beauty routine to fight her cruel fate of aging, lying in a bed designed for two and occupied by one, trying to calculate whether she has enough structural integrity to get vertical.
I think about Eleanor, and the calculation fails.
Eleanor, who has a legal team and a Scarsdale estate and the particular confidence of a woman who has never once questioned whether she deserves what she’s asking for.
Eleanor, who looked at me across a courtyard and said what are you here to collect like I was a debt she didn’t want to honor instead of a person.
Eleanor, who is at this very moment building a case that I—Celeste Brinley, CEO, designer, the woman who can identify thread count by touch—am not fit to raise a child.
And the worst part. The part that keeps me awake at four thirty and drills holes in my skull at six.
She might be right. Not about the custody.
About me. About the glass box and the empty apartment and the eighteen-hour workdays that leave no room for anything soft.
I built this life on purpose. I designed it the way I design a collection.
Every element intentional, every choice deliberate, every vulnerability eliminated at the pattern stage.
And now I can’t let a caseworker walk through this apartment and see exactly what I built: a showcase.
Beautiful, cold, and utterly inhospitable to a child.
I think about Whit, and the headache deepens.
Whit, who wanted to be a mother more than she wanted anything.
Whit, who chose me out of everyone in her life, including the mother who raised her, to protect the thing she wanted most. Whitney, who I hadn’t spoken to in two years because I was too proud, too scared, too busy choosing the wrong man over the right friend.
I think about Greg, and I want to throw something. Right off my penthouse balcony.
Greg, who is somewhere in this city right now, probably sleeping soundly in whatever apartment he’s renting with whatever portion of my company’s revenue he’s siphoning, unbothered by custody battles or caseworkers or the particular agony of being a woman who is expected to perform competence in every arena simultaneously and without complaint.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. A calendar reminder. Valencia—fabric sign-off—seventy-five minutes.
I pick up the phone. My hand is trembling, which I resent.
My hands are the steadiest part of me. They cut fabric and sketch and gesture and hold—they are the instruments of my entire career, and right now they are shaking like I’ve had seven espressos, when in fact I’ve had nothing, because getting to the kitchen requires standing and standing requires a version of me that hasn’t reported for duty.
And I don’t think I’m in control of it.
My head is throbbing, the intrusive, depressing thoughts ricocheting off my brain like a pinball machine that launched too many balls at once. It’s debilitating chaos and I can’t form a single coherent thought for the world of fashion this morning. I have no choice.
I do something I never do.
I open my email and type a message to my VP of production.
From: C. Brinley, CEO
Subject line: URGENT AS ALL HELL
Maria,
Sorry for the late notice, but I need you to take the Valencia call alone this morning. I trust your eye. Sign off on the organza if the hand is right. If it’s not, tell them I’ll call Monday. I’m unwell.
-Celeste
The word looks foreign on the screen. Unwell.
I’ve worked through fevers. I’ve taken calls from hospital beds.
I’ve shown up to a fitting twelve hours after my divorce was finalized, pinning a hemline with hands that had just signed away a decade of my life.
Unwell is not a word in my vocabulary. It’s not in my brand guidelines.
Still, I press send.
Then I open my texts. Saylor’s name is there—a new contact, added from the business card exchange that somehow became the most loaded moment of my week. I type with the trembling hands of a woman admitting defeat:
Me
I’m sorry, Saylor. I need to reschedule our drive to Westchester. I’m not feeling well today. I’ll reach out when I’m back on my feet.
I send it before I can revise. Before I can add qualifiers or professional padding or the three additional sentences I’d normally include to ensure no one worries, no one reads too deeply, no one sees the cracks.
Then I turn the phone off. Not silent. Off.
The screen goes black and the room goes quiet and I am alone in the most complete way a person can be alone—by choice, by necessity, by the specific cowardice of a woman who would rather disappear than be seen like this.
I pull the duvet over my head. The darkness is immediate and total and warm in a way that feels like permission.
I close my eyes. And the dream comes, except it’s not a dream. It’s a memory wearing a dream’s clothes—perfectly preserved, mercilessly clear, playing behind my eyelids with the fidelity of something that never stopped happening.
La Fondue Douce on a Saturday night. And we have the whole restaurant to ourselves.
I admit, it’s over-the-top but turning thirty-six felt like the kind of thing that deserved melted cheese and privacy.
It’s tucked on a side street in the West Village—exposed brick, copper pots, the kind of candlelight that makes everyone look like a Vermeer painting.
There are twenty guests. My favorites. Rina, a new friend, a few designers from the atelier, college friends who still text the group chat.
Greg is at the head of the table because Greg is always at the head of the table, even when it’s not his table, even when it’s not his night.
Whitney is beside me. She’s wearing a dress I made for her—a deep emerald silk with a bias cut that follows her frame like water.
I finished it two weeks ago, specifically for tonight.
The neckline took three iterations. The hem is hand-stitched.
It’s one of the best things I’ve ever made, and watching her wear it feels like watching someone read a letter you wrote them—your work, her body, the collaboration of love and craft.
Her red curls are down. Her freckles are showing because she stopped wearing foundation six months ago and announced, with the conviction of a woman discovering religion, that “covering freckles is a hate crime against your own face.” She looks beautiful and restless, and I should be paying closer attention to the restless part, but I’m not, because the fondue is perfect and the wine is a Sancerre that Whit picked specifically because it was the wine we drank the night we graduated, and I am thirty-six years old and in love with my life.
That’s the version I’m telling myself, anyway.