Chapter Twenty-Three
Christian told me about the investor dinner the next morning, plainly, without waiting for me to hear about it from someone else first, and without performing it for extra credit.
I'd had my own small victory that week, one I hadn't yet told him about, a woman from two towns over who'd found my pieces online and asked if I'd be willing to take a custom commission, a wedding gift for her daughter.
I'd said yes before I'd fully thought through the logistics, and had spent the two days since sketching ideas at the kitchen table in the evenings, absorbed in a way I hadn't been absorbed in anything outside the marriage in years.
I almost mentioned it over breakfast, then decided to wait, curious, in a way I wouldn't have been a few months earlier, to see whether he'd ask about my week before launching into his own.
"I wanted you to hear it from me," he said. "I don't need you to be impressed. I just didn't want it to be one more thing you found out about secondhand."
"Thank you for telling me," I said, and meant it.
"How was your week?" he asked, before saying anything more about the dinner, and I felt something loosen in my chest at the simple, ordinary fact of the question, asked first, asked plainly, without needing to be prompted.
"Good, actually," I said, and told him about the commission, watching his face carefully as I did, curious whether he'd reach immediately for logistics the way he once would have.
"That's wonderful, Isla," he said, and nothing else, no questions about pricing or timelines or scaling, just the plain, uncomplicated pleasure of someone glad for someone else, and I let myself enjoy the simplicity of it before we moved on to his own news.
"Corinne was there," he added. "She remembered you from the early shareholder meetings. Said you used to sit in the back and take notes nobody asked you to take."
Something in me went quiet, hearing that, an old memory surfacing I hadn't thought about in years. "I did do that," I said. "I used to think if I understood the business well enough, I'd be able to help you make better decisions. I never told you that. I don't think I ever told anyone."
"What happened to that? The wanting to understand it well enough to help?"
"You stopped needing my notes, somewhere around year five or six," I said. "You hired people whose actual job it was to understand those things. I didn't feel pushed out, exactly. It just stopped seeming like something I needed to keep doing."
I thought, saying it, about the craft fair the weekend before, about the ease I'd felt talking to other vendors about dye lots and loom widths, technical questions that had nothing to do with Christian's company and everything to do with a version of expertise that belonged entirely to me.
I hadn't known, until that afternoon, how much I'd missed being the person in the room who actually knew something, rather than the person managing the room so someone else could be that.
"You have that back now, though," Christian said, gently. "The knowing something part. I watched you at the craft fair. You didn't need me for a single conversation you had all afternoon."
"No," I agreed. "I didn't."
"I never even noticed you'd stopped," he admitted. "I don't think I noticed most of what you stopped doing, honestly. I only noticed the things you kept doing, because those were the things I still needed."
We sat with our coffee a while, the kind of ordinary morning silence that had started, slowly, to feel comfortable again instead of strained, and I found myself asking the question I'd been circling for days.
"What happens now?" I said. "I don't mean today. I mean what this actually looks like going forward. I don't want to go back to exactly what we had before. I don't think I could, even if I wanted to."
"I don't want that either," Christian said, without hesitation, like he'd already been sitting with the same question.
"I don't want us to just patch the old arrangement and pretend the last few months didn't happen.
I want to actually know what a real partnership looks like for us now, not the one we backed into during the hard years. "
"What does that look like to you?"
"Honestly, I don't fully know yet," he said.
"I know it means I don't get to disappear into work and assume you'll manage the rest of my life without complaint.
I know it means asking you what you want instead of deciding for you what would make things easier.
I know it means actually seeing you as someone with your own plans, not just someone whose plans happen to run parallel to mine when it's convenient. "
"I want to keep the class," I said. "I've been thinking about it more seriously than I probably should admit yet. I think I want to try building something small, actually. Not to replace anything. Just because I think I have something worth making, and I'd like to find out."
"Tell me what you're thinking," he said, and I noticed, telling him, that he didn't reach for his phone once, didn't start problem-solving before I'd finished a single sentence.
"I've been sketching out a small line," I said.
