CHAPTER TWO
DOMINIC
He’d been standing in that penthouse since seven in the morning.
Not because the site visit was scheduled — it wasn’t, not for him. Rachel had the walkthrough. He’d approved the brief three months ago and told himself he wouldn’t be there.
He’d been there since seven.
He’d watched the city come up in the east-window light and thought about the last time he’d stood in a room that felt right and known what had made it feel that way.
Isla made rooms feel right.
It was her specific gift — the thing that went beyond the professional skill, beyond the trained eye and the architectural vocabulary.
She understood that a space was a psychological proposition.
That the way light fell across a floor at three in the afternoon could make the difference between a person feeling held by their home or merely occupying it.
He’d been in two apartments in the past eighteen months. Neither had felt like anything.
He deserved that.
He was clear on what he deserved.
He’d left his marriage on a Thursday in April.
He could reconstruct every hour of it — had reconstructed it approximately three hundred times in eighteen months, the way you reconstruct a decision you made at the wrong intersection of certainty and fear.
Claire had come back from Paris in February.
He’d seen her at a dinner — mutual friends, the kind of social collision that felt like fate when you were susceptible to that kind of thinking.
She’d looked exactly as she had at twenty-six when she’d left the first time: certain, composed, a little out of reach.
He’d talked to her for forty minutes and felt the specific pull of a decade of wondering.
He’d told himself it was nothing.
He’d gone home to Isla that night and watched her sleep and thought: I am the luckiest person in this building.
And then three weeks later Claire had called and asked to have coffee and he’d said yes.
That was the decision.
Not leaving. Not the divorce filing. Not the conversation with Isla that had been the worst hour of his adult life. The decision was saying yes to coffee, knowing what he was susceptible to, knowing what he had at home.
He’d said yes because some part of him had been asking the question for ten years. What would have happened if Claire hadn’t left for Paris? Who would he have been? Was Isla —
He hadn’t let himself finish the question.
He’d said yes to coffee.
And from there it had moved the way things move when you’ve already made the real choice and are just working out the sequence.
He’d told Isla in April.
She’d gone very still.
She’d asked: is this real? Do you love her?
He’d said: I think I need to find out.
She’d looked at him for a very long time.
She’d said: then go find out.
She’d said it without tears. Without anger. That was the part that had haunted him most — she hadn’t been angry. She’d been — certain. Like she’d known something he didn’t and was watching him prove it.
He hadn’t known what she’d known.
He did now.
Claire had ended it in October.
Six months. They’d been together for six months, which was long enough to understand that the thing he’d been chasing was not a person but a feