Chapter Nine #2
“Yes. And I didn’t this time. I took a job that interested me. And I had a feeling you wouldn’t be very supportive about it. So I did it alone. And it’s too late to quit, because I already have an agreement. I’m already working on the project, actually.”
“Is that why you were behind on sending me those estimates?” Isaiah asked. As if this error was proof positive they were actually correct, and she couldn’t handle all this on her own.
“Yes,” she said. “Probably. But, you know, I’m the one who does the design. And I should be able to take on projects that interest me. And turn down things that don’t.”
“Are we making you do things you don’t like?”
“No. It’s just... The whole mass-production thing we’re doing, that’s fine. But I don’t need to be as involved in that. I did some basic designs, but my role in that is done. At this point it’s standardized, and what interests me is the weird stuff. The imaginative stuff.”
“I’m glad you enjoy that part of it. It’s what makes you good. It’s what got us where we are.”
“I know. I mean...” Everyone was staring at her and she felt strange admitting how secure she was in her talent.
But she wasn’t a fifteen-year-old explaining a report card.
She was a grown woman explaining what she wanted to do with the hours in her day, confident in her area of expertise.
“You can’t get where I’m at without being confident.
But what I’m less confident about is whether or not you two are going to listen to me when I say I know what I want to do. ”
“Of course we listen to you.”
She sucked in a sharp breath and faced down Joshua and Isaiah. “I took a design job for Levi Tucker.”
Isaiah frowned. “Why do I know that name?”
It was Devlin who stood up, and crossed large, tattooed arms over his broad chest. “Because he’s a convict,” he said. “He was accused of murdering his wife.”
“Who isn’t dead,” Faith pointed out. “So, I would suggest that’s a pretty solid case against him being a murderer.”
“Still.”
Mia spoke tentatively. “I mean, the whole situation is so...suspicious, though,” she said softly. “I mean...what woman would run from her husband if he was a good guy?”
“Yes,” Faith said, sighing heavily, “I’ve heard that line of concern before.
But the fact of the matter is, I’ve actually met him.
” She felt like she did a very valiant job of not choking on her tongue when she said that.
“And he’s...fine. I wouldn’t say he’s a nice guy, but certainly he’s decent enough to work with. ”
“I don’t like it,” Devlin said. “I think you might be too young to fully understand all the implications.”
Anger poured into her veins like a hot shot of whiskey, going straight to her head.
“Do not give me that shit,” she said, then looked quickly over at her mother and gave her an apologetic smile for the language.
“Your wife is the same age as I am. So if I’m too young to make a business decision, your wife is certainly too young to be married to you. ”
Mia looked indignant for a moment, but then a little bit proud. The expression immediately melted into smugness.
“I like his ideas.” Faith didn’t say anything about his house being a sex palace. “And it’s a project I’m happy to have my name on.”
Joshua shook his head. “You want to be associated with a guy like that? A young, powerful woman like yourself entering into a business agreement with a man who quite possibly has a history of violence against women...”
She exploded from the table, flinging her arms wide.
“He hasn’t done anything to anyone. There have been no accusations of domestic violence.
He didn’t... As far as anyone knows, he never did anything to her.
She disappeared and he was accused of all manner of things with no solid evidence at all.
And I think there was bias against him because he comes from. ..modest beginnings.”
“It’s about the optics, Faith,” Joshua pointed out. “You’re a role model. And associating with him could damage that.”
Optics. That word made her feel like a creature in a zoo instead of a human. It made her feel like someone who was being made to perform, no matter her feelings.
“I don’t care about optics, Joshua. I’m twenty-five years old and I have many more years left in this career. If all I ever do is worry about optics and I don’t take projects that interest me—if I don’t follow my passion even a little bit—then I don’t see the point of it.”
“The point is that you are going to be doing this for a long time and when you’re more well-established you can take risks. Until then, you need to be more cautious.”
She looked around the room at her family, all of them gazing at her like she had grown a second head. Suddenly she did feel what Levi had described earlier.
This was, in its way, a prison.
This success had grown bigger than she was.
“I’m not a child,” she said. “If I’m old enough to be at the center of all this success, don’t you think I should follow my instincts? If I...burn out because I feel trapped then I won’t be able to do my best work. If I burn out, I won’t be able to give you all those years of labor, Joshua.”
“Nobody wants that,” her mother said. “Nobody expects you to work blindly, Faith. No one wants you to go until you grind yourself into the ground.” She directed those words at Joshua and Isaiah.
“You think it’s a good idea for her to work with an ex-con?” Joshua directed that question at their father.
“I think Faith’s instincts have gotten all of you this far and you shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss them just because it doesn’t make immediate sense to you,” her father responded.
Right. This was why she had confessed in front of her parents. Because, while she wanted to please them, wanted all their sacrifices to feel worth it, she also knew they supported her no matter what. They were so good at that. So good at making her feel like her happiness mattered.
A lot of the pressure she felt was pressure she had put on herself.
But every year when there was stress about the scholarship money coming through for boarding school, every year when the cost of uniforms was an issue, when a school trip came up and her parents had to pay for part of it, and scraped and saved so Faith could have every opportunity.
.. All of those things lived inside her.
She couldn’t forget it.
They had done so much for her. They had set her out on a paved road to the future, rather than a dirt one, and it hadn’t been a simple thing for them.
And she couldn’t discount the ways her brothers had helped her passion for architecture and design become a moneymaking venture, too.
But at the end of the day, she was still owed something that was hers.
She still deserved to be treated like an adult.
It was that simple.
