11. Brooke
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Brooke
Gemma has appointed herself my emotional support cousin, which mostly means she lies across my childhood bed eating my mother’s crackers and providing unsolicited commentary while I try to remember how to dress like a person with a job.
“Not that blazer.” She points a cracker at me. “That’s a sad blazer. That’s a blazer that’s been through things.”
“It’s a professional blazer.”
“It’s a divorce blazer, Brooke, I can smell it from here. Wear the gray one.” She rolls onto her stomach. “So he really stood in the yard? Like, in the actual yard, and made a whole speech?”
“He made a whole speech.” I pull the gray one off the hanger, because she’s right, she’s always right, it’s infuriating. “To the house. I didn’t come down.”
“God, the drama of him.” She says it with a strange mix of scorn and grudging awe. “And he pulled the book? The whole book? That’s a lot of money, Brooke, that’s genuinely insane, people don’t do that.”
“So I hear.”
“And he cut off Layla.” She sits up now, and her voice changes, loses the teasing edge. “That’s the part I keep chewing on, honestly. Because can I say a thing, and you’re not allowed to be mad.”
“That’s never a good opener.”
“I never liked her.”
She says it fast, like she’s been holding it.
“Layla. I never liked her, and I never said anything, because you loved her and I didn’t have a reason, just a feeling, and who am I to blow up a twelve-year friendship over a feeling.
But there was always this thing with her, this way she’d land a little dig and dress it up as a compliment, this way she was always warmest right when you were down.
I used to watch her do it and think, am I crazy, am I the jealous one for even noticing. So I said nothing. For years.”
She picks at the blanket. “I should have said it out loud. I’m sorry I didn’t.”
I sit down on the edge of the bed next to her, gray blazer in my lap.
“You couldn’t have known, Gem.”
“I sort of did, though. That’s the thing.” She bumps her shoulder against mine. “We all sort of did. She was just really, really good at making anyone who noticed feel like the problem.”
And there it is, the exact shape of it, said out loud by a person who loves me, and it settles a thing in my chest that’s been rattling loose since the launch. I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t the jealous wife inventing a villain.
Other people saw it too and just couldn’t prove it either, and there’s a strange cold comfort in that, in not being the only one who was fooled.
“Okay.” I stand up. “I have to go be a professional now. Are you going to be here when I get back?”
“I’m going to be here eating your mother’s entire pantry and waiting to hear every single word they say to you.” She flops back down. “Go. Get the job. Make buildings. Be the terrifyingly competent woman I know you are.”
“That’s the plan.”
“And Brooke?” She props herself on an elbow, and for a second the joking drops all the way off her. “This is the first thing you’ve done for you, and not for him, and not for your mom, and not for anybody, in about two years. So. Just noticing that. Out loud. Go.”
I take the drafting pencil off the dresser on my way out, the stub of it, my father’s, worn down to almost nothing, and I slide it into the inside pocket of the gray blazer where it rests over my heart, a small wooden promise.
For luck. For him.
For the version of me who used to sketch stairwells and make people cry about them.
***
The firm is in a converted warehouse in the arts district, exposed brick and steel beams and a receptionist who offers me water three times, and I sit in the lobby with my portfolio on my knees and my father’s pencil over my heart and I try to remember that I am good at this.
It’s the boutique hotel. That’s the thing that undoes me a little, sitting there.
When Nadia called me weeks ago, before the launch, before everything came apart, and told me they’d lost their design associate and she’d put my name forward, I’d said I wasn’t looking. I’d almost let it go.
Then my whole life detonated, and Nadia texted me the day after I moved into my mother’s, just three words, coffee is nonnegotiable, and dragged me out and sat across from me and said, you’re going to that interview, Brooke, I already told them you’re coming, it’s happening, wear the gray blazer.
Everyone keeps telling me to wear the gray blazer. There may be a conspiracy.
The interview itself I move through in a kind of clear bright focus I haven’t felt in years, because it turns out the one thing two years of erasure couldn’t take from me is this, the buildings, the way a space is supposed to hold the people inside it.
They show me the hotel plans and I see the problem in the lobby flow before they finish explaining it, and I say so, and I watch the two of them across the table glance at each other, and I know that particular glance, I’ve been on the other side of it, it’s the glance that means she’s the one.
