Chapter 13 #3
“Greg.” My voice is level. Controlled. The boardroom voice, the one that means someone has severely miscalculated.
“I’m going to say this once, so I’d encourage you to listen with both ears.
This company exists because I designed it.
Every stitch, every collection, every relationship with every buyer and every mill and every magazine—that’s my work.
My name. My reputation. You are here because a divorce settlement gave you equity in something you didn’t build and couldn’t replicate. ”
Greg rolls his wrist, trying to dismiss my rant. “Celeste—”
“If we go public like you so direly want, and a board of directors sits down to evaluate who is essential to the continued success of this brand, I want you to think very carefully about which one of us they’d consider expendable.
Because it’s not the woman whose name is on the building.
” I rise, pick up his tablet from my swatch, and hold it out to him.
“And if you ever refer to someone I care about as a manwhore again, or suggest that the baby my best friend entrusted to me isn’t mine, I will make that board conversation happen sooner than either of us would like.
Are we crystal-fucking-clear about whose house you’re in right now? ”
Greg takes the tablet. His jaw is tight. His eyes are hard. But he takes it, which means he heard me, and he turns and walks out of the studio without another word. The door closes behind him with a controlled click that somehow sounds louder than a slam.
Silence.
Then Rina, from her stool, both arms extended well above her head like Mario frozen mid-jump, says, “Hell yes. That was a long time coming. Oh my God. I did good things in life which is why karma rewarded me by allowing my presence during the most lethal, epic tell-off of all time.”
I exhale. The breath comes from somewhere deep—not relief exactly, but release. The feeling of having finally said a thing that’s been composting in my chest for months, maybe years.
“He called Saylor a manwhore. It set me off.” Partial truth. Partial lie. He doesn’t get to badmouth my friend in front of me, but it feels good to know Greg’s intimidated by Saylor. He should be. The way Saylor enters a room and can make a woman swoon—it’s very intimidating. For all of us.
“I heard.”
“Do you think that’s what everyone thinks? That I’m a sad old spinster that has resorted to a love life filled with escort-fueled vignettes?”
“Oh stop that. Greg doesn’t know what to do with a man who’s actually good to you.
It short-circuits him. So he diminishes.
” Rina joins me on the couch, sitting close enough to nudge my knee with hers.
“You know, Sean used to do the same thing. Anytime I succeeded at something, he’d find the smallest possible way to make it about luck instead of skill.
When I got tenure at Columbia, well it wasn’t Harvard, right?
It was always ‘Right place, right time.’ ‘The market was favorable.’ Never ‘you’re brilliant and I’m proud of you.
’ Because a well-read woman is always intimidating to a coward.
But a talented, intelligent woman? She is revered by a real man.
And the Gregs and Seans of the world will never be real men. They’ll just be loud ones.”
I sit with that. I sit with the echo of Whitney saying the same thing in different words on a sidewalk outside a fondue restaurant—he’s reminding you that you’ve expired.
I sit with the image of Saylor in my foyer, paint on his forearm, looking at me like I was the most extraordinary thing he’d ever seen, and not once—not even once—making me feel like I was too much, or too old, or too anything.
“Can I ask you something?” Rina says.
“You’re going to anyway.”
“Fair.” She smiles. “I was thinking of booking a spa weekend. Just us. Get out of the city, decompress, drink wine, complain about men, the whole thing. I found this place in Connecticut—hot springs, no cell service, the works. What do you think? This weekend?”
The offer is generous. It’s exactly the kind of thing I would have said yes to three weeks ago, before the funeral, before Saylor, before a nursery with you are so loved painted on the wall.
Three weeks ago, I would have packed a bag and disappeared into eucalyptus steam and silence and called it self-care.
But the woman sitting in this studio right now is not that woman. Or maybe she is, but she wants something different.
“Actually,” I say, and I hear the shift in my own voice—something lighter, something almost shy, a register I haven’t used in so long that it takes me a moment to recognize it as hope. “I think I want to spend the weekend in Westchester.”
Rina raises an eyebrow.
“The renovations aren’t done,” I add quickly, because I am still Celeste and I still require a logical framework for every emotional decision. “There’s the backyard. The guest rooms. Saylor can’t do it all alone. I should be there. It’s my house.”
“It’s your house,” Rina repeats, and her tone is so carefully blank, it’s practically neon. “And that’s the reason you want to spend the weekend there. The house.”
“Yes.”
“Not the Australian.”
“The house, Rina.”
“The house that the Australian is currently living in. With his mother. While pretending to be your fiancé.”
I pick up my iced coffee. Take a long sip. Meet her eyes over the rim.
“I’m going to help with the renovations,” I say firmly. “That’s all.”
“Sure. You of all people, getting your hands dirty.”
“Hey!” I scold. But we both know it’s the truth.
Rina stands. Collects her bag. Smooths her pantsuit with the practiced gesture of a woman who is about to leave and wants her exit to carry the appropriate weight. She pauses at the door.
“Celeste?”
“What?”
“Bring wine this weekend. You know, to Westchester. Good wine. The kind you drink when you’re celebrating something, even if you haven’t figured out what it is yet.”
She winks, then leaves in the expected Rina fanfare. She’s so goofy and yet ethereal, a bizarre combination.
The studio is quiet again. Just me and the copper silk and the dress form and the eleven pieces that are finished and the eleven that aren’t and the particular silence of a woman sitting in the mess of an afternoon that contained a work crisis, an unexpected sandwich, a revelation, a long-overdue confrontation, and a decision she’s pretending is about a house.
I look at the copper swatch. I rotate it a quarter inch. It’d help if you had some hips, Patrice! I rotate it one more quarter inch, and voilà.
For the first time in weeks—not because anything has changed, but because something inside me has shifted, like furniture being rearranged to catch the afternoon light—I see it. The drape. The cascade. The way the fabric wants to move if I just stop fighting it and let it fall.
Newly inspired, I pick up my pencil and start sketching once again.