Chapter 14
Rose
I build my workspace by the window because the light is good in the afternoons and because I want to see the street while I work.
Not the curated, distant view of Pacific Heights—those enormous windows framing the bay like a painting no one is allowed to touch—but something messier.
Closer. People moving through their days at eye level, wearing clothes that have been lived in, carrying bags that contain actual things rather than the abstract concept of luxury.
The desk is too small. I knew it would be too small when I bought it, but it was the only one that fit both my budget and the dimensions of the wall.
Now it disappears beneath sketches, fabric swatches, three different pairs of scissors because I keep misplacing them, pencils sharpened to vicious points, and photographs torn from magazines or printed from the internet—women in motion, fabric catching light, details I want to remember.
I pin things to the wall above the desk.
Not with the careful, aesthetic precision of someone creating an Instagrammable workspace, but with the chaotic urgency of a woman who needs to see her thoughts made physical.
A sleeve detail from a Comme des Gar?ons show.
A photograph of Patti Smith in a man’s jacket.
A swatch of emerald green silk that reminds me of the bay on certain winter mornings.
A Post-it with my own handwriting: STOP MAKING THINGS PRETTY. MAKE THEM TRUE.
The wall becomes a map of my brain. Messy. Overlapping. Contradictory in places. It would give Jack’s mother a stroke. The thought makes me smile while I’m pinning up a photograph of a woman’s hands, wrinkled and elegant, holding a cup of tea.
I play music while I work. Not the careful, background jazz that filled the Ashford home during dinner parties—music selected to signal taste without demanding attention—but whatever I want.
Loud sometimes. The kind of music that makes the neighbor downstairs thump his ceiling with a broom handle, which I pretend not to hear because I am thirty-two years old and paying my own rent and if I want to listen to hard core rock at a volume that rearranges my internal organs, that is between me and whatever higher power governs the acoustics of prewar buildings.
The music does something to time. Hours compress.
An afternoon becomes a single sustained note.
I look up from a sketch and the light has changed, the room gone gold then gray then dark, and I have no idea how long I’ve been sitting here except that my back hurts and my stomach is empty and there are pencil smudges on my left palm that will probably not come off in the shower.
I order takeout. Thai, usually, from the place on the corner where the woman at the counter has started recognizing my voice over the phone.
She doesn’t know I’m Rose Ashford, estranged wife of the tech billionaire.
She knows I’m the woman in 4B who orders pad see ew with extra vegetables and enough chili oil to qualify as self-harm.
I eat sitting on the floor because I still haven’t bought a dining table. The container balances on my knees. I spill noodles on the hardwood and don’t immediately scramble to clean them up. Later, I tell myself. The noodles will keep. The sketch won’t.
My life is imperfect in ways that would have horrified me six months ago.
There is a stack of unwashed dishes in the sink that has achieved a kind of structural integrity.
My bed is still a mattress on the floor because I haven’t found a frame I like and I’m not buying furniture just to fill space.
The bathroom mirror has a crack in the corner that distorts my reflection slightly, giving my left eye a haunted, elongated quality that I’ve started to find perversely reassuring.
It is unfinished. It is mine.
The mess is mine. The silence is mine. The decisions—all of them, even the bad ones—are mine.
I choose the paint color (white, boring, because I want the clothes to provide the color).
I choose when to work and when to stop. I choose which photographs go on the wall and which music fills the room and whether the dishes get done today or tomorrow or never, if I’m feeling particularly committed to the bit.
There is no one to apologize to for the disorder.
No one to reassure that the chaos is temporary, that I’ll return to proper adult behavior soon, that this is just a phase.
This is not a phase. This is what it looks like when a woman stops performing competence and starts actually building something.
I miss Jack.
The thought arrives without warning, ambushing me in the middle of a seam I’m trying to puzzle out.
I miss the weight of his arm across my waist in sleep.
I miss the particular way he laughs when he’s genuinely surprised.
I miss the smell of his skin and the sound of his keys in the door and the way our kitchen felt at seven in the morning when we were both awake and the world hadn’t yet begun making its demands.
I miss him, and the missing does not cancel out the rightness of being here. The two feelings exist in the same body, neither negating the other, both true and neither simple.
I set down my scissors. Look at the dress taking shape on my desk. The fabric is wrong for the collar. I can see it now, in the fading light—the weight is off, the drape too stiff. I’ll need to start again tomorrow.
I don’t mind. Starting again is its own kind of freedom.
I turn the music up. The neighbor thumps. I eat cold pad see ew with my fingers and stare at the wall of my own making, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, the woman looking back at me from the cracked mirror is someone I recognize.