“Your father was Harold Lowell,” the older one, Marisol, says near the end, tapping my portfolio. “I worked on a project adjacent to one of his, years ago. He built things that were kind to the people who used them. That’s rarer than it sounds.”
My throat does a thing. “Thank you. He’d have liked hearing that.”
“Well.” She closes the folder. “Let’s not make you wait and do the whole song and dance of we’ll be in touch. We want you. Associate to start, but I’ll be honest, we’re small and we’re growing and there’s real room here for someone who sees what you see. When can you start?”
And I sit in a converted warehouse in the arts district in my gray divorce blazer with my dead father’s pencil over my heart, and I get to say the words I forgot I was allowed to want.
“How’s Monday?”
I hold it together through the handshakes and the elevator and all the way out onto the sidewalk, and then I stop under the exposed-brick facade of the building where I now have a job, an actual job, with my actual name on it, and I let myself feel it.
One good thing. Out of all of it, out of the whole scorched wreckage of the last two years, one clean good thing that is entirely mine. Not the wife of. Not the woman behind. Mine.
And it occurs to me, standing there, that this is what the other side looks like. That there is a version of my life that exists past Adrian, and it started today, in a lobby, with a handshake, and it doesn’t need him to sign anything to be real.
Let him stand in yards.
Let him pull books and make speeches and cut off Layla and do all the loud grand gestures he never once managed to do quietly when it actually would have mattered. It’s noise. It’s the same noise it always was, just aimed at me for a change.
He’ll keep it up for a week, maybe two, until the guilt burns off and the next thing catches his attention, because that is the entire pattern of the man, and then the papers will get signed and this will all be a chapter I survived.
Standing on that sidewalk, in the sun, with a job and a future and my father’s pencil over my heart, I believe that completely. The worst is behind me. Whatever noise Adrian wants to make, I get to walk toward the rest of my life while he makes it.
That’s the exact thought in my head, that clean and that certain, when my stomach turns over hard enough to stop me walking.
It comes on fast, a hot wave rolling up from my stomach, and I barely reach the alley beside the building, one hand flat against the brick, before it comes up.
There isn’t much, I haven’t eaten since a slice of my mother’s toast this morning, but my body doesn’t care, it just heaves, twice, hard, until I’m bent over with my eyes watering and my new-job elation replaced entirely by the specific misery of being sick in a side alley in a gray blazer.
A delivery guy wheels a hand truck past the mouth of the alley without a glance, and a car alarm goes off somewhere, and the city carries on exactly as loud and indifferent as it was a minute ago, none of it aware that anything at all just happened to me.
When it passes I straighten up slowly and lean my back against the brick and wipe my mouth with the tissue I dig out of my pocket, and I tell myself the thing I’ve been telling myself for a while now.
It’s stress. Obviously it’s stress.
My marriage detonated, I moved back into my childhood bedroom, I just walked into the highest-stakes interview of my life, of course my body is in open revolt, of course I’m dizzy and sick and running on no sleep and less food.
Anyone would be. It doesn’t mean anything.
I have gotten very good at this, actually, at the small daily work of explaining my own body to myself in whatever way lets me keep moving. Tired because I don’t sleep. Sick because I don’t eat. Sad because, well, look around.
Every symptom filed neatly into a folder marked heartbreak, because heartbreak explains everything and asks nothing of you except that you keep surviving it. I have been surviving so hard, for so many weeks, that I stopped noticing my body was trying to tell me a different story entirely.
I go back inside to clean up, because I refuse to get on a bus like this, and I find the ground-floor bathroom and I run the cold water and I splash some on my face and then I look up into the mirror.
The woman looking back at me stops me cold.
She looks terrible.
Not sad-terrible, I’ve been sad-terrible for weeks and I know that face.
This is a different kind of worn. Gray under the eyes, a pull to the skin, and underneath the exhaustion there’s a puffiness I hadn’t clocked, a fullness in my face that has nothing to do with crying.
I look at her, and she looks at me. This time, I actually add it up instead of waving it away.
The dizziness. The kitchen tilting the morning of the launch.
The near-collapse at the party. The nausea that’s been coming and going for a while now, that I keep blaming on grief and skipped meals.
The way certain smells have started turning my stomach.
The bone-deep tiredness that sleep doesn’t touch.