Chapter Seventeen — Sienna
The silk doesn't care that I'm shaking. It folds the same either way.
I work fast. Hands on instinct, rolling each length into a tight cylinder so nothing creases in transit. Three more go in after that, then my fingers find their own rhythm and stop waiting for the rest of me to catch up.
The duffel still smells like cedar from the guest suite closet. I fill it anyway.
My phone rings while I'm rolling the third length of silk.
Izzy.
I almost don't pick up. Then I do, because not picking up would require an explanation I don't have the words for yet.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey." A beat. She knows something. She always knows. It's the same quality Adrian has, that ability to read a room from the sound of a single word. "You okay?"
"I'm packing."
Silence. Then, "Where are you going?"
"Home." I tuck the silk into the duffel. "My apartment. The real one."
"Sienna." Not a question. A warning.
"Don't."
"I'm not doing anything. I'm just — tell me what happened."
I don't answer right away. The books come off the shelf. The Vionnet. The two pattern references. I set each one in the duffel with more care than the moment deserves, like if I'm precise enough about this part the rest of it won't be real.
"I found a document," I say. "On his kitchen counter. A security log. Someone's been following me. Where I go, who I meet, how long my phone calls run. Weeks of it."
Izzy doesn't say anything.
"You're in it," I say. "Broome Street. Our table. Logged by the hour, with your name cut down to an initial like you're a contact instead of a person."
"Sienna—"
"There's a note at the end." I pick up the shears. Wrap the leather roll tight. "Subject unaware of security detail. Recommend continued discretion per principal's instruction." I hear my own voice go flat on the last part. "He's the principal, Iz. He signed off on it."
She's quiet long enough that I check the screen to see if the call dropped.
"That's not—" She stops. Starts again. "There's a reason. There's always a reason with him, you know that better than anyone."
"That's the part that frightens me. He had a reason. He decided I didn't get to know it."
"Then ask him." Her voice gets quieter. Not softer, more serious. "I mean it. Whatever you read, ask him. He's not — he doesn't do this. Whatever it looks like right now, he doesn't."
"I have. More times than I can count," I say. "The only answers I get are, I can't, soon, just give me a little more time." My voice thins out on it.
She doesn't answer immediately. She doesn't defend him, either.
"Talk to him," she says. "Please. Before you walk out that door."
"I'll talk to him when I know what I want to say." I zip the duffel. "I need to go."
"Sienna—"
"I'll call you tomorrow. I promise." I end the call.
My hands are still steady. That's something.
I leave the red dress.
It's hung on the back of the chaise since the show, weeks now, the champagne someone spilled near the runway dried into a pale ring at the hem.
I kept meaning to deal with it. I never did.
That dress is too loud for a duffel bag.
Too much of me to fold into a cylinder and carry out the door like luggage.
The kimono he found me in some vintage shop downtown still hangs over the back of the Eames chair too. Silk worn soft at the elbows from however many women wore it before me. I almost take that one. My hand closes around the sleeve before I make myself let go.
Some things you don't get to keep just because letting go is the part that hurts.
My shears go into their leather roll next to the sketchbook I haven't finished filling. The pins. The tape measure that's been mine since design school. The chalk box from the counter. The flat wooden one I reach for without thinking every time I'm working through a problem.
Everything that belongs to my hands comes with me. Everything that only belongs to this version of my life stays exactly where it is.
The jasmine candle stays on the nightstand too. It was never really mine. It belongs to a room that's been pretending to be a home for a month, and the charade stops tonight.
I remember him saying it once early on: you don't have to stay in the corners anymore. I believed him enough to move my shears onto his counter. Enough to leave a kimono on his chair like I lived there.
I didn't believe him enough, apparently. Neither did he.
I leave the duffel by the bedroom door and take the elevator down to fourteen one last time. Because packing my things is not the same as walking past everything we built without looking at it.
The official commission stands on the form near the windows, untouched since the day on the terrace when he asked for it. White muslin, pinned in pieces, no silk cut yet because we were still arguing over the bodice line the last time either of us had time to care.
Nobody's cutting it tonight. Nobody's cutting it tomorrow either, as far as I can tell.
I run one finger along the muslin seam at the waist, the spot where the bias would start if this dress ever gets to be real.
