Chapter 4 - LEO
Sitting at home on the couch with Sarah, the atmosphere is heavy as usual. Dinner goes cold between us, but not all at once. It starts with the rice, then the vegetables, then the space in Sarah’s eyes when she stops really looking at me and starts calculating instead.
Conversation feels forced in order to break the silence. I tell her about my first day in the mail room. I tell her about Danny and about learning the routes, the codes, the way the hotel has two lives — one polished and public, the other one hidden and functional.
She nods, chewing mechanically, holding back what she really wants to say. In the past few months since moving here, all the soft edges that she had when we met have slowly fallen away. She’s more impatient and judgmental. I would go so far as to say I think she hates me sometimes.
“And?” she says. “What about moving up?”
“I just started,” I reply. “It’s my first day.”
“That’s how people get stuck,” she says immediately. “They get comfortable.”
The word lands like an accusation and I roll my eyes, dropping my fork onto the small coffee table in front of me.
“I’m not comfortable,” I say, trying to keep my voice level. “It’s my first fucking day, Sarah. Can you give it a rest for one night?”
She scoffs, shaking her head.
“I’m too tired to do this right now,” I say.
She pushes her plate away. “You’re always tired, Leo.”
There it is. Does she ever fucking stop? Not in the headspace for another argument, I change the subject.
“I met the owner, well kind of, I saw him at the office,” I say. “Ethan. He’s younger than I thought he’d be and he is really tough and not one to cross, from what the guys have told me.”
Her eyes sharpen and light up as she stares at me, suddenly interested in what I have to say. “Young?” she asks, her voice taking on a higher pitch.
“Yeah.”
“Good. That means he’s ambitious. You should make yourself useful to him.”
I stare at her. “I sort mail.”
“So? People notice reliability. You can’t think small.”
I think of Ethan standing in the glass corridor, the building acting like his perfect accessory. I remember how small I felt just looking at him and how everyone around him was transfixed. What is it about him that has me intrigued?
“It will take time,” I say.
Sarah laughs softly, but there’s no humor in it. “Time is what we don’t have.”
“What do you mean? I didn’t realize we were on a schedule?”
“Aren’t we? I want us to be financially secure and living in a decent home before starting a family. Have proper friends, be someone important. You take your time and need to be pushed.”
“Don’t patronize me, Sarah. You know who I am. Not everything can happen the exact second you demand it,” I snap, getting more pissed at her comments.
“Whatever,” she mumbles before standing to throw her plate in the sink and slumping back into the couch.
Moving over to the sink, I wash the plates while she scrolls on her phone, where she is already drifting somewhere else mentally. When I dry my hands, I go to grab my jacket and bag, and she looks up.
“Where are you going?”
“The workshop,” I say.
Her mouth twists in disgust. She knows I go every two weeks. “You’re still doing that?”
“It’s once every two weeks.”
“And it costs money.”
“It’s not much.”
“It’s unnecessary.”
“And is it necessary, you having your nails done every week? Or going out with the girls from the coffee shop every month?”
“It’s important that I look good, Leo. And I need to socialize. It matters that I make the effort, not like that dumb pipe dream of yours, becoming a sculptor,” she mocks and my blood boils.
“It matters to me,” I hiss at her with one hand on the door before I open it to leave.
She stands. “No, Leo. You want it to matter. That’s different.”
I don’t answer.
She walks over to me. “You’re married. You don’t get to chase hobbies like a teenager.”
I turn to her. “It’s not a hobby. It’s the only thing that makes me feel like I exist.”
Her face hardens. “You exist when you contribute.” The nasty words hollow me out.
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a fucking child, Sarah. I don’t see you going out there trying to find a better career.”
We stand there, inches apart, strangers wearing familiar faces.
Then it hits me, like a bolt of lightning, that it’s been months since we touched each other with any intention.
We’ve had no fights about it. Not even a conversation.
Just a quiet acceptance, like something we left behind in a room no one enters anymore.
Neither of us care. That should be a red flag, right?
Deciding to ignore her, I open the door and she doesn’t stop me.
The hallway smells like dust and old carpet.
As I get to the stairs, I pause, hoping that she’ll call my name.
