Chapter 5 Ivy
five
Ivy
My assistant Priya wouldn’t call before eight unless the building is metaphorically on fire, and today she's calling at six and her voice is flat in the specific way it gets when she's managing something she can't fix. That’s how I know it’s bad.
"Kevin's leaving," she says.
Kevin Lau. My business partner of four years, the person who handles the Vancouver client relationships while I'm in the field. "When?"
"He gave notice yesterday. He's going to the competing firm." A pause. "He took the Burnaby hospice project with him."
I stand in my room at the Silver Lodge with the window showing me the early morning mountains and I do the math.
Burnaby was twenty percent of this year's projected revenue.
The other two projects in our current queue are running four weeks behind because of permitting delays Kevin was supposed to be managing.
Without Kevin handling intake, I'm the only person who can do client-facing work, which means I need to go back.
Or I need to hand the Silver Ridge project off. Finish the design package, send a junior designer to execute, go back to my real life.
I tell Priya I'll call her back. Then I pull on my boots and go to the site.
The hill at six in the morning is in the particular silence of a place that hasn't started its day yet.
I walk the path line and I make myself think it through properly.
I could hand the Silver Ridge execution to a junior designer.
The planting plan is nearly done. The design is approved.
She'd just be here to oversee installation.
There is a real and legitimate version of my life in which I get in the car this morning and drive back to Vancouver.
In that version I don't come back to Silver Ridge.
I sit down on the installation platform and let that land.
It's not the garden keeping me here — or not only the garden.
It's that I've been in Silver Ridge for six weeks and somewhere in that time this place stopped being a project.
The lodge room that feels like mine. The woman at the bakery who knows my order.
The workshop with its task lights and stone dust and Flint's hands.
His hands.
I've designed memorial gardens for fourteen years and I've never had trouble walking away from one when the work required it. That's the skill — you design the space to hold what needs holding, and then you leave it to do that, and you go build the next one.
I cannot figure out how to apply that logic to this.
I call Priya. I tell her I need three more days to think. She doesn't ask why.
I find Flint at the workshop at noon. He's at the Jamie stone and he finishes the cut before he acknowledges me, which is one of the things about him I've stopped finding annoying and started finding steadying — he finishes things. He sets the chisel down.
"There's a problem at my firm," I say. "I might need to go back to Vancouver."
He looks at me. Just looks. Waiting.
"I could hand the Silver Ridge execution to a junior designer. The design is done. She'd oversee installation." I put my sketchbook on the worktable because I need something to do with my hands. "I haven't decided. I wanted you to know I haven't decided."
He's very still. Not his working stillness — something different. Something with more held in it.
"I didn't know you were planning to leave," he says.
Not an accusation. But it lands like one.
"I'm telling you now," I say.
"I know."
He picks up the chisel. Sets it down.
"What do you want?" I ask him.
He looks at me for a long moment. "That's not the same as what I'll say."
The most honest thing anyone has said to me in years. Also completely useless.
I drive back to the Silver Lodge. I lie on the bed and look at the ceiling.
He wants me to stay. He won't say it because he thinks it's my decision to make. He's right that it's my decision. He's wrong that saying it would make it for me.
I pick up my phone. I call Priya. I tell her I'm staying.