22. Watching Her Live Without Him
Twenty Two
Watching Her Live Without Him
Sebastian
The Hudson Valley property opened its design phase to the public in a small local feature — nothing like the press cycles I was used to, just a regional paper covering a boutique hotel’s renovation progress, with a photo of Olivia on-site, sketches in hand, mid-sentence to a contractor.
I read the piece four times, the way I’d once read the Ledger headline, except this time every word of it was actually, unambiguously true.
Olivia Mercer, design consultant, whose eye for hospitality spaces has already reshaped two rooms of the property beyond what the original blueprints called for.
Ezra Landry was quoted calling her instincts “the reason I hired her over three more conventional firms.”
There was no photograph of me anywhere in the piece.
No mention of Mercer Hospitality at all.
It was entirely, cleanly hers, and something in me that I wasn’t proud of — small, old, possessive — noticed the absence of my name and felt a flicker of something before I caught it and named it honestly: not jealousy of Ezra, exactly.
Grief, maybe, for a version of partnership I’d let erode so completely that my wife’s biggest professional moment in years now existed in a world that had no room for me in it at all, because I hadn’t left any.
I didn’t call her about the piece. I’d learned that much, at least — that not every feeling I had needed to become her problem to manage.
I sat with the grief instead, the way my therapist had been teaching me to, and let it be uncomfortable without trying to immediately convert it into an action that would make me feel better faster.
Two days later, on our regular Thursday call, she brought it up herself.
“Did you see the Hudson Valley piece?”
“I did. It’s wonderful, Liv. You looked completely in your element.”
“I felt like myself again, doing that interview,” she said, and I could hear, even through the phone, some of the old brightness in her voice, the version of her I remembered from hard hats and unfinished lobbies.
“Nobody asked me a single question about you. It was strange. Good-strange. I’d forgotten what that felt like. ”
“I’m glad,” I said, and meant it fully, even the part of it that ached.
“Are you? Really?”
“I’m allowed to be glad and also feel something complicated about it at the same time,” I said.
“I am glad. You built something entirely your own, and it’s extraordinary, and I had nothing to do with it, and that’s exactly as it should be.
I’m also aware that a year ago, you were standing in rooms that had my name all over them and none of your own, and now the reverse is true, and some old, small part of me doesn’t love that reversal even though I know I have no right to. ”
She was quiet for a moment. “That’s honest.”
“I’m trying.”
“Ezra asked me to dinner, last week. Not a work dinner. An actual dinner.”
I felt that land somewhere specific and sharp, and made myself breathe through it before answering, the way I’d practiced.
“What did you say?”
“I said I wasn’t in a place to say yes to that right now,” she said. “Not because of you, necessarily. Because I don’t know yet what I actually want, and I decided a long time ago in that kitchen that I was done making decisions about my own life before I’d actually finished thinking them through.”
“That’s fair,” I said, and it cost me something real to say it evenly, without pushing, without needing more information than she’d offered.
“I wanted you to know I told you the truth about it,” she said. “Not because you’re owed updates on my life. Because I decided I wanted you to be someone I could still tell true things to, and I’m testing out whether that’s still possible.”
“It is,” I said. “For whatever it’s worth — however this ends, Liv — I’d rather know the true, complicated things than the comfortable simple ones. I learned that lesson at a cost I’m going to be sorry about for a long time.”