15. First Attempt
Fifteen
First Attempt
He showed up at the studio on a Tuesday, which felt, by now, like a pattern too on-the-nose to be entirely coincidental.
I was at the drafting table, Dahlia beside me working through fabric samples for the Perry Street suites, when the door opened and Sebastian stepped in, still in his work clothes, looking like a man who’d rehearsed something in the elevator and lost half of it on the way up.
“Can we talk?” he asked.
Dahlia glanced between us, correctly read the room, and mumbled something about a coffee run before disappearing out the door with more speed than the errand required.
“I have a client call in twenty minutes,” I said, which was true, and also, I’ll admit, a small armor I reached for without fully deciding to.
“This won’t take twenty minutes.” He looked around the studio — really looked, the way I hadn’t seen him look at anything of mine in years. “This is good. The space. I like what you’ve done with it.”
“You didn’t come here to talk about the studio.”
“No.” He exhaled, and something in his shoulders dropped, the careful CEO posture giving way to something closer to plain. “I’ve been in therapy. Three sessions now. I wanted you to know that.”
“Okay.”
“And I understand some things now that I didn’t three weeks ago. About why I did what I did. It wasn’t about Vanessa, Claire. I need you to know that clearly. It was never really about her.”
“I believe you,” I said, and meant it. “I never really thought it was about her sleeping with you, Sebastian. I thought it was about you forgetting I existed as anything other than furniture in your life. Vanessa was just the moment I finally noticed.”
He flinched, visibly, at that. “That’s fair.”
“I’m not trying to be cruel. I’m trying to be accurate.”
“I know.” He was quiet for a moment, gathering himself.
“I want to fix this. I’ve been thinking about it constantly, and I have some ideas.
I could restructure my role at Cole Capital — bring on a president to handle day-to-day operations, cut my hours nearly in half.
We could take that trip to Vermont I kept cancelling.
I could buy back into the studio — a real investment, proper backing, so you never have to worry about the business side again and can just focus on the design. I want to give you—”
“Stop.” I said it quietly, but it landed hard enough that he actually stopped mid-sentence. “Do you hear yourself right now?”
“I’m trying to fix this.”
“You’re trying to solve me, Sebastian. Same as always.
You walked in here with a list of things you could restructure, buy, or give, and you didn’t ask me a single question first. Not one.
You didn’t ask what I actually want. You just started offering solutions, the same way you offered a divorce three weeks ago — decisively, before either of us had actually sat with what was broken. ”
He opened his mouth, then closed it. I watched something shift across his face — not defensiveness, for once, but a slow, visible recognition.
“I did the same thing,” he said quietly. “Just now. I did it again.”
“You did.”
“I came here to prove I’d changed, and I proved the opposite.”
“You proved you understand the idea of what needs to change. That’s not nothing, Sebastian.
Three weeks ago you wouldn’t have caught yourself doing it.
” I softened, slightly, despite myself. “But understanding it and actually doing it are two very different things. And I’m not interested in a grand gesture that fixes the optics of this without actually fixing the pattern underneath it. ”
“Then tell me what would. Actually fix it.”
“I can’t tell you that,” I said. “That’s the entire point.
If I tell you exactly what to do, you’re just following another set of instructions — mine, instead of your board’s, instead of whatever internal voice tells you the fastest way through a problem.
I need you to figure out, on your own, what it actually looks like to show up for someone without trying to manage them into happiness. ”
He nodded slowly, and I watched him absorb that — not gracefully, not without visible discomfort, but honestly, which was more than I’d expected from him three weeks ago.
“Can I ask you something?” he said. “Just one thing. Not a solution. Just a question.”
“Okay.”
“Are you happy? With him. With Marcus. Whatever this is.”
I considered lying, softening it, protecting him from an answer that would clearly cost him something. I decided against it.
“I don’t know what it is yet, with Marcus,” I said honestly.
“But I know I’m happier than I’ve been in years, and some of that is about him, and some of it — most of it, if I’m honest — is about remembering who I am when nobody’s managing me into a smaller version of myself.
That’s not really about Marcus at all, Sebastian. That’s about me.”
He absorbed that too, quietly, and I watched something that looked almost like grief pass across his face — not for losing me to another man, I thought, but for the slow, plain recognition of exactly how much he’d let disappear without ever noticing it was going.
“I should let you get to your call,” he said finally.
“Sebastian.” He paused at the door. “For what it’s worth — the fact that you caught yourself, mid-sentence, and said it out loud instead of pushing through it? That’s actually something. It’s not enough. But it’s something.”
He nodded once, and left, and I sat back down at the drafting table with twelve minutes left before my call, staring at the door for longer than the twelve minutes strictly allowed.
Dahlia came back with coffee and one raised eyebrow.
“That was Sebastian,” she said. Not a question.
“That was Sebastian.”
“How do you feel?”
I thought about it honestly before I answered. “Cautiously interested in whether he’s actually capable of change,” I said. “And entirely unwilling to find out by waiting around for him to prove it.”
I picked my pencil back up, and got back to work.