The Wife He Replaced With His Past (The Wives They Replaced #4)

CHAPTER ONE

ISLA

The email arrived on a Thursday and Isla March read it twice before she understood what was being asked of her.

Ashworth Properties. Hudson Yards Residential Phase Three. Full interior architecture commission. Timeline: twelve months. Budget: open.

Open budget.

That was the thing that made her keep reading when every other instinct said close the laptop and go make coffee and never think about this again.

An open budget on a project this scale meant complete creative control.

It meant the kind of work she’d been building toward for eight years — work that would change what people understood her firm to be capable of.

Not the high-end residential renovations she’d spent the past eighteen months using as a life raft.

Something that would define what came next.

Ashworth Properties.

She looked at the name for a long time.

Then she forwarded it to Josie.

Josie called in forty seconds, which was faster than usual.

“You saw it,” Josie said.

“I saw it.”

“And?”

“And I’m staring at my coffee trying to decide whether the project is big enough to override my personal preferences.”

“Isla.” Josie’s voice was direct, the way it always was when she was about to say something Isla wasn’t going to find comfortable. “Your personal preferences are your divorce. The project is your career.”

“That’s a reductive framing.”

“It’s an accurate framing. You’ve been doing residential renovations for eighteen months. Good work, solid billing, nothing that puts you in the room where the real work happens. This—” A pause. “This puts you in the room.”

Isla looked at the email.

Ashworth Properties.

Dominic’s company. His grandfather’s name, his father’s build, his own decade of turning it into something that now touched forty percent of Manhattan’s luxury residential market.

Her ex-husband’s company.

The man she hadn’t spoken to in eighteen months. The man who had ended their four-year marriage by leaving her for Claire Beaumont, his first love, the woman he’d spent a decade being half in love with from a distance and had finally been given the chance to choose.

He’d chosen her.

Isla had moved out on a Tuesday.

She hadn’t cried until Thursday.

“The brief doesn’t name a contact,” she said.

“It names a project director,” Josie said. “A woman named Rachel Park — no relation to me — who manages the residential division’s third-party commissions.”

“Not him.”

“Not him,” Josie said. “As far as I can tell, this is a procurement decision made at the division level.” She paused. “He may not even know it went to us.”

“He would know,” Isla said. “He approves commissions at this scale. He always did.”

“Maybe he does know.”

Isla was quiet.

“That’s either better or worse,” Isla said.

“I think it’s better,” Josie said. “If he wanted to never see you again, he would have told Rachel Park to pull the brief before it went out.”

“Or he did it deliberately. As—” Isla stopped. She couldn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t know what word went at the end of it. As a bid. As an apology. As a way to see her again. All of those were uncomfortable.

“Isla.” Josie’s voice softened slightly — the register she used for the things that mattered. “We’ve been waiting for a project like this for eighteen months. You know that.”

“Yes.”

“And?”

She looked at the open budget. She looked at the Hudson Yards address. She thought about what she could do with twelve months and an open budget in a space that size.

She thought about who she’d been before the marriage ended.

She thought about who she was now, which was someone who had learned to take up less space and was slowly, deliberately, learning to take it back.

“I want to see the site first,” she said. “Before I decide.”

“I’ll book it,” Josie said.

“If it’s right—”

“If it’s right, we’re taking it,” Josie said. “Yes.”

“Josie.”

“What.”

“If I see him there—”

“Then you see him,” Josie said. “You’ve survived harder things.”

She had.

She hung up.

She turned back to the email.

She looked at the commission brief for a long time — the parameters, the scope, the specific creative possibility of it — and she thought about the woman she’d been four years ago who would have taken this without a second’s hesitation, who’d moved through her professional life with the specific confidence of someone who knew what she was building.

She’d lost that woman somewhere in the last two years of her marriage.

She was finding her again, piece by piece, in eighteen months of careful reconstruction.

This project was the next piece.

She typed back: March & Park Interiors is interested in discussing the commission. We’d like to schedule a site visit before formal proposal submission.

She hit send.

Then she closed her laptop and went to make coffee and stood in the kitchen of the studio apartment she’d rented after the divorce — small, Tribeca, all windows, entirely hers — and she breathed through the specific sensation of making a decision before she was ready for it.

She was good at this.

She’d been practicing for eighteen months.

The site visit was three days later.

Hudson Yards, Tower Three. The building was complete in structure and raw in everything else — fifty floors of blank walls and unfinished floors and the specific smell of a space that hadn’t been lived in yet.

This was what she loved.

Not the finished thing. The before. The moment when a space was still all possibility.

She walked through the penthouse floor with Rachel Park, the project director, who was competent and brisk and had excellent instincts about light. They talked for forty minutes. Isla asked the questions she always asked: What do the clients want to feel? Not look. Feel.

Rachel said: Arrived. Like they’ve always belonged here.

Isla thought: I know exactly how to build that.

She was almost certain she was taking the project when she turned from the east window and found Rachel looking past her shoulder.

She turned.

Dominic was standing in the doorway.

Her chest did the thing it did — the specific thing she’d been working on, the involuntary response to seeing him in a room that her body hadn’t yet stopped performing no matter what her mind had decided.

She breathed.

She looked at him.

Eighteen months.

He’d lost weight he could afford to lose and was wearing it badly — the specific thinness of someone who’d been running on work and not enough else. His face was — she refused to do the inventory. She’d done the inventory a thousand times in her sleep and it didn’t help anything.

“Isla,” he said.

Not Ms. March. Not her name with the professional register. Just her name.

“Mr. Ashworth,” she said.

She heard Josie in her head: that’s going to land like a blade.

She watched it land.

He didn’t flinch visibly, but the specific quality of his stillness changed — tightened, reorganized.

“I wanted to show you the east exposure personally,” he said. “The light changes in the afternoon—”

“Rachel walked me through it,” Isla said.

A beat.

“Of course,” he said.

Rachel was watching them with the measured discomfort of a professional who understood exactly what she was standing in the middle of and was deciding whether to speak or become briefly invisible.

She chose invisible. She made a note on her clipboard.

Isla turned back to the window.

She looked at the view. The Hudson, the afternoon light, the specific quality of the city from this height that always made her feel like she was standing at the edge of something she could actually see the shape of.

“The brief says open budget,” she said. Still facing the window.

“Yes.” His voice behind her.

“That’s unusual for a commission of this size.”

“It’s an unusual project.”

She turned around.

“Why us?” she said. Direct. The way she addressed everything that mattered.

He held her gaze.

“Because you’re the best,” he said. “And this project deserves the best.”

She looked at him.

She waited for the second reason — the one underneath that one. The real one.

He didn’t offer it.

She turned back to the window.

“We’ll submit a proposal next week,” she said.

She left without looking at him again.

In the elevator, going down, she pressed her hands flat against the cold steel wall and looked at the floor numbers descending and breathed.

She was taking the project.

She was going to build something extraordinary in his building.

She was going to do it in spite of every reason not to.

That was who she was becoming.