That she’ll say she’s scared too. That she’ll say she doesn’t want to lose me.
It’s stupid to even think that and of course she doesn’t.
So I walk down the stairs alone. By the time I reach the street, my heart feels heavy in a way that has nothing to do with work or money or ambition. It feels like grief.
For the life I thought I was building.
For the man she wants me to be.
For the quiet, stubborn part of me that still wants to make something beautiful out of scrap and fire and time.
I pull my jacket tighter and head for the subway, carrying all of the emotions with me, which feel like a vice around my neck. We can’t go on like this.
When I arrive at the workshop, my body warms as the smell of heat, iron and old oil fill my nostrils.
It’s like a punch in the face the second I push open the door, it’s sharp, dirty, and alive.
In my peripheral, sparks flicker in the back like restless stars.
The air crackles with machines and effort and something almost holy: creation born from pressure.
I breathe it in like a tonic to my soul.
“Hey Leo, ready to get to work?” Ed, the owner of the workshop says as he walks over from his work station.
“Always,” I say, grinning, and he slaps me on the back before leaving me to get on with it.
I drop my bag to the floor, remove my jacket and hang it on the coatstand in the corner. From the workbench I pull on gloves that are stiff with past mistakes, damaged with burns I don’t regret. The world narrows to the workbench, the tools laid out like familiar bones.
Metal waits for me. Cold at first. Heavy and full of potential.
When I strike it, the sound rings and vibrates intensely up my arms and settles into my chest. Each blow shudders through me, steadying something that’s been shaking all day.
The heat blooms, orange and dangerous, licking the edges of control.
Sweat gathers at the back of my neck and on my forehead.
This is where my body makes sense. At the hotel, I’m careful. Small. Replaceable. A fucking nobody.
Here, I am a fulfilled person. A creator.
I shape the metal slowly, deliberate movement, coaxing curves from resistance. Every scar on my hands tells a story Sarah never wanted to hear. Every dent in the table is proof that I once tried to make something that would outlast me.
I close my eyes for a moment, and listen to the hiss of cooling steel, the low thunder of distant machinery. Nostalgia hits as I think back to when my dad used to bring me to places like this.
Not workshops exactly, but garages, scrapyards, forgotten corners of the town where broken things went to wait to be reinvented. He’d hand me rusted bolts and bent nails like they were treasure.
“You can make anything,” he used to say. “You just have to see what it wants to become.”
I swallow, holding back the hurt that he’s gone. He’s been gone over a year, but sometimes I still reach for my phone to call him when the world feels too loud. He would’ve loved this place. The mess of it. The stubbornness of it.
Sarah used to love him too, before she realized just how much I was like him.
How much passion I had for something she looked down her nose at as pointless.
Before my dad died she visited less and less, preferring to spend her spare time on social media, and creating pinterest boards of the perfect life she envisioned.
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment she changed from the easygoing, free spirited girl she was to this money and status obsessed stranger.
I think seeing her friends leaving our town and moving on to better things stirred something in her.
She would often mention them and show me their social media, comparing what she had to them, and talked about “security” like it was oxygen.
Constant speeches about “moving up,” and how love doesn’t pay rent.
I strike the metal again, harder this time. Every impact chips away another part of the stress I carry from the day. It’s stripped me back to the person I am.
I really don’t want to go home. Not to the silence that judges me. Not to the way she looks at me like I’m an unfinished project that’s already taking too long to complete.
Here, no one asks me what I’m worth. They just let me make something.
I study the shape forming under my hands — rough, imperfect and permanent. Beautiful. I want a life that feels like this.
Earned.
Hot.
Mine.
Maybe I can’t save my marriage. Maybe I shouldn’t try to turn myself into someone else just to be tolerated. If I put the work in, I can do well at the hotel. I can learn. I can move up. I can survive.
And somewhere between surviving and sculpting, maybe I can find happiness that doesn’t kill a part of myself that’s in my DNA.
Removing my gloves, I wipe my hands on my jeans and stare at the glowing metal, heart pumping fast but steady.
For the first time in weeks, the future doesn’t feel like a jump off a cliff into the unknown.
It feels like something waiting to be shaped.