13. Ariah
— ? —
Ariah
Three weeks into my new life, and I’ve developed a routine.
Mornings belong to the twins. Breakfast, which is usually cereal because my cooking ambitions have scaled dramatically down from the Grimaldi kitchen’s endless possibilities.
Then preschool drop-off, where I smile at the other mothers who don’t know what to make of me, the woman who appeared suddenly with two children and an address that doesn’t match the Grimaldi name on their enrollment forms.
Afternoons are for job hunting, which mostly means staring at my laptop and wondering who would hire a woman whose only recent work experience is “ran a household” and whose actual expertise has been buried under six years of being someone’s wife.
“You’re doing it again,” Piper says from the kitchen, where she’s making coffee that smells like it could strip paint.
“Doing what?”
“That thing where you spiral into existential despair while pretending to look at job listings.”
“I’m not spiraling. I’m being realistic.”
“You’re being dramatic.” She brings me a cup of the terrifying coffee and sits down across from me at the small table that serves as our dining room, work space, and general life-planning headquarters. “You have skills. Actual, marketable skills. You just need to remember what they are.”
“I founded Maison d’Emery eight years ago, Piper. And yes, I’ve done pieces here and there since… private pieces, uncredited work for the house - but nothing under my own name. Nothing that was really mine. The industry’s moved on without me.”
“Has it? Because the necklace I wore to dinner last night got more compliments than my personality, and that’s saying something.”
I look up from my laptop. “What necklace?”
“The one you made me for my thirtieth birthday. The silver chain with the little…” She makes a vague gesture near her throat. “The spiral thing.”
“The helix pendant.”
“That’s the one. This woman at the restaurant couldn’t stop staring at it. She asked where I got it, and I told her my cousin made it, and she practically climbed across the table asking for your contact information.”
Something stirs in my chest, something I haven’t felt in a long time. Interest, maybe. Or hope. “What did you tell her?”
“I told her you were incredibly talented but annoyingly modest, and that she should prepare to grovel if she wanted a commission.”
“Piper.”
“What? It’s true.” She pulls out her phone and slides it across the table.
“Here. Her name is Valentina Bianchi, a socialite. She’s getting married in four months and she wants something custom for her wedding day.
She specifically asked for ‘the woman who designed that piece’ and was very disappointed when I told her you’d been out of the business for a while. ”
I stare at the phone, at the contact information for a woman I’ve never met who wants to pay me for something I made with my own hands. It feels like a message from another life, the life I had before I became Ariah Emery-Grimaldi and let my name get swallowed by a hyphen.
“I can’t,” I say, even as part of me is already calculating what I’d need - my portable tools, some supplies, a space to work. “I don’t have a workshop. I don’t have clients. I don’t have…”
“You have hands,” Piper interrupts. “And talent. And a woman who’s willing to pay you actual money for actual work. What else do you need?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It’s exactly that simple.” She leans forward, her expression suddenly serious.
“Ari, listen to me. You built Maison d’Emery from nothing.
You were twenty-four years old with no connections and no money and no safety net, and you made something people wanted.
You didn’t need Pietro then, and you don’t need him now. ”
“I wasn’t supporting two children then.”
“So support them with this. One commission leads to another. That’s how it works. That’s how it worked before.”
I want to argue with her. I want to point out all the ways this is different, all the reasons it won’t work, all the obstacles standing between me and the life I used to have. But underneath all that resistance is something else, something that feels like hunger.
I miss it. I miss the weight of metal in my hands, the precision of the work, the satisfaction of turning raw materials into something beautiful.
I miss being good at something, being known for something, being someone other than the wife who waited at home while her husband built an empire on her ideas.
“Fine,” I hear myself say. “I’ll call her.”
Piper grins. “That’s my girl.”
* * *
Valentina Bianchi turns out to be exactly the kind of client I used to dream about - wealthy enough to afford quality, specific enough to know what she wants, and passionate enough about the work to make the collaboration exciting rather than exhausting.
“I want something that tells a story,” she says, when we meet at a café near my apartment three days later.
She’s younger than I expected, maybe twenty-eight, with the kind of effortless elegance that comes from growing up surrounded by beautiful things.
“My grandmother had this ring that she wore every day of her marriage, and when she died, my grandfather couldn’t bear to look at it.
He put it in a box and never opened it again. ”
“That’s heartbreaking.”
“It’s romantic.” She smiles, a little wistfully. “I want my wedding jewelry to be like that. Something so meaningful that it would break someone’s heart to lose it.”
I think about my own wedding ring, left on a counter in a house that never felt like mine. I think about Pietro’s face when he must have found it, the weight of that small circle of metal suddenly representing everything that had gone wrong between us.
“I can do that,” I say, and I mean it.
We spend an hour talking about design, about her grandmother’s ring, about the relationship between metal and memory that I used to build my whole philosophy around.
By the time we’re done, I have a notebook full of sketches and a deposit that will cover a month of expenses, and something that feels almost like excitement building in my chest.
“Your cousin told me you used to have your own brand,” Valentina says as we’re gathering our things to leave. “Maison d’Emery. I looked it up - your early work was stunning. What happened?”
“I got married,” I say. “And my company got merged. And somewhere along the way, the name stopped being mine.”
“That’s a shame. The work deserves to be remembered.”
“Thank you.” The words come out steadier than I feel. “I’m hoping to change that.”
* * *
That evening, after the twins are in bed and Piper has retreated to the couch with a book, I sit at the small table with my portable toolkit spread out in front of me and I start to work.
The muscle memory is still there, buried under months without regular bench work but not forgotten.
My hands remember how to hold the pliers, how to gauge the temperature of heated metal, how to coax a design from imagination into reality.
The first few attempts are clumsy. I’m out of practice, and the makeshift setup isn’t ideal but by midnight I’ve produced a rough prototype of the piece I’m envisioning for Valentina, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, I feel like myself.
Not Pietro’s wife. Not the Grimaldi daughter-in-law. Not the woman who gave up her name and her work and her identity for a marriage that turned out to be built on sand.
Just Ariah. The woman who makes beautiful things.
My phone buzzes on the table, and I pick it up expecting a text from Piper asking if I’m coming to bed. It’s not Piper.
It’s Pietro.
I know you asked for space, and I’m trying to respect that.
But I miss the children. I miss hearing their voices.
Is there any way I could see them? I’ll do whatever you want, supervised visits, public places, whatever makes you comfortable. Please. I just want to be their father.
I stare at the message for a long time, my thumb hovering over the screen.
Part of me wants to ignore it, to make him wait the way he made me wait for six years.
Part of me wants to tell him no, to punish him for every missed dinner and every empty chair and every night I fell asleep alone in our bed.
But then I think about Luca asking when Papa is coming to visit, about Lucy drawing pictures of a family with four figures instead of three, about all the ways my children love their father even when their father failed to show up for them.
My anger is mine. It doesn’t belong to them.
We can talk about arrangements, I type back. But this is for the children. Not for us.
His reply comes almost immediately: Of course. Thank you. Whatever you need.
I set the phone down and go back to my work, but my hands are less steady now, and the metal in my grip feels heavier than it did before.