Chapter Four
Lucy
I woke on the floor of my old studio with a dust sheet over my legs, a dog on my feet, and silk stuck to my back like wet paper.
For a second I didn’t know where I was. Then the band saw started up downstairs, a long rising whine through the floorboards, and I knew exactly. Owen works Sundays. Owen works every day God sends, and some He doesn’t.
Juniper lifted her head and thumped her tail twice against the boards. Her face said she’d had a wonderful night, thank you, and when was breakfast.
“I know,” I told her. “I didn’t bring any. I’m a terrible mother.”
The north window had gone white with morning.
Everything in the room I’d left draped last night was still draped, except the drafting table, which stood in the middle of the floor with its sheet in a heap at its feet like a dress somebody had stepped out of.
The six notebooks were stacked on the stool where I’d put them. The pencil was still in the tray.
I hadn’t touched it. I’d wanted to. I’d stood there at one in the morning with my hand over it like it was a stove burner.
Somebody knocked, two knuckles, polite.
“It’s open,” I said. “Obviously.”
Owen came in sideways with a paper cup of coffee in one hand and a folded pile of flannel in the other. He looked at me, and the dress, and the dog, and his face did the thing it’s done since he was five: it took it all in and filed it and said nothing.
“Your car’s parked on my good lumber,” he said.
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine. It’s cedar. It’s been through worse.” He held out the flannel. “Sweats are clean. Shirt’s mostly clean. Coffee’s from the gas station, so don’t get your hopes up.”
I took all of it. The cup was so hot I had to shift it hand to hand. “Rhys call you?”
“Four times.”
“Did you pick up?”
“I was busy.” He crouched and scratched Juniper under the chin, and she groaned like an old door. “Kibble’s in the truck. I keep a bag for her. Don’t ask me why.”
“Because you love her.”
“Because she eats my sandwiches off the bench if I don’t.” He stood up. At the door he stopped with his hand on the frame and didn’t turn around. “He’s gonna come up, Luce.”
“I told him not to.”
“You told him not to come last night.” Now he turned. “You know him. He’s already sitting in the truck, deciding what he’s going to say.”
* * *
I heard Rhys before I saw him. He took the outside stairs two at a time, the way he takes everything, and the fourth step creaked, and the ninth, and then he was in the doorway with a duffel bag over one shoulder and a twenty-pound sack of dog food under his arm.
He stopped.
I don’t know what he’d expected. Me crying on a dust sheet, maybe.
I was sitting at the drafting table in Owen’s sweatpants rolled three times at the waist and a flannel shirt that smelled like linseed oil, drinking gas-station coffee with my bare feet hooked on the stool rung.
My hair was still half up from last night.
There were bobby pins all over the floor.
“Hi,” he said.
“I asked you not to come.”
“You said not to come tonight. It’s tomorrow.
” He tried the grin. It didn’t catch on anything, so he put the dog food down instead.
Juniper went to him at once, her whole back end swinging, and he knelt and let her wash his jaw, and for a moment it was very hard to look at them.
“Hey, Juni-girl. Hey. You kidnap your mom?”
“She came willingly.”
“I brought your stuff.” He set the duffel on the stool next to me. “Clothes. Toothbrush. Your phone charger. The good one, not the one that only works upside down.”
I unzipped it. On top were a pair of running shoes I’d bought in 2021 and worn exactly once, a black cocktail dress, and a sweater his mother had knitted me the first Christmas we were married, which I have never, not once, worn outside the house because it has a moose on it.
I zipped it back up.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Is it wrong? I grabbed what was on top.”
“It’s fine.”
He stood in the middle of the floor with his hands in his jacket pockets and looked around at the draped shapes, the north window, the stained plank floor. He hadn’t been up here since 2017. I watched him not remember it.
“So this is still here,” he said.
“I pay for it.”
“You—what, still? Every month?”
“Six hundred dollars.”
“Why?”
I didn’t answer that. I didn’t know how to answer it without saying something I couldn’t take back.
He blew out a breath and dragged his hand down his face. He looked tired, and he looked like he hadn’t slept, and underneath both of those he looked happy, and that was the worst part. The happy was sitting right on the surface of him like oil on water, and he couldn’t get it to sink.
“Okay. I’m just going to say it. I had the call with Dev at ten.
Summit’s in, Luce. They want Sterling House.
Term sheet this week. It’s real.” He shook his head, almost laughing.
“And I wanted to tell you last night, and I came up to the house, and you were gone, and Jonah called me an idiot, which, fine, he does that. But nobody will tell me what I did.”
