11. A Room of Her Own
Eleven
A Room of Her Own
Renata’s guest room had good light in the mornings, and on the fourth day I woke early enough to actually notice it — the way the sun came through the east window and lay across the floor in a long gold stripe, the kind of detail I used to catch instantly, back when noticing rooms was half of what I did for a living.
I lay there for a while, watching the light move, and thought about the framed photo I’d packed — hard hat, dust, Sebastian looking at me like I was the whole plan — and something in me, for the first time in days, felt less like grief and more like curiosity.
What would it look like, I thought, to be that person again. Not his partner in the old sense. Just — someone whose eye for a room still mattered to anyone.
I hadn’t done real design work in almost four years.
Not paid work, not work with my name on it — just the house, the boards, favors for friends renovating kitchens.
I’d told myself, back when I stepped away from Sebastian’s company, that I’d find some other outlet eventually.
Eventually had quietly become never, the way it does.
I opened my laptop that morning and did something I hadn’t done in years: I made a folio.
Photos of the Belmere lobby, credited properly this time, in my own words, under my own name.
The brownstone renovation that had once lived in a magazine spread.
Two board projects where I’d quietly redesigned meeting spaces nobody had asked me to touch, because I couldn’t help myself.
I didn’t send it anywhere yet. I just made it. It felt like picking something back up that I’d set down so long ago I’d half-forgotten I was the one who’d set it down at all.
Renata found me at the kitchen table an hour later, laptop open, coffee gone cold.
“You look different,” she said, pouring herself a cup.
“I made a portfolio.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know yet.” I turned the laptop toward her. “I just wanted to see it exist. See my name under the work again.”
She scrolled through it slowly, and her face did the thing I’d been half-afraid to hope for — genuine surprise. “Liv, this is really good. This is actually good, not just family-good.”
“I know it’s good,” I said, and felt some relief in knowing that I did know it, that some stubborn, buried part of me had never stopped knowing it, even during four years of letting the knowledge go quiet.
“So make it matter again.”
“It’s not that simple. I have a whole life built around not doing this.”
“You built a life around giving your husband room,” Renata said, gentler now. “That’s not the same as a life that doesn’t have room in it for you.”
I didn’t have an answer for that yet. But I kept the portfolio open the rest of the day, and that night, before bed, I updated the little-used professional profile I hadn’t touched in four years, added the folio, and wrote, under my name, four words I hadn’t used about myself professionally in a long time.
Interior & hospitality design consultant.
I didn’t know yet that someone would find that profile within the week. I only knew that writing it felt like coming up for air after not realizing, until that exact moment, how long I’d been holding my breath.