Chapter 13
Celeste
The silk is wrong.
I’ve been staring at the same swatch for forty minutes—pinned to the dress form under the track lighting in my studio, rotating it a quarter inch every few minutes like I’m trying to crack a safe.
The weight is right. The drape is right.
The color—a muted copper that I’ve been calling “rusted dawn” because naming fabrics is sixty percent of my job and I refuse to call anything “brownish orange”—is almost right.
But the hand is off. There’s a stiffness to it, a reluctance, like the fabric knows what I want it to do and is choosing not to cooperate.
Had I chosen to be on that call with Valencia a few weeks ago, instead of surrendering to my emotional breakdown, I wouldn’t be having this problem.
Maria, my VP of production, probably didn’t yell on that meeting.
No good. You must yell at Valencia to get their attention, otherwise they won’t listen. I swear I put that in our SOPs.
The fall line is due to my production team in three weeks.
I have eleven pieces finalized out of twenty-two.
I have a Bergdorf exclusive hinging on a collection that is, at best, half-finished and, at worst, actively resisting me.
I have sketch after sketch pinned to my corkboard that looked brilliant at two in the morning but looks like the fever dreams of a woman who’s forgotten how to design in the sober light of ten a.m.
This doesn’t happen to me. I don’t stall.
I don’t stare at fabric and wait for it to speak because fabric has always sung to me—in textures and possibilities, in the specific language of what a body could become if you dressed it with intention.
But for the past week, the fabric has gone quiet, and I’m standing in my studio like a woman waiting for a phone call that she knows isn’t coming.
The phone calls that are coming, for the record, are all from people I don’t want to hear from.
Amy from accounting, reminding me that production is at least twenty percent over budget and we need to use more cost-effective material.
Not happening. My publicist, asking why I haven’t confirmed the Vogue feature.
Mostly because I have nothing to say at the moment.
Denise Bilch, asking for documentation—something from mine and Greg’s divorce I don’t feel like digging up—that I should have sent three days ago.
And Margot, asking if I want a green smoothie, because she has learned nothing, evidently.
What I want is to be in Westchester. Away from all of this.
The thought arrives uninvited, the way all the dangerous thoughts have been arriving lately—without permission, without context, wearing the casual clothes of something harmless when it is, in fact, the most destabilizing thought I’ve had all day.
I want to be in the house. I want to see what Saylor’s done to the kitchen.
I want to sit in the rocking chair in the nursery and look at the tire swing and feel, for even five minutes, like the person Janet Lundy thinks I am: a woman with a partner, a plan, and a home that smells like cinnamon and fresh paint.
Instead, I’m here. Staring at copper silk that won’t behave. Being exactly the version of myself that Eleanor described to the court in her statement—a career-obsessed CEO who doesn’t know how to stop working long enough to raise a child.
There’s a knock on my office door. I ignore it as if I’m invisible through these walls of windows. Instead, my office landline beeps loudly. The call comes from Margot’s desk. I answer before I look up.
“Margot, if that’s a smoothie, I swear on everything—”
“It’s a bánh mì and it’s from me, so put the claws away.”
At my office door stands the most pleasant surprise for a Friday afternoon. I wave Rina in, rising from my seat, preparing my apology for being rude.
She walks in carrying a brown paper bag and two iced coffees, looking like the only functioning adult in my life, which she may in fact be.
She’s in a charcoal pantsuit with red heels—power outfit, which means she either came from a meeting or is heading to one, or both, because Rina operates at a frequency that makes my eighteen-hour days look leisurely, and that’s even after she quit teaching.
“You haven’t eaten,” she says. It’s not a question.
“I had coffee.”
“Coffee is not food, Celeste. Coffee is a coping mechanism that you’ve promoted to a food group.
” She sets the bag on my coffee table, nudging a pile of swatches aside with the precision of a woman who knows better than to wrinkle anything in my studio.
“Eat. Then tell me why you look like you haven’t slept. ”
“I’ve slept.”
“You’ve slept the way I’ve slept, which is four hours with one eye open and your phone charging six inches from your face.” I make my way to the sofa, and she sits on the stool across from me, crossing her legs. “How’s the line coming?”
“The line is plotting against me.”
“That bad?”
