Chapter 10 Darcy
"You're punctual. I like that." She led me through the main hall, past a wedding setup half assembled for the weekend, gesturing at details as we walked, original tin ceiling, restored heart pine floors, a loading dock converted into a covered courtyard. "Show me what you've got."
I'd spent the two days beforehand pulling together everything I could.
The old portfolio was still at the house, but I'd had the foresight, the night I first found it, to photograph the reference letters and a handful of the event photos on my phone before I put it back behind the linens, some instinct even then telling me I might need proof of myself that didn't live inside the Westcott house.
I laid the printouts across a folding table in Irene's office, the Hendricks wedding, the corporate gala I'd rebuilt in two hours, the letters of reference, and walked her through each one while she listened without interrupting, occasionally making a small sound of approval that told me nothing about whether I was actually impressing her.
"This is old work," she said finally, tapping the Hendricks photo. "What have you done recently?"
I told her the truth, that recently had mostly meant unpaid Foundation events for my husband's family, twelve years of logistics without an invoice attached to any of it.
Irene didn't flinch or soften her face into sympathy the way people sometimes did when I said things like that.
She nodded and made a note beside the dates on my reference letter.
"Tell me about the hardest one you pulled off," she said, leaning back in her chair, arms crossed, the posture of someone settling in for the real interview rather than the performance of one. "Not the biggest. The hardest."
I thought about it honestly, sorting through a decade of galas and benefits before settling on one, a Foundation dinner three years earlier where the keynote speaker had canceled the morning of and I'd spent six hours rebuilding the entire program around a last-minute panel discussion, all while fielding calls from Claudette about napkin colors while I was still trying to reach a replacement speaker.
I told Irene the whole of it, the frantic calls, the borrowed microphone stands, the way I'd managed to make the evening look effortlessly planned by the time two hundred guests arrived.
She listened with real focus this time, none of the noncommittal sounds from before.
"That's a good answer," she said, when I finished. "Most people give me the biggest disaster because it's the most dramatic story. You gave me the one that actually tested whether you could think under pressure. That tells me something."
"So you've been doing the work. Just not getting paid or credited for it.
" She took off her reading glasses and looked at me directly.
"That happens to more women in this business than you'd think.
I've had three coordinators in the last decade come to me straight out of exactly that situation, running a household's entire social calendar for free and calling it a hobby because nobody offered them a rate card.
I'm not interested in your marriage, Darcy.
I'm interested in whether you can run a two-hundred-person wedding without calling me every twenty minutes. Can you?"
"Yes."
"Which event would you need me for?" I asked. I took my notebook out of my bag, ready to discuss the schedule and scope before we talked about a fee.
"Two hundred and ten guests, family wants a full sit-down dinner and a band that needs load-in access before the ceremony even starts, and the mother of the bride has already emailed me four times about linen colors.
" She said it flatly, no complaint in it, just an inventory.
"You'll spend half your time managing her expectations and the other half making sure the actual logistics don't fall apart underneath all that noise. Sound familiar?"
"More than you'd guess."
"The coordinator we had booked took a corporate job," Irene continued.
"The wedding is in eleven weeks. It would be a paid trial, one event with a written scope.
If we work well together, we can discuss something longer.
" She named the fee and what it covered, including preparation, the rehearsal, and the wedding day.
I wrote it down and asked when payment was due.
"A deposit when we sign and the balance after the event," she said. "Could you start Monday?"
"I can start Monday."
"Good." She stood, taking a draft contract from the printer. "I don't do a lot of hand-holding here, Darcy. I expect problems solved, not reported. If that's not how you work, better we find out now."
"That's exactly how I work." I said it and meant it, and felt something settle in me as I read the first page of the contract that had nothing to do with Tyler or the Westcotts or twelve years of being managed instead of hired.
She asked, almost as an afterthought, whether I had reliable transportation and whether Saturdays were a problem, and I answered both plainly, no hedging, no mention of anything happening in the rest of my life that might make either question complicated.
It felt strange, answering questions about my own availability without consulting anyone else first, and I caught myself mid-sentence, surprised by how unfamiliar that particular kind of ease had become.
Irene walked me to the door and pointed out the courtyard gate.
"Deliveries come through there. On Monday I'll show you where we keep the access codes and emergency contacts.
You'll have the information you need, and I expect you to use it.
" She checked the time. "Nine o'clock. Comfortable shoes.
We'll be moving furniture for part of the morning.
" I left with the contract in my bag and a start time in my calendar.
I called Maxine from the car, unable to hold the news in until I got back to her house. "I got it. A trial, but a real one. Paid."
