Chapter 3
POTENTIAL ALLY?
I’m fifteen minutes early, tucked into a corner table at Osteria Marco with a sparkling water I can’t drink and a portfolio case full of real mood boards, real fabric swatches, and an iPad that could rearrange the rest of my life.
I rehearsed the pivot once in Deborah’s bathroom mirror last night, and my hands shook so badly I knocked her toothbrush holder into the sink. They’re not much steadier now.
The door opens and the hostess straightens. Patrick Collier walks in and the space reorganizes around him—silver hair, dark eyes, a charcoal suit that fits like it was built for his body. He’s taller than his company photos. Broader. He moves without hurrying, scanning the room until he finds me.
My stomach flips. Not nerves. Something lower and less useful.
“Virginia?” His voice is deeper than I expected.
“Ginny.” I stand and shake his hand. Firm grip, dry palm, eye contact that holds a beat longer than professional. “Thank you for making time.”
“Your email caught my attention.” He sits, unbuttons his jacket. The candlelight from the votives catches the silver at his temples. “Four restaurant locations is a serious rollout. How did Collier Commercial come across your radar?”
My pulse hammers against the side of my throat.
“My restaurant group client is expanding into mixed-use spaces. Your Larimer Street portfolio came up when I was researching landlords who understand design-forward tenants.” Smooth.
Professional. “Most landlords treat tenant buildouts as a cost center. Your properties don’t look like that. ”
“You’ve done your homework.”
“I don’t take meetings I’m not prepared for.”
“Neither do I.” He leans back. “Walk me through the scope. Square footage? Buildout timeline?”
I give him numbers. Timelines. Neighborhood targets—all real, pulled from my actual client.
Patrick listens the way Clarence never does—no phone on the table, no wandering gaze.
His attention is steady and direct, and every time his eyes settle on mine something warm blooms behind my ribs that has nothing to do with commercial real estate.
“Strong concept,” he says. “But I’ll be direct—your firm is small for this scale. Who else is on the team?”
The end of the road. I can bluff square footage but I can’t invent a team he’s going to vet.
“There’s no team.” My heartbeat fills my ears. “And I owe you the truth—there is no project. Not this one.”
His expression doesn’t crack. He picks up his coffee, takes a slow sip, sets it back in the exact same position.
“Then why am I here, Ginny?”
“Your daughter Annabelle. She’s been having an affair with my husband. Eight months.”
The restaurant noise swells in the silence—a cork popping at the bar, someone’s chair scraping the tile floor. Patrick’s jaw tightens. His eyes don’t go wide. They go heavy. Like I just added weight to something he was already carrying.
“Who’s your husband?”
“Clarence Ellis.”
Recognition. Immediate.
“Clarence.” He says the name the way you’d say the name of a restaurant you tried once and didn’t go back to.
“I remember him. From college. He and Annabelle dated—two years, maybe.” His thumb traces the rim of his coffee cup.
“He was head over heels for my Annabelle back then. Thought the sun rose when she smiled. But those two weren’t good together.
She’d yank his chain and he’d come running back.
Every time. They brought out the worst in each other. ”
She’d yank his chain and he’d come running back. The sentence lands in my stomach like a stone. Twenty years later and nothing’s changed. Annabelle pulled, and Clarence came, and I was just the stable ground he stood on between earthquakes.
“You have proof,” Patrick says.
I pull the iPad from the portfolio case. Unlock it. Turn it toward him.
He reads. I watch his face—the tightening around his eyes at the photos, the way his thumb slows on certain messages. When he reaches boring but stable his hand goes flat against the screen.
“She asked him if he felt guilty,” I say. “That’s his answer.”
He reads it twice. Sets the iPad face-down. The expression underneath his composure is anger pointed inward, and exhaustion, and something that’s been here before.
“She moved back to Denver nine months ago,” he says. “Called me from the airport. I set her up in an apartment. Helped her find her footing. Again.” The again carries the weight of years. “She didn’t mention Clarence.”
“He didn’t mention her, either.”
His eyes sharpen. The parallel registers—two people kept in the dark by the people closest to them.
“Ginny.” He folds his hands on the table. The warmth from earlier is gone. “I appreciate you coming here. I understand your situation, and I believe what you’ve shown me. But she’s my daughter. For all her faults—and I’m not pretending I don’t see them—she is still my daughter.”
The words land like a lock clicking. She blew up my marriage. She read boring but stable and kept right on going. And this man is drawing a line around her.
My fingernails dig into my palms under the table. The anger stays behind my teeth because he’s being honest with me—directly, without the slippery rearranging Clarence does—and even through the sting, I recognize what it looks like when someone tells you the truth instead of what you want to hear.
“I didn’t come here to ask you to choose a side,” I say. “I came because you deserved to know.”
He signals the waiter. Handles the check before I can reach for my bag.
He walks me out. The sunlight is blinding after the dim restaurant. My car is half a block down and he matches my pace, and I’m aware of the space between us—the way his sleeve brushes mine when the sidewalk narrows. The contact jolts up my arm.
At my car he stops. Close enough to catch his cologne—something clean and woodsy, nothing like Tom Ford.
“I hope you have good people around you,” he says. “For what comes next.”
No card. No phone number. No offer to talk again. He nods once, turns, and walks back up the sidewalk without looking back.
I get in the car. Drop my head against the headrest. My hands are trembling—the shaky release of holding everything together while sitting across from a man who made my skin hum and then shut the door in my face.
I showed a stranger the most humiliating thing my husband has ever written about me, and the stranger chose his daughter.
My phone buzzes. Deborah: How’d it go?? Did you chicken out?
I type at the next red light: Didn’t chicken out. He believed me. Then told me she’s still his daughter.
