9. The Consultancy
Nine
The Consultancy
Ihired my first employee on a Tuesday — a specific irony I noted and then set aside, because I’d decided Tuesdays could mean something else now, if I insisted hard enough.
Her name was Dahlia, twenty-six, two years out of Pratt, with a portfolio full of student projects so confident and strange and alive that I’d called her back within an hour of reading her application.
She reminded me of someone. It took me a full day to realize it was myself, a decade earlier, before I’d learned to make my ideas smaller so they’d fit more easily into rooms Sebastian was also standing in.
“You want me to what?” Dahlia asked, on her first day, when I handed her the Perry Street mood boards and told her to push back on anything she disagreed with.
“Push back,” I said. “If you think the palette’s wrong, tell me it’s wrong. I don’t want an assistant. I want someone who’s going to make the work better by disagreeing with me occasionally.”
She looked at me like I’d handed her something rare, which, I was beginning to understand, I had — not just a job, but permission, the specific kind that most young designers spend years waiting for and rarely receive.
I understood the gift because I remembered, with sudden and uncomfortable clarity, exactly how long I’d gone without it myself.
The studio filled up slowly, the way a room does when someone finally starts paying attention to it.
New sample boards. A proper drafting table, ordered and delivered and assembled by two very confused movers who kept asking where the rest of the furniture was going.
I registered a business license under Hartwell Design, the name I hadn’t used in three years, and felt something settle in my chest when I saw it printed on the paperwork — not triumph, exactly. Something quieter. Recognition.
Lucy came by most evenings, ostensibly to check on me, mostly to sit on the studio’s one good chair and hand me unsolicited opinions about paint chips.
“You seem different,” she said, one evening in late September, watching me sketch the Perry Street lobby’s reception desk for the fourth revision that week.
“Different how?”
“I don’t know. Lighter. Which is insane, because you’re getting divorced.”
“I’m allowed to be more than one thing at once.” I didn’t look up from the sketch. “I can miss my marriage and also remember what it feels like to actually want to get out of bed in the morning. Those aren’t opposites, Lucy. I spent a long time thinking they were.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Do you miss him? Sebastian?”
I set down my pencil. It was a fair question, and I owed her an honest answer, even if I didn’t entirely like what the honest answer revealed.
“I miss the marriage I thought we had,” I said slowly.
“The one where I mattered as much as Cole Capital did. I don’t know if I miss the actual, current version of Sebastian, because I’m not sure I’ve seen him — the real him, not the CEO, not the man managing a crisis — in longer than I want to admit. ”
“That’s sad.”
“It is.” I picked the pencil back up. “But it’s also useful information. I spent nine years assuming the marriage was solid because nothing dramatic was happening. I’ve learned the absence of drama isn’t the same thing as the presence of attention.”
Lucy reached over and adjusted one of the fabric swatches on the board in front of me — the gray-green, still, the one I kept circling back to no matter how many alternatives I laid beside it.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, “the work is good. Really good. Better than anything you did the last few years, even.”
“I know,” I said, and for once, saying it out loud didn’t feel like arrogance. It felt like a simple fact, the kind I’d been too quiet to claim for far too long. “I know it is.”
The Perry Street project moved fast, faster than I expected, because Marcus Reyes made decisions the way I used to before I’d married a man who made all of his decisions for both of us without ever quite meaning to. Marcus asked for my opinion. Then, more often than not, he took it.
It was, I was slowly realizing, an entirely novel experience — being trusted with a vision and then actually left alone to execute it.
I didn’t think about what that meant yet.
Not fully. I only knew that some long-dormant part of me had started, cautiously, to wake back up — and that whatever came next, in the marriage, in the divorce, in whatever shape my life was going to take, I wasn’t going back to being the woman who let that part of herself go quiet again.
Not for anyone.