7. Elena
— ? —
Elena
He left his toolbox.
A.V.
I should leave it by the door. Text him to pick it up. Maintain the careful distance I’ve been cultivating since I walked out of Vale Manor in the rain.
Instead, I open it.
Tools. A hammer, screwdrivers, a level, a measuring tape. A small jar of wood screws. A packet of picture-hanging hardware.
And underneath everything, tucked into a plastic ziplock bag like something precious, a photograph.
My breath catches.
It’s from the rooftop bar. Four years ago, the night we met.
I’m sitting on one of those uncomfortable wrought-iron chairs with my head tilted against his shoulder, laughing at something I don’t remember.
Adrian is looking at the camera, Sophie took this picture, I think, but his eyes are soft, unfocused, like he’s not really seeing the lens at all.
Like he’s still thinking about whatever I just said.
I turn the photo over.
The night everything started. I’m not ready for it to end.
***
I remember that night in pieces.
Sophie and I were celebrating my first real furniture sale, a custom bookshelf for a woman in Brooklyn who’d found my work through Instagram. Two thousand dollars, more money than I’d ever made from a single piece, and Sophie insisted we go somewhere fancy to mark the occasion.
“The rooftop bar at the Waldorf,” she said, already booking the Uber. “I read about it in New York Magazine. Very swanky. Very ‘I’m a successful artisan now.’”
“I’m not a successful artisan. I sold one bookshelf.”
“You sold one bookshelf so far. Tonight, we manifest.”
The bar was exactly as swanky as promised, velvet couches, Edison bulbs, a cocktail menu with drinks that cost more than my hourly rate at the restaurant where I was waitressing to pay rent. Sophie ordered two of the most expensive ones and told the bartender to put them on her tab.
“To your future empire,” she said, raising her glass. “To Elena Vasquez, furniture designer extraordinaire. May your drawer pulls always be honeybees.”
We clinked glasses. I took a sip of something involving lavender and gin. And then I looked across the room and saw him.
He was standing by the window, alone, holding a whiskey he wasn’t drinking.
Tall, dark-haired, wearing a suit that fit like it had been custom-made for his exact body.
He was looking at his phone, and he looked…
tired. Not bored, not distracted, just tired, like he’d been carrying something heavy for a very long time.
“Don’t even think about it,” Sophie said, following my gaze. “That’s Adrian Vale. The billionaire. His face is literally on the cover of Forbes this month.”
“I wasn’t thinking about anything.”
“You were thinking about whether he’d notice you if you walked over there.”
“I was not…”
“He would. Notice you, I mean.” Sophie stirred her drink. “But guys like that don’t date furniture designers from Queens. They date models and heiresses and women who went to finishing school in Switzerland.”
“Good thing I’m not interested, then.”
But I kept looking.
And at some point, he looked back.
***
He crossed the room like he was walking through water, slowly, deliberately, like each step required conscious thought.
“I’m sorry,” he said when he reached our table. “I know this is forward. But I had to come over here and tell you…” He stopped. Shook his head. “I don’t know yet. I don’t know what I had to tell you. But I think I need to find out.”
Sophie made a noise that might have been a laugh or a gasp. I just stared at him.
“That’s the worst opening line I’ve ever heard,” I said.
“I know.” He smiled, and his whole face changed, less tired, more alive. “I’m usually better at this. I think you short-circuited something.”
“Should I be flattered or concerned?”
“Both? Neither?” He ran a hand through his hair. “Can I buy you a drink? Or sit down? Or just stand here awkwardly until you tell me to leave?”
“You can sit down,” I said. “But I’m keeping my current drink. It was expensive.”
He sat.
Sophie, bless her, invented a sudden need to visit the restroom and didn’t come back for forty-five minutes.
***
We talked until 3 a.m.
About furniture, at first, he seemed genuinely interested in the bookshelf, asked questions about wood grain and joinery that suggested he’d done some reading before approaching me, and then about other things.
His company, which he’d taken over from his father five years ago and was trying to modernize.
My grandmother’s bees, and how I’d learned to love the smell of beeswax and honey before I loved anything else.
The way the city looked from rooftops at night, all those lights like earthbound stars.
At some point, I realized Sophie had left completely, a text on my phone said You’re welcome. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, and that I was alone with a billionaire who was looking at me like I was the only person in Manhattan.
“I should go,” I said at 2:47 a.m. “I have a meeting with a client tomorrow. Today. In six hours.”
“Can I see you again?”
“I don’t even know your name. I mean, I know your name, Sophie told me, but you didn’t actually introduce yourself.”
He extended his hand. “Adrian Vale.”
I took it. “Elena Vasquez.”