Deborah: Are you serious? After seeing the texts??
He saw everything. Wasn’t surprised. He’s not going to do anything about it.
A pause. Then: His loss. Forget the dad—you need a lawyer. I’m calling my cousin tonight.
I pull onto the highway and the skyline fills the windshield and my arm is still warm where his sleeve brushed it, and I hate that I noticed, and I noticed anyway.
The tile samples are wrong.
I’m standing in the middle of the Platte Street restaurant—the flagship location for the group that’s going to prove Clarence wrong about every dismissive thing he’s ever said about my career—and I’m staring at forty square feet of incorrectly glazed terracotta while my contractor waits for me to say something.
The space is mid-demolition. Exposed brick along the north wall where we stripped the old drywall.
Fresh framing for the bar area, raw two-by-fours still pale and smelling like lumber.
Conduit runs overhead where the pendant lights will hang, and the concrete floor is covered in drop cloths spattered with joint compound.
My mood boards are pinned to a sheet of plywood propped against the far wall—fabric samples, paint chips, a photo of the black walnut bar top sitting in its moving blankets by the entrance.
Three months ago, walking this space made me feel powerful.
Today it feels like standing inside someone else’s life.
“They sent matte instead of satin.” Marco holds a sample up to the light coming through the storefront windows. Sawdust drifts in the afternoon sun. “Color’s right, but the finish is off. You want me to send them back or can we work with it?”
I take the tile. Turn it. Run my thumb across the surface—flat where it should catch light, dull where it should glow.
“Can we work with it?” The sharpness in my voice surprises both of us. “We spec’d satin for a reason, Marco. The whole lighting design is built around how the tile reflects the pendants. If we go matte, the bar area dies. It’s not a preference—it’s a spec.”
Marco’s eyebrows lift. He takes a half-step back, clipboard against his chest like a shield.
The silence rings in the half-built room. A drill whines somewhere in the back. Outside, traffic on Platte Street pushes past, someone honking.
“I’m sorry.” I press my fingers against my forehead. The tile is still in my other hand, rough-edged, too heavy. “That wasn’t about the tile. I’m sorry.”
“No worries.” He takes the sample back carefully, the way you’d take something from a person you’re not sure is finished throwing things. “I’ll pull the PO and send photos to the supplier. We’ll get it sorted.”
“Thank you. And tell them they’re eating the freight.”
He nods and heads toward the back of the space, and I’m alone in the gutted dining room with my pulse pounding and my jaw aching from clenching it for three hours straight.
I lean against the plywood where my mood boards are pinned and close my eyes and Patrick Collier’s face is right there—the way his expression closed when he said she’s still my daughter.
The careful, practiced wall going up. The warmth disappearing from his voice like a light switching off.
And underneath that: Clarence. Clarence sitting across from Patrick twenty years ago, young and charming and head over heels for a woman who yanked his chain because the chaos was the point.
Clarence choosing Annabelle then and choosing Annabelle now and choosing Annabelle in between, while I ironed napkins and marinated lamb and reached across tables for a man who was already gone.
My phone rings. I open my eyes. Deborah.
“Okay, I talked to my cousin.” No hello. “Her divorce attorney is Paulina Klein. Family law. Apparently she’s terrifying and she wins everything.”
“How terrifying?”
“Opposing counsel flinched when she walked in. She’s not cheap, but Ginny—‘boring but stable’ is basically a signed confession. Any judge will see that.”
I push off the plywood and walk toward the windows.
Late afternoon sun throws long rectangles across the drop cloths and catches the dust hanging in the air.
My reflection in the storefront glass is a woman in a hard hat and steel-toed boots, standing in a space she’s building from nothing.
Clarence’s voice floats through my head: her little design thing is cute.
The anger flares behind my sternum, bright and familiar.
“I’ll call her tomorrow.”
“Don’t sit on it.” Deborah pauses. I can hear her TV in the background. “So. The dad.”
“What about him.”
“You spent two hours with the man. You texted me he wasn’t what you expected. That’s not a report on a business meeting. That’s a review.”
My face goes hot. “He listened. That’s all. He sat there and listened without checking his phone or telling me I was overreacting, and that shouldn’t be remarkable but apparently the bar is underground.”
“Uh-huh. And what does he look like?”
“Deborah.”
“I saw the Instagram photo. I just want to know if the photos do him justice.”
I press my forehead against the cool glass. Outside, a woman walks past with a coffee. A delivery truck idles at the curb. The world is functioning normally.
“He drew a line,” I say. “She’s his daughter. He’s not going to help me.”
“Of course he’s not. He’s her father.” Deborah’s voice shifts—softer.
“But Ginny, you dropped a bomb on that man. He’s not going to make a move in front of you.
He’s going to go home and sit with it. That’s what people who actually think look like.
You’re not used to it because Clarence reacts to everything like a cornered animal. ”
Something loosens in my chest. Not much—just enough for a full breath.
“Call the attorney,” Deborah says. “That’s your next move. Forget Patrick Collier. If he comes around, great. If not, you’ve got the screenshots, you’ve got the truth, and you’ve got me.”
I hang up. Stand at the window with the half-built restaurant behind me and the skyline in front of me and the anger still burning steady behind my ribs, the way it’s burned since I read boring but stable on an iPad screen four days ago. Four days. It feels like a year. It feels like five minutes.
Marco comes back. “Plumbing’s good. You need anything else today?”
“I’m good. Thanks, Marco. And I’m sorry again—about earlier.”
He waves it off. “Rough day. We’ve all had them.” The door swings shut behind him and the street noise goes muffled and I’m alone in a room I’m building from the studs up.
I pull out my phone. Find the contact Deborah texted me. Paulina Klein, Family Law.
I save the number. Tomorrow.