Chapter Thirteen #2
I made a genuine mistake two weeks later, approving a paint color for the dining room that looked warm and inviting on the sample card and read cold and clinical once it covered an entire wall under the room's specific light.
Ruiz noticed before I did, walking through with his usual afternoon inspection.
"That's not what you wanted," he said, simply, no judgment in it. "I can see it on your face."
"It's wrong. I need to repaint the whole room."
"That's another two days and a few hundred in paint we already bought."
"I know. Do it anyway." I looked at the wall, disappointed in myself but unwilling to let a mistake stand simply because fixing it was inconvenient. "I'd rather spend the money now than have Dot living with a dining room that feels like a doctor's waiting room for the next twenty years."
He didn't argue, and the room got repainted, and something about admitting the error out loud, absorbing the cost without excuse, felt like its own small, necessary practice in exactly the kind of accountability I'd spent thirteen years watching other people avoid.
The budget went wrong twice more in the following month, once when a supplier canceled a linen order two weeks before delivery, once when the actual cost of restoring the original hardwood floors came in nearly double what Dot's contractor had estimated.
I solved both problems myself, late at night, on my own laptop, without a single phone call to anyone whose name carried more weight than mine.
There was one night, close to midnight, staring at a spreadsheet that refused to balance no matter how many times I reordered the line items, when I genuinely doubted whether I could still do this at all.
Thirteen years was a long time to be out of daily practice, whatever quiet consulting I'd done on the side, and the specific exhaustion of running an entire project alone, answerable to no one but myself, hit differently than I remembered it hitting at twenty-two.
I sat at my kitchen table that night, seriously considering calling Marlowe to admit I'd taken on more than I could actually deliver.
I didn't make the call. I closed the laptop instead, slept a few hours, and woke up with a clearer head and a solution to the budget problem that had eluded me the night before.
It wasn't dramatic. Nobody witnessed the doubt or the recovery from it.
But something about surviving that particular night entirely on my own resources mattered more to me than almost any single design decision I made on that project.
Dot found me in the lobby one evening, exhausted, surrounded by fabric samples and a laptop full of spreadsheets, and asked, simply, "What do you think we should do about the breakfast room? I can't decide between the two layouts you sent."
I looked up at her, and something in my chest went warm and a little disbelieving, because it had been so long since anyone had asked me a question like that and actually waited, patiently, genuinely, for my answer.
"I think the layout with the window seats," I said. "People linger longer over breakfast when they have somewhere comfortable to sit."
"Then let's do that."
It was such a small exchange. It felt, in that moment, like the first real thing I'd built entirely for myself in over a decade.
I visited Camille's gallery that same week, needing a break from paint samples and supplier calls, and found her in the middle of installing the spring exhibition she'd fought to keep at full scope despite the lost funding.
The space looked extraordinary, a careful curation of emerging local artists she'd clearly poured herself into completely.
"You did this," I said, walking the length of the main room, genuinely impressed. "All of it, exactly as planned, despite losing your biggest donor."
"Barely. I called in every favor I had left." She looked tired in a way I recognized completely, the specific exhaustion of holding something together through sheer will rather than adequate resources. "How's the inn?"
"Terrifying and wonderful in roughly equal measure. I keep waiting to feel like I don't belong here, and it hasn't happened yet."
"Maybe that's because you do belong here. You always did. You just spent thirteen years somewhere that made it hard to notice." She squeezed my hand, warm and sincere. "I'm glad you're doing this, Nerissa. Whatever happens with Stellan, I'm glad you're doing this for yourself."
I left her gallery that afternoon feeling lighter than I had in weeks, buoyed by watching someone else fight for something entirely her own and win, even against odds that had genuinely threatened to collapse it.
Stellan sent flowers to the inn later that week, an enormous, expensive arrangement that arrived at the front desk with a card that simply read, thinking of you, no pressure, no request. I sent them back the same afternoon, not out of cruelty, but because accepting them, even quietly, even privately, felt like accepting a shortcut back into a life I hadn't finished examining yet.