She just wanted them to recognize that she was a grown woman who was responsible for her own time, for her own decisions.
“I took the project,” she said again. “It’s nonnegotiable. He’s going to publicize it whether you do or not, Joshua. Because it’s part of his plan for...reestablishing himself. He’s a businessman, and he was quite a famous one, for good reasons, prior to being wrongfully accused.”
“Faith...” Joshua clearly sounded defeated now, but he seemed to be clinging to a last hope that he could redirect her.
“You don’t know him,” Faith said. “You just decided he was guilty. Which is what the public did to him. What the justice system did to him. And if he’s innocent, then he’s a man who lost everything over snap judgments and bias.
You’re in PR, maybe you can work with that when the news stories start coming out—”
“Dinner will be ready soon,” her mother interrupted, her tone gentle but firm. “Why don’t we table talk of business until after?”
They did that as best they could all through the meal, and afterward Faith was recruited to help put away dishes. She would complain, or perhaps grumble about the sexism of it, but her mother had only asked for her, and Faith had a feeling it was because her mother wanted a private word with her.
“How well do you know Levi Tucker?” her mother asked gently, taking a clean plate from the drying rack and stacking it in the cupboard.
“Well enough,” Faith answered, feeling a twist of conviction in her chest as she plunged her hands into the warm dishwater.
“You have very strong feelings about his innocence.”
“There’s nothing about him that seems...bad to me.”
Rough, yes. Wounded, yes. Stabbed through the rib cage because of his own wife, sure. But not bad.
“Be careful,” her mother said gently. “You’ve seen more of the world than I ever will, sweetheart.
You’ve done more, achieved more, than I could have ever hoped to.
But there are some things you don’t have experience with.
.. And I fear that, to a degree, your advancement in other areas is the reason why. And it makes me worry for you.”
“You don’t have to worry for me.”
“So your interest in him is entirely professional?”
Faith took a dish out of the soapy water and began to scrub it. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
“But I do,” her mother said. “Just like I worry about your brothers sometimes. It’s what parents do.”
“Well, I’m fine,” Faith said.
“It’s okay to make mistakes,” her mother said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just forget about Levi Tucker for a second. It’s okay for you to make mistakes, Faith. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to be everything to everyone. You don’t have to make Isaiah happy. You don’t have to make Joshua happy. You certainly don’t have to make your father and I happy.”
Faith shifted uncomfortably. “It’s not a hardship to care about whether or not my family is happy. You did so much for me...”
“Look at everything you’ve done for us. Just having you as my daughter would have been enough, Faith. It would have always been enough.”
Faith didn’t know why that sat so uncomfortably with her. “I would rather not make mistakes.”
“We would all rather not make them,” her mother said. “But sometimes they’re unavoidable. Sometimes you need to make them in order to grow into the person you were always supposed to be.”
Faith wondered if Levi could be classified as a mistake.
She was going into this—whatever it was—knowing exactly what kind of man he was and exactly when and how things were going to end.
She wondered if that made her somehow more prepared.
If that meant it was a calculated maneuver, rather than a mistake.
“I can see you, figuring out if you’re still perfect.”
Her mother’s words were not spoken with any sort of unkindness, but they played at Faith’s insides all the same. “I don’t think I’m perfect,” Faith mumbled, scrubbing more ferociously at the dish.
“You would like to be.”
She made a sound that landed somewhere between a scoff and a laugh, aiming for cool and collected and achieving neither. “Who doesn’t want to be?”
“I would venture to say your brothers don’t worry very much about being perfect.”
Sure. Because they operated in the background and worried about things like her optics, not their own.
Isaiah somehow managed to go through life operating as if everything was a series of numbers and spreadsheets.
Joshua treated everything like a PR opportunity.
And Devlin... Well, Devlin was the one who had never cared what anyone thought.
The one who hadn’t gone into business with the rest of them.
The one who had done absolutely everything on his own terms and somehow come out of it with Faith’s best friend as a bonus.
“I like my life,” Faith insisted. “Don’t think that I don’t.”
“I don’t think that,” her mother said. “I just think you put an awful lot of pressure on yourself.”
For the rest of the evening, Faith tried not to ruminate on that too much, but the words kept turning over and over in her head on the drive back to Levi’s.
She swung by her house and put together a toiletries bag, throwing in some pajamas and an outfit for the next day. And all the while she kept thinking...
You’re too hard on yourself. You can make mistakes.
And her resistance to those words worried her more than she would like to admit.
Logically, she was completely all right with this thing with Levi being temporary. With it being a mistake, in many ways. But she was concerned that there was something deep inside her that believed it would become something different. That believed it might work out.
Beneath her practicality she was more of a dreamer than she wanted to acknowledge.
But how could she be anything but a dreamer?
It was her job. To create things out of thin air.
Even though another part of her always had to make those dreams a practical reality.
It wasn’t any good to be an architect if you couldn’t figure out how to make your creations stand, make them structurally sound.
She didn’t know how to reconcile those two halves of herself. Not right now. Not in this instance.
Now she had just confused herself. Because sex with Levi was not designing a house. Not even close.
She needed to stop trying to make sense of everything.
Maybe there were some things you couldn’t make sense of.
She was having a just-physical relationship with the man. She nodded her head resolutely as she pulled up to the front of his house and put the car in Park. Then she shut off the engine decisively.
She knew exactly what was happening between them, and she was mature enough to cope with it.
He wasn’t a mistake. He was an experience.
So there. She didn’t need to make mistakes.
Satisfied with that, Faith grabbed her overnight bag, got out of her car and went to Levi’s house.