Chapter 3 #2
She texted Diana Huang: Chronicle researcher called. Asking about separation. I said no comment.
Diana replied in under two minutes: Good. Say nothing to anyone in media. I'll handle if it escalates. Don't let Sebastian's team issue a joint statement without your approval.
Then, because Juliet Farrow was not a woman who sat on a deck and waited for things to happen to her, she picked up her phone and called Sebastian.
He answered on the first ring. "Jules—"
"Did you talk to Patricia Yee's office?"
A pause. She could hear him recalibrating, the slight intake of breath that meant he'd expected a different conversation. "What?"
"A researcher from the Chronicle just called me asking about us taking time apart. Did you or anyone on your team talk to a columnist?"
"No. Absolutely not. I haven't told anyone except Caroline, and she'd rather die than leak."
"Then who's talking?"
"I don't know. I'll find out."
"Don't find out on my behalf. Find out because you should know who on your payroll can't keep their mouth shut.
And Sebastian — don't issue any statements.
Not through your PR people, not through your lawyers, not through anyone.
If you put out a joint statement without my consent I will make this divorce very expensive for you. "
"I wouldn't do that."
"You did a lot of things I thought you wouldn't do."
She hung up before he could answer. Her hands were steady now. The anger was useful — it burned clean, like fuel, and it left no room for the softer thing underneath it that she wasn't ready to name.
#
The laptop was still open on the deck table, the Adobe login screen glowing in the fading light.
Juliet looked at it. Two years. She hadn't opened Illustrator in two years, not since the foundation work had swallowed her calendar and Sebastian had suggested — gently, reasonably, in that way he had of making his preferences sound like observations — that she didn't need to take on freelance clients anymore.
That the foundation needed her full attention.
That her design work would always be there when she was ready to go back to it.
She'd agreed because it was easier than arguing, and because at the time she'd believed that the foundation mattered. That building something together was its own form of creative work. She'd been wrong about that. She'd been wrong about a lot of things.
Her fingers remembered the password before her brain did.
The software loaded slowly on the cottage's Wi-Fi, and while it spun she went inside and found a notebook — one of Alix's, spiral-bound, the kind you buy at a drugstore — and started sketching with a ballpoint pen.
Nothing specific. Shapes. Spatial relationships.
The way a room could hold light if you opened up the right wall.
The way color temperature shifted a mood from clinical to warm.
She'd always been good at this. Before Sebastian, before the foundation, before the wedding that had cost more than most people's houses, Juliet Farrow had been an interior designer with a growing client list and a reputation for spaces that felt both intentional and lived-in.
She'd had a studio in the Mission. Business cards printed on heavy cotton stock. A waitlist.
She'd given it up in increments so small she hadn't noticed until it was gone.
The pen moved. A floor plan took shape — not for any real project, just muscle memory coming back online.
She sketched a living room with a fireplace wall, then erased the fireplace and replaced it with built-in shelving.
Better. She sketched a kitchen with an island, then widened the island and added a waterfall edge.
She was thinking about counter materials when forty minutes had slipped past and Sebastian hadn't entered her mind once.
That was worth something. That was worth a lot.
When Illustrator finally loaded, she opened a blank canvas and stared at it the way she used to — not with anxiety, but with appetite. The white space wasn't empty. It was available.
#
Alix found her at the kitchen table at nine o'clock, laptop open, three pages of sketches spread around her, a glass of wine she'd forgotten to drink going warm beside her elbow.
"You're designing," Alix said.
"I'm remembering how to design."
Alix sat down across from her and picked up one of the sketches. She turned it sideways, then right-side up. "This is a kitchen."
"It's a concept. Nobody's kitchen. I'm just — getting my hand back."
"It's good."
"It's rough."
"It's the first thing you've drawn in two years, Juliet. It's good."
Juliet closed the laptop halfway. The screen cast a blue-white glow across the table, catching the edge of her wine glass. "I'm going to start my consultancy again."
Alix set down the sketch. "Now?"
"Not tomorrow. But soon. I need to figure out the business side — LLC, insurance, a portfolio site. I haven't had a client in two years, so I'm starting from zero. But I'm not going to sit in this cottage and wait for my divorce to define me."
"Nobody said you had to."
"Sebastian said I didn't need to work."
"Sebastian said a lot of things."
Juliet pulled the laptop back open. She'd been thinking about this since the bridge, since the moment the city lights had blurred through her windshield and she'd realized that the woman crying on the Bay Bridge had no career, no income, and no identity outside of a marriage that was ending. That woman was done.
She navigated to the California Secretary of State's website. Business entity registration. LLC filing. The form was straightforward — name, address, registered agent, purpose.
"What are you going to call it?" Alix asked.
Juliet typed it in without hesitating, as if the name had been waiting for her to come back and claim it.
Farrow Interiors, LLC.
Not Lowell. Not Farrow-Lowell. Just Farrow.
She entered her information, used the cottage's address as the principal office, and paid the seventy-dollar filing fee with the personal credit card she'd opened Thursday — the one that had nothing to do with Sebastian's accounts or Sebastian's name or Sebastian's money.
The confirmation page loaded. Your filing has been submitted for processing.
She stared at it for a long time. It wasn't a career.
It wasn't even a business yet — it was a name on a government database and a seventy-dollar charge on a new credit card.
But it was the first thing she'd built for herself in longer than she wanted to admit, and it was hers, and nobody could take it back.
"Farrow Interiors," Alix said, reading over her shoulder. She raised her forgotten wine glass. "I'd hire you."
"You can't afford me."
"I absolutely cannot." Alix grinned. "But I'm still going to tell everyone I know."
Juliet closed the laptop. The cottage was quiet. Through the window she could see the harbor lights reflected on the water, and beyond them, across the dark stretch of the bay, San Francisco glittered like a city that had nothing to do with her anymore.
That wasn't true, and she knew it. The city was full of Sebastian.
Full of their restaurants, their friends, their Sunday mornings at the Ferry Building, the bench in Alta Plaza Park where he'd proposed with a ring she hadn't expected and a speech she'd never forgotten.
The city held all of it, and she'd have to learn to walk through it without flinching.
But that was tomorrow's problem. Tonight she had a cottage, a best friend, a business name, and the steady, stubborn knowledge that Juliet Farrow had existed before Sebastian Lowell and would exist after him.
She picked up her wine and drank it warm.