Vionnet's whole philosophy, the one he made me prove to him on the terrace with a length of ivory silk and his hands guiding mine: fabric cut on the bias tells the truth about the body underneath it.
No structure to hide behind. No straight grain holding anything in place that doesn't want to be there.
I used to think that sounded romantic.
Tonight it just sounds like a warning I didn't take seriously enough.
I leave the muslin exactly where it is. I don't touch the pins. Whatever happens to this dress now isn't my decision to make alone anymore, and some decisions are easier to walk away from than to finish unmaking.
Back upstairs, I collect the duffel and carry it to the kitchen and set it down by the door.
The fob is the only one I've ever carried for someone else's door. I work it off my keyring slowly, the split ring biting under my thumbnail before it gives, and set it down on the marble.
It lands louder than I expect. One clean crack that climbs straight up into the ceiling and comes back down twice as loud in a kitchen built for silence.
I stand there a second, breath caught, listening to nothing happen.
Some stubborn part of me wants the elevator to chime right now. Wants him to walk in mid-stride, see the duffel by the door, and do something reckless enough to make me put it down.
He doesn't.
He's somewhere below me in a boardroom I'm not allowed to picture, finishing whatever it cost him to make me disposable in front of Julian Vane.
I pick the duffel back up. I don't look at the fob again on my way to the elevator.
Four months compress into the space of one descending elevator if you let them.
I run them backward, looking for where it started to go wrong. I don't have to go far. It's the first thing I find. The dossier on the tablet, my name listed under assets, and me deciding to stay anyway.
Everything after that was the same warning, louder. The workbench at midnight. Red silk and every rule either of us claimed to have. His hands at my waist backstage, before either of us said a word. The terrace, ivory over my shoulders, the dress that was going to be ours.
I saw the seam the day I walked in. I just kept telling myself the fabric would hold.
The elevator is glass on two sides, the kind of design that makes you watch yourself fall forty-four floors in real time.
I watch the lobby get bigger instead of looking at my own face. Somewhere around floor thirty I think about my father, the way I always do when I'm the one walking out for once instead of being left standing in a doorway.
He used to say leaving early hurts less than waiting to get pushed. He said it the night he packed his own bag.
Twenty-three years of making sure I'm always the one who leaves first. Tonight just makes it official.
I spend the rest of the ride taking inventory, which doesn't take long. Every paycheck Kensington ever sent me, sitting in an account I've barely touched. Some part of me kept waiting for someone to take it back. Rent due in nine days. The thread I owe the notions shop on 38th Street.
It comes to enough. The night Adrian Kensington found me I had forty-two dollars and seventeen cents and no choice about anything. Tonight I can afford to walk out.
That's the only part of this that feels like winning.
The doorman, Gerald, who always holds the door an extra second like it's a courtesy he invented personally, looks up from the desk when he sees me with the duffel.
"Heading out for the night, Ms. Rossi?"
"That's right."
"You need me to call a car? Mr. Kensington has an account with—"
"No." I soften it with a smile. "I'll grab a cab. Thank you, Gerald."
He nods, already moving to hold the door. "I'll let Marcus know to have the elevator ready when you're back. Supposed to rain through tomorrow morning."
"Perfect," I say. "Thank you."
I walk through the door he's holding and don't look back.
Outside, the air hits different than it does forty-four floors up. Rain on hot pavement. Diesel exhaust from a delivery truck idling at the curb. The sourness of a trash bag split open near the gutter.
Sandalwood and recycled penthouse air don't follow me past the revolving door.
I love it instantly. It smells exactly like the life I actually have.
I hail a cab instead of calling a car, because I am done being driven anywhere by anyone connected to that building.
***
The cab smells like pine air freshener fighting a losing battle against old vinyl. The driver keeps the radio low, some Spanish station playing songs I don't know the words to but feel anyway.
We loop down through Midtown and swing east. The skyline is lit up like nothing that happened tonight matters to it at all.
By the time we hit my block, I've stopped checking my reflection in the window. There's nothing left to fix before I get there. Nobody waiting on the other side of this door to notice if my eyes are red.
Three flights up, the building exhales heat from a radiator that has been broken since October.