I set the coffee down on the table very carefully.
“You toasted Margot,” I said.
He stared at me.
“At our anniversary. On our dock. In front of three hundred people. You said you wouldn’t have survived one year without the person who keeps your whole world running, and I stepped forward, Rhys. I put down my clipboard. And you turned around and said her name.”
“That—” He actually laughed. Not meanly. Out of relief, I think, that it was something so small. “That’s what this is? The toast?”
“And then you remembered me. Second. As a joke.”
“It wasn’t a joke, it was a—come on. It was a toast, Luce. Margot was building the company while you were picking napkins.”
The saw downstairs stopped.
It stopped right then, like even the building wanted to hear what came next. In the quiet I heard Juniper’s tags clink as she lay down. I heard my own heartbeat, which was very slow and very loud.
“I didn’t pick the napkins, Rhys,” I said. “I painted them. And I drew every room you’ve ever slept in.”
He opened his mouth. Nothing came out of it.
“Three hundred linen napkins. A pine bough in the corner of every one, in fabric paint, because I wanted people to take them home and I knew they wouldn’t take them home if they were plain. That’s what I was doing in April while you ate cereal and asked me if we could just get the cards printed.”
“I know you did the napkins.”
“You didn’t. You didn’t know. You said what are they, Luce, on a microphone.
” My voice didn’t shake. I was proud of that later.
“The great room. The library. The boot room. The powder room with the green tile. Every bed at Glenbrook, every bed at the other three. I drew them. I stood in the mud with the contractor and I drew them again when he got them wrong. And last night a man at the bottom of the terrace steps told his friend Margot did the look.”
“Nobody thinks that.”
“He thinks that. And now there’s a video of you telling three hundred people none of it exists without her.”
Rhys looked at the floor. At the bobby pins. When he looked up, his jaw had set, and I recognized the shape of it: it was the face he makes at lenders who say no. He wasn’t being cruel. He was being cornered, and he only knows one way out of a corner, which is to sell.
“Luce, I love you. You know I love you. But Margot’s earned it. Ten years she’s been in that office at six a.m. She’s done every lender meeting, every permit fight, every payroll. She doesn’t get invited to things. She doesn’t have a life. The least I can do is stand up once and say thank you.”
“Has she,” I said.
It wasn’t a question. He heard that it wasn’t.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I don’t know what she’s earned. Neither do you. You don’t read what she hands you, Rhys. You sign it.”
He took a step back as if I’d pushed him. Then his eyes went past me, to the stool, to the stack of black notebooks, and his whole body eased. I watched it happen. He’d found something he could fix.
“Is that what you’re worried about? The notebooks?” He came over and put his hand flat on top of the stack, like a man patting a dog. “Babe, you don’t have to haul these around. They’re safe. They’re all in the archive.”
I went cold from the scalp down.
“What archive?”
“The design archive. On the company drive. Margot had them scanned—God, a couple years ago. Twenty-three? Every page. Insurance thing. She said if the house ever burned, we’d lose the whole brand in one night, and she was right, so.” He shrugged, pleased. “They’re safe. Everything’s backed up.”
I remembered, then. A week in the fall of 2023 when the shelves in my study had stood empty and I’d thought I was losing my mind, and then the notebooks had come back all at once, in a cardboard box, in the wrong order.
Number nine after number fourteen. A little yellow sticky note on the lid: Thanks so much! —M’s office.
I’d put them back in order. I hadn’t asked. I hadn’t thought there was anything to ask.
“She scanned my notebooks,” I said.
“For you. To protect them.”
“And who can open the archive?”
He hesitated. Just a flicker. “I mean—the team. Whoever needs it.”
I got up.
I went to the corner where I’d left the flat file, and I pulled open the bottom drawer, which stuck, the way it always stuck, and I took out one sheet of good paper. Twenty-four by thirty-six, heavy, cold-pressed, a little yellow at the edges from nine years of waiting in the dark.
Rhys watched me carry it to the drafting table. “Luce. Come home. We’ll talk about all of it. Dev’s coming up Thursday for dinner, and I want—I need you there, you’re so good with these guys—”
I laid the sheet on the table and smoothed it flat with both palms. I took four pushpins out of the tray and pressed one into each corner, and each one went into the old cork with a small soft sound, like a door being closed very gently.
The paper was white. There wasn’t a single line on it.
“Lucy,” he said. “How long are you going to stay up here?”
I didn’t turn around. I looked at the blank sheet, and the north light fell across it, clean and even and cold, the best light there is for seeing what’s really there.
“I’m staying until I remember what I draw when nobody’s using it.”