"I knew it. I told you." I could hear her grinning through the phone, the pride she took in being right about people. "What's she like?"
"Terrifying. Wonderful. I think I like her more than I've liked most people I've worked for in years.
" I pulled out of the lot, the folder of old photographs still sitting on the passenger seat, and felt something shift loose in my chest that had been tight for longer than I'd let myself notice.
"I have to find something to wear that isn't a gala dress. "
"We'll go shopping. This weekend. My treat, because I'm insufferably proud of you.
" She hung up laughing, and I drove toward the apartment listings with the radio on for the first time in weeks, something upbeat and a little ridiculous that I sang along to badly, alone, at a red light, for no reason except that I felt, for the length of one song, entirely like myself.
I spent that afternoon looking at apartments, working from a list Judith's office had helped me put together, modest one-bedrooms in walkable neighborhoods, nothing that required explaining myself to anyone.
I'd made a list of my own the night before, sitting at Maxine's kitchen table with a legal pad, trying to figure out what actually mattered to me now that I was the only person whose preferences counted.
Not the things that had mattered when I was furnishing rooms for other people's approval, statement pieces, the right kind of understated luxury that photographed well for the Foundation newsletter.
Just practical things. Light in the mornings.
A kitchen big enough to actually cook in instead of stage.
Somewhere I could hear my own footsteps without wondering if they were too loud for someone else's quiet.
The agent, a cheerful young man who clearly did this all day and had learned to read people quickly, asked at the first apartment what I was looking for, and I found myself unable to answer in any of the usual practical terms, square footage or proximity to work, and said instead, almost surprising myself, "somewhere that already feels like mine before I've moved anything in.
" He nodded like that was a completely reasonable answer, which it apparently was, professionally speaking, and adjusted the rest of the showings accordingly.
The first two felt wrong in ways I couldn't quite articulate to the patient agent showing me around, too similar to rooms I'd decorated for other people over the years, too easy to imagine filling with someone else's preferences instead of my own.
The third one I saw, a converted rowhouse near the Fan with a bay window and floors that creaked in a way I found more charming than annoying, felt right almost immediately, small and unimpressive and entirely mine to decide about.
I signed the lease application that afternoon without calling anyone first, not Tyler, not my mother, not even Maxine, and sat in my car in front of the building afterward feeling the strange, private satisfaction of having made a significant choice about my own life without a single other person weighing in on it.
That evening I opened the message Tyler had sent the previous Wednesday, while I was still at Maxine's, sitting on the porch with the day's decisions settling slowly into something that felt more solid than frightening.
I had seen his name in the preview and left it unread, bracing myself for another version of the trip offer, another attempt to solve this with a gesture large enough to make the actual problem disappear.
It wasn't that. I read it twice, sitting very still on the porch step, the weight of each sentence settling somewhere I hadn't expected.
He named the exact thing, the shrinking, the unpaid staff comment, the joke about tips that I remembered with an unpleasant clarity even now.
He didn't ask me to come back. He didn't ask when we could talk.
He'd simply told me he'd seen it, all of it, and left the message there without demanding I do anything with what he'd handed me.
Maxine found me still holding the phone a few minutes later. "What happened? You look strange."
"Tyler apologized. Really apologized. Not the kind where he's actually asking me to forgive him and calling it an apology." I turned the phone toward her, and she read it, her expression softening slightly by the end.
"That's a real one," she said, handing the phone back. "Doesn't mean anything's actually different yet. But it's real."
"I know." I set the phone face down on the step beside me. "I don't know what to do with it."
"Do you want to write back?"
"Not tonight. Maybe not for a while." I looked out at Maxine's small backyard, the string lights she'd hung along the fence catching the last of the evening.
"I think I'm afraid that if I answer too fast, it becomes about managing his feelings again.
Making sure he knows I noticed, making sure he doesn't feel like it went nowhere.
I don't want to do that reflex anymore, even for something that felt real. "
"Then don't. He can sit with not knowing for a while. It won't kill him." Maxine bumped her shoulder gently against mine. "You're allowed to just receive something good without immediately handing something back in return."
Maxine leaned back on her hands. "You got a job today. You found an apartment. That's plenty for one Tuesday. Let the rest wait."
I let it wait, and that night, lying in the guest room with my phone charging on the nightstand instead of clutched in my hand, I thought about how strange it was that the day's smallest victory, a bay window in a rowhouse I'd picked for myself, felt like it belonged to me more completely than twelve years inside a marriage where I'd rarely made a decision without considering the family first, because there had always been someone else's preferences arriving first.