"Woven pieces, throws, some smaller accessories.
Nothing mass-produced. I want it to stay handmade, even if that means it stays small.
I don't know if there's a real business in it or if it's just something I do for myself.
I want room to find out, without you either taking it over or treating it like a hobby you're humoring. "
"I can do that," he said. "I want to do that. Can I ask what taking it over would even look like, so I know specifically what to avoid?"
I laughed, a real laugh, the first one in weeks that came easily. "You'd hire someone to build me a website within the week. You'd want projections. You'd probably try to get Talia involved in a launch strategy before I've even finished my second piece."
"That does sound like something I'd do," he admitted, smiling. "Okay. I'll try to just ask how it's going instead."
We talked for a long time that morning about what partnership might actually require of both of us, not the vague generalities people offer at anniversaries, but specific, practical things: who handled what, how we'd check in with each other honestly instead of assuming the other person's silence meant everything was fine, how we'd talk about money going forward in a way that acknowledged what we'd both actually put into building it.
"I want to ask you something, and I want you to actually think about it instead of giving me the answer you think I want to hear," Christian said, at one point. "If you could design our life from scratch right now, no history to account for, what would you actually want it to look like?"
I sat with the question longer than I sat with most questions these days, because it deserved the effort.
"I'd want real time that's mine," I said finally.
"Not leftover time, after everything else is handled.
Actual protected hours, every week, that belong to the textile work, that don't get quietly reabsorbed the first time something urgent comes up on your end.
I'd want us to talk about money as something we both built, not something you earned and I benefited from.
I'd want to go to your work events sometimes because I actually want to, instead of because managing your calendar requires it.
And I'd want you to ask me questions like this one more than once a year, in a moment of crisis.
I'd want it to just be how we talk to each other. "
"I can do all of that," Christian said. "I want to be honest, some of it I'll probably get wrong at first. The protected time especially.
I think my instinct, even now, is going to be to assume you'll flex around whatever comes up, because that instinct is fifteen years deep.
I'm asking you to call it out when I do that, even if it feels tedious to keep having the same correction. "
"I can do that," I said. "As long as you actually hear it when I do, instead of getting defensive."
"I'll work on the defensive part," he said, with a small, rueful smile. "That one might take longer than the rest."
Christian suggested, tentatively, that we should talk to Orson together about restructuring some of our finances so that I had accounts and assets that were unambiguously mine, not as a repayment, he was careful to say, but as a correction of an imbalance that had been allowed to persist for too long.
I told him I'd think about it, and I meant it, without the old instinct to refuse anything that looked like it might be construed as a transaction.
We did meet with Orson together, the following week, and I found myself surprised by how uncomplicated the conversation actually was, once neither of us was treating it as a referendum on the marriage itself.
Orson walked us through some straightforward restructuring, an account in my name alone, funded not as guilt money but as what he called, gently, "correcting an oversight that should have happened a decade ago.
" I signed the paperwork without the old flinch of discomfort I might once have felt, understanding, finally, that having something unambiguously mine didn't diminish what we'd built together.
If anything, it made the partnership feel more honest, two people with their own resources deciding, freely, to build a shared life on top of them.
Later that evening, after the harder conversation had settled into something calmer, he reached for my hand across the table the way he used to, tentative in a way that told me he wasn't sure yet whether he'd earned the gesture back. I let him take it.
"I'm not asking you to forgive me today," he said. "I just wanted you to know I'm not going anywhere while you decide."
"I know," I said, and for the first time since the fight, I believed the words the way I wanted to believe them, not as a hope I was extending him on faith, but as something closer to fact, built slowly out of everything he'd actually done in the weeks since, rather than everything he'd merely said.
We didn't rush toward anything more than that, that night.
But later, when he kissed me, it wasn't the distracted kiss on the top of my head that had become our habit somewhere in the last several years.
It was the kind of kiss that remembered, that paid attention, that understood exactly who it was kissing, and I let myself lean into it, cautiously, the way you lean into something you're only beginning to trust again.