“Elena.” He said it slowly, like he was tasting it. “When can I see you again?”
“You’re very persistent.”
“I’m very interested.”
I gave him my number. He called me the next morning at 8 a.m., before my meeting, just to say good morning.
And then he called again that night, and the night after that, and three months later he proposed with his grandmother’s ring on that same rooftop, and I said yes without hesitation because I’d never felt so seen in my entire life.
I don’t know when that changed.
I don’t know when “seen” became “invisible” and “interested” became “distracted” and all those late-night conversations became silence across a dinner table while his phone buzzed and buzzed and buzzed.
But standing in my terrible apartment with this photograph in my hands, I remember what it felt like before.
I remember what we were supposed to be.
***
The email arrives at noon.
From: Adrian Vale To: Elena Vasquez Subject: December 10th
Elena…
I checked your calendar. (I know, I’m sorry, but I needed to make sure.) Your showcase is December 10th at the Metropolitan Design Center.
I’m not coming. You asked me to stay away, and I’m trying to respect that.
But I wanted you to know that I finally looked at your console table.
Really looked at it, not just glanced in passing.
The joinery is incredible. The way the grain flows across the drawer face, how you matched the figure in the wood, it must have taken you weeks to find pieces that worked together that way.
And the honeybee pull. I know it’s for your grandmother. I know she meant everything to you. And I know I never asked about her, never asked about the bees or the summers you spent at her farm or why you hum sometimes when you’re working and don’t realize you’re doing it.
I should have asked. I should have noticed.
Your console table is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. It deserves to be in that showcase. You deserve to be celebrated.
I’m sorry it took me so long to say this.
A
I read the email three times. Then I close my laptop and go back to work.
***
The second knock comes at 2 a.m.
This time I don’t grab the hammer. I just open the door.
Adrian is standing there with takeout bags from Lao Zhou, the dumpling place in Flushing that I made him drive to three times during our first month of dating because their soup dumplings were the best I’d ever had.
“It’s an hour away,” I say.
“Fifty-three minutes, if you don’t hit traffic.”
“It’s two in the morning. There’s no traffic.”
“Forty-seven minutes, then.” He holds up the bags. “They’re still hot. I had them put extra vinegar on the side, the way you like.”
I should close the door. I should maintain boundaries. I should remember that soup dumplings don’t erase months of being invisible in my own marriage.
I step aside.
***
We eat at my tiny table, the one I built myself from scraps when I first moved in. He doesn’t comment on the wobbly leg or the mismatched chairs. He just eats his dumplings and passes me the vinegar and doesn’t look at his phone once.
“Thank you for the email,” I say finally.
“I meant every word.”
“I know.” I dip a dumpling, watch the vinegar swirl into the soy sauce. “That’s what makes this hard.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you were lying, if you were some smooth-talking cheater trying to manipulate me back, it would be easy. I could hate you and move on. But you’re not lying. You’re just…” I search for the word. “Late.”
He sets down his chopsticks. “You said you didn’t need my proof. You needed me present.”
“I remember.”
“You were right.” He looks at me across the table, and his eyes are the same eyes that looked at me on that rooftop four years ago, soft, focused, like I’m the only person in any room.
“I wasn’t there. I was so busy trying to keep everything running that I forgot why I was running it in the first place. ”
“Why were you running it?”
“So I could build a life worth having. So I could deserve someone like you.” He shakes his head. “But then I got you, and I stopped. I stopped deserving you. I stopped trying.”
“Adrian…”
“I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m just asking you to let me try again. Not with proof. Not with money. Just…” He gestures at the takeout containers, the tiny table, the leaking ceiling I know is going to start dripping again any day now. “With this. Being here. Being present.”
I don’t know what to say.
So I pick up another dumpling, and we eat in silence, and when he leaves at 3:30 a.m., I don’t ask him to stay.
But I don’t tell him not to come back.
***
At 4:47 a.m., my phone buzzes.
Unknown number. Not Adrian’s, I know his, even if it’s blocked.
The message is a screenshot. Instagram, from an account I don’t recognize.
A photo of Camille, hand on her stomach, looking down at a visible baby bump. The caption reads:
14 weeks today. So grateful for this blessing, and for the father who’s been there from the beginning. @adrianvale
I stare at the screen.
Fourteen weeks.
I open the calendar app. Count backward from today.
Fourteen weeks ago was September.
September, when Camille was still married to Rick. September, when she was living in Stamford. September, which was a full month before she moved into Vale Manor, sobbing about her divorce and claiming she had nothing.
If she’s fourteen weeks pregnant, the baby was conceived before she even arrived.
Which means either Adrian was sleeping with my sister while she was still married and living an hour away…
Or the timeline doesn’t work at all.