“Eleven of twenty-two. Three weeks to deadline. And the hero piece—the copper gown that’s supposed to anchor the entire collection—is currently giving me the silent treatment, with two middle fingers erect in the air.
” I gesture at the dress form. “I can’t find the movement.
It should cascade. It should feel like liquid metal. Instead it feels like—”
“A curtain.”
I stare at her. “Yes. Exactly like a curtain.”
“Sometimes you just need fresh eyes. Step away. Eat the sandwich. Come back to it tomorrow.”
“I don’t have tomorrow. I have three weeks and a Bergdorf buyer who will not hesitate to replace me with whatever twenty-four-year-old designer is trending on Instagram this month.
” I unwrap the bánh mì anyway because Rina brought it and Rina is usually right about the things I need, even when I’m committed to refusing them.
I take a bite. It’s perfect. Pickled daikon, cilantro, jalapeno, the bread crisp and warm. I hate that it’s perfect because it means Rina was right and I was hungry and I didn’t even know it, which is becoming a theme—people around me identifying my needs before I can.
Rina sips her coffee and watches me eat with the patient satisfaction of a woman who has completed a mission. Then, casually, the way she delivers all her most significant information: “Saylor quit.”
I stop chewing. “Quit what?”
“The agency. Officially. Called me four days ago, thanked me for everything, and said he was done.”
The bánh mì sits in my mouth, un-chewed. I force myself to swallow even though it hurts. “Wow. Did he say why?”
“He said he had other things he wanted to focus on.” Rina’s expression is carefully neutral.
It’s the face she wears in negotiations, the one that says ‘I know more than I’m telling you and I’m waiting for you to figure it out.
’ “So that’s three. Forrest, Taio, and now Saylor.
My three best guys, gone in six months. All because of love.
” She sips her coffee. “I’m starting to take it personally. ”
“Saylor is not in love…well, with me. It’s possible he’s in love with someone his own age. Someone who’s not—”
“Hey. Careful. We’re the same age. Whatever you say about you, you’re saying about me.”
I cringe. “The point is, Saylor didn’t quit because of me.”
The words leave my mouth with the conviction of a woman reading a teleprompter.
Rina doesn’t even dignify them with a response.
She just looks at me over the rim of her iced coffee with an expression that roughly translates to: sure, Celeste.
Whatever helps you sleep at night. Assuming you’re sleeping, which we’ve established you are not.
“He said he’s living in your parents’ house. He moved his mom in? He’s helping you with the custody case? Do these sound like neighborly, platonic favors?”
“It’s not a favor. I’m paying him as a contractor.”
“Yeah, so was I.”
“What are you getting at, my friend?”
Her smile is sly and cocky. “I’m simply saying if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck, loves water like a duck…” She raises her eyebrows. “How long do I have to keep going?”
“You have it all wrong. I mean, sometimes we text,” I say, because apparently I’ve decided to defend a position I didn’t take.
“He sends me updates on the house. Photos of the progress. What he’s working on, what supplies he needs.
” I pause. “He sent me a photo a few nights ago of the kitchen backsplash he’s tiling.
Asked me to choose between two patterns.
I spent twenty minutes deciding before I texted back, so he called.
And yeah, we talked a bit. But it’s all very platonic. ”
Except that kiss. Definitely not platonic. Definitely not going to bring that up.
“Talked about what? Backsplash, huh?”
“It’s a significant design decision.”
“This man is building you Barbie’s dream house, Celeste. And I hate to break it to you, but he thinks he’s Ken.”
I set the sandwich down. “That’s not what’s happening.”
“What is happening?”
What’s happening is that every night around ten, after Ada’s gone to bed and the house is quiet, Saylor texts me.
It started as logistics—measurements, paint colors, whether I wanted to keep the old dining table or replace it.
But somewhere around day three, the texts got longer.
He told me Ada had him rearrange the living room furniture because the sofa was facing the wrong direction for afternoon light and she was right, the room looks better now.
He told me he found a box of my old Halloween costumes in the attic and that I apparently went as a “fashion designer” three years in a row, which tracks.
He told me the neighbor’s daughter, the two-year-old, wandered over while he was fixing the deck railing and sat in the sawdust watching him work for fifteen minutes before her mother came looking for her, and that the little girl called him “hammer bang-bang man,” which he now considers his official title.