Chapter 28
Chapter twenty-eight
Work didn’t fix heartbreak, but it came close enough that I could pretend.
The Harrington & Associates winter cocktail party was happening in thirty-two days, and I had convinced myself that if I could make it perfect, everything else would stop hurting.
This was the logic of a man who had spent three days in the same Henley and two different pairs of boxers, so maybe my thinking wasn’t top-tier at the moment.
The lamp on the side table buzzed at a frequency only I could hear.
I was sitting cross-legged on my living room floor, surrounded by cardboard bins, each one labeled in my aggressively neat handwriting: GLASSWARE.
LINENS. CENTERPIECE MATERIALS. One bin contained sample napkins in four shades of cream, arranged in order of how much they cost per hundred.
The Harringtons were using their office conference room, which had exposed brick and terrible natural light.
I had already sourced uplighting. I had already decided on the bar layout.
I had already drawn a floor plan that accounted for traffic flow and prevented that one thing that happens at all parties where people cluster in the kitchen like they were auditioning for a very boring reality show.
Ellis would say…
But Ellis wasn’t here. That was the point. That was why I was here, on my floor, cross-referencing catering menus like I was trying to solve a homicide.
The thing about controlling an event was that everything was solvable.
The florist could be replaced. The DJ had backup tracks.
If the centerpieces arrived damaged, I had contingencies.
Life didn’t work like that. Life shows up three hours after you’ve finally stopped crying, asked for a break, and left you here, on a floor full of napkins, wondering if he was sleeping or staring at the ceiling in that apartment that still had your hoodie somewhere in it.
My phone buzzed. I didn’t check it.
Tuesday. 9:47 AM. The Harrington & Associates office was all floor-to-ceiling windows and a light that made everyone look like they were being interrogated for a crime they didn’t commit.
I was here for the final walk-through with Margaret Harrington, the CFO who had the energy of someone who had never once disappointed a deadline.
I was showing her the table configurations when my phone vibrated against my ribs. A text from the florist: “Client emergency, only able to do half the arrangement order for next Saturday. Working on alternatives, but wanted to give you notice.”
Half the arrangements. Margaret Harrington. Three weeks out.
My brain did that thing where it moved too fast, calculated losses, spun scenarios like I was running code.
Half the arrangements meant I either doubled down on the ones we were getting (make them bigger, fuller, so visually they looked more present) or pivoted entirely.
Fewer, larger installations positioned strategically around the room to create focal points rather than coverage.
The second option required new florals, new budget conversations, new approvals from Margaret, who was currently talking about seating charts and making it very clear that execution was my entire job.
“Just one second,” I told her, which was professional except I was already texting back: “Which designs can you execute?” with my hands shaking slightly because this was what happened when you’d given a client a promise and suddenly the person who made the promise possible was backing out.
Margaret was still talking about the board members who needed to be separated from the board members who divorced each other last year.
I was standing in her office, in their office, the Harringtons’ kingdom, nodding while my phone buzzed again.
The florist: “The lush cascades and the low cylinders. Not the tall arrangements.”
No tall arrangements. The room was already shit for natural light and I specifically chose the tall arrangements to draw the eye upward, to counteract the heaviness of the exposed brick.
Without them, the whole visual story shifted.
The room got smaller. It started looking like a venue instead of an experience.
“Jett?” Margaret was looking at me. “You’re okay with the seating?”
I had no idea what the seating was. I had no idea what she’d just said. My attention was fragmenting like a phone screen someone had dropped on concrete, and I was still in her office pretending to know what I was doing.
“Yeah, absolutely. Let me get those adjustments to you by tomorrow morning,” I heard myself say, which was a lie because I didn’t have the adjustments yet.
I didn’t even have the concept yet. I was making promises in real-time like my job security wasn’t literally hanging on whether I delivered what I promised three weeks ago.
“You seem distracted,” Margaret said, and now her tone had shifted. Concerned. Which was worse than angry because concern meant she was already calculating whether she could trust me with something this important.
“I’m not. I’m good. Full attention.” It was the behavioral equivalent of sprinting while assuring someone you’re walking. “I have the florals update to process, but we’re definitely moving forward with the core concept. This is all going to be stunning.”
She watched me like a code that needed decryption. “This is a significant event for us, Jett. The partners are going to be here. New clients. This is…”
“I know. I know exactly what this is. This is an event that tells people who we are.” And my hands were still shaking because she was right and because I was standing here selling confidence on a day when I could barely keep myself together.
I was balancing the Harringtons’ entire evening on a tightrope made of my own competence, and right now, today, that competence stretched thinner than it had ever been.
I left her office and walked to the corner of the floor where the windows looked out over downtown Brooklyn.
Three weeks. Twenty-one days to solve a problem that showed up with no warning, while Ellis was somewhere in the city also falling apart, and instead of being able to talk to him about it, I was standing here pretending that everything was manageable.
My phone buzzed again. Another text from another vendor. A logistical conflict with the bar setup, the electrical outlet they thought was on the east wall was actually on the west wall, and that changed the whole layout. That changed the traffic flow. That changed the experience.
I texted back something competent and professional while my brain was screaming.
Heartbreak did a thing I hadn’t accounted for.
The Ellis problem, the asking for space, the saying yes because I was trying to be a better person, bled into every other thing.
You got stupid. You missed details. You stood in the CFO’s office looking like you didn’t have control of your own event because you didn’t have control of anything.
I could call someone. Sierra. Calliope. My mom.
But my mom had stopped calling months ago, Sierra would tell me to step back, and Calliope would tell me to drink, and none of that helped the Harringtons’ light situation or the florals or the fact that I’d convinced myself that if I just work hard enough, fast enough, long enough, I could outrun this feeling.
By 2 PM, I was back at my apartment with my laptop open, pulling up lighting diagrams and florals catalogs, reworking the entire visual plan around the loss of the tall arrangements.
Three mugs of coffee went cold across the desk before I caught any of them.
I was running numbers on costs. I was emailing backup florists.
I was doing the work, the only thing I knew how to do, which was to remake the world until it fit inside the container I promised.
The work wasn’t fixing it. The work was just making me tired.
Underneath the tired sat the real problem: I was doing this alone.
There was no one else in this apartment who could look at a floor plan and tell me if it was going to work.
That person, the one who would sit with me and make jokes and somehow make it less catastrophic, was the exact person I couldn’t call because he asked for space and I was trying to respect that, even though respecting it was killing me.
This was what distraction looked like, the desperate flavor of it. Running so fast from one thing, you barreled into the next.
“Jett, open the door. I can hear your misery through the wood and it’s very loud.”
I should have locked the deadbolt. Despite moving the spare key, Sierra quickly located it and wasted no time removing the barrier between me and the world.
Sierra stood in my doorway for a moment, taking in the scene: the bins, the napkins, the laptop glowing in the darkness, me at 7 PM still in the same Henley.
Her camera was around her neck, which was never a good sign.
She put things in her viewfinder when she was about to have important conversations, like she needed the distance the lens provided.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever this is. I’m working.”
She stepped over a bin of votives and sat directly on the napkin samples without asking permission. Her dark curls were in a bun. She was wearing one of her oversized vintage blazers. This was her intervention outfit.
“When did you last shower?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me this?”
“Because you smell like a basement had a baby with a gym locker and everyone is concerned.” She picked up one of the napkins, examined it. “Which shade is this?”
“Eggshell.”
“They all look the same.”
“Exactly. That’s why I need to pick the right one.”
She set the napkin down and turned to me with the expression I’d been dreading since I heard the key in the lock. The one that meant she was about to say something true.
“You can’t organize him back,” she said.
“I’m not.”