3. Okay
Three
Okay
Lucy opened her door in pajama pants and an old promotional T-shirt from some marketing conference, took one look at my face, and didn’t ask a single question. She just stepped back and let me in.
“I don’t want to talk about it tonight,” I said.
“Okay.” She locked the door behind me. “Wine or tea?”
“Both. Separately. In that order.”
I slept four hours, woke up at five, and lay very still in Lucy’s guest room watching the ceiling go from dark to gray to the flat white of a New York morning, running the math on nine years the way you’d run the math on a business you were closing.
What we’d built. What was actually mine.
What I was going to do with my hands, which felt suddenly, uselessly empty.
By seven, I had a list.
By nine, I was standing in the doorway of what used to be my studio — Hartwell Design, though I hadn’t used that name on anything in over three years, hadn’t taken a client that wasn’t a favor to a Cole Capital portfolio company, hadn’t fought for a project on its own merits since somewhere around year four of my marriage, when it had started to feel easier to let Sebastian’s world absorb mine than to keep insisting mine existed too.
The studio was small. A sublet space I’d kept out of some stubborn refusal to fully give it up, filled with sample boards and paint chips gone dusty, a drafting table I hadn’t stood at in longer than I wanted to count.
I stood in the doorway for a long time.
Then I walked in, and I opened the windows, and I started making calls.
Sebastian called four times that day. I let all four go to voicemail — not out of cruelty, I don’t think, though I understand why it might have looked that way to him.
I let them go to voicemail because I didn’t have anything to say to him yet that wasn’t going to come out as begging, and I’d already decided, somewhere around Fifty-Ninth Street, that I wasn’t going to beg.
He texted instead. Can we talk. Not about the divorce. Just talk.
I looked at that message for a long time before I put my phone face-down on the drafting table and went back to sorting fabric swatches for a lobby that no longer had anything to do with my marriage, which was, strangely, a relief.
Lucy showed up at the studio around noon with coffee and a look on her face like she was bracing for a conversation I clearly wasn’t ready to have.
“You said okay,” she said carefully, setting a cup down next to my elbow.
“I did.”
“To the divorce.”
“I did.” I didn’t look up from the swatches.
Cream, or the pale gray-green I’d been circling back to all morning.
The gray-green, I decided. It made everything else in the room look intentional instead of tired.
“What was I supposed to say, Lucy? Fight for a man who told me he doesn’t know what he feels?
Cry until he feels sorry enough to stay?
I’ve watched women do that. It doesn’t work.
It just teaches him that showing up halfway is enough, as long as you cry hard enough at the other half. ”
“So what, you’re just — fine?”
“No.” I finally looked at her. “I’m not fine.
I feel like someone took the floor out from under a house I’ve been living in for nine years and I’m just now finding out the foundation was never as solid as I thought it was.
But I’m not going to let him watch me fall apart over a woman he hasn’t even done anything with. Not yet, anyway.”
“You believe that? That he hasn’t—”
“I believe Sebastian hasn’t lied to me about anything that mattered before this week.
” It cost me something to say it, but it was true, and I’d decided I wasn’t going to start lying to myself just because it might feel better than the truth.
“I believe he hasn’t touched her. I also believe that doesn’t matter as much as he thinks it does.
You don’t have to sleep with someone to leave your marriage for them.
Sometimes all it takes is remembering what it felt like before the marriage started asking anything of you. ”
Lucy was quiet for a moment, turning her coffee cup in her hands. “That was almost annoyingly wise.”
“I had a long night.”
“So what now?”
I looked around the studio — really looked, at the dust, the sample boards for other people’s lives, the drafting table that had been waiting patiently for three years for me to remember it existed.
“Now I find out what I actually built, underneath all the things I let go of for him,” I said. “And he can go figure out what he actually feels. On his own. Without me managing it for him.”
Outside, the city kept doing what it always did — indifferent, enormous, entirely unbothered by the small collapse of one marriage on the forty-first floor of a building that wasn’t mine.
I picked the gray-green swatch back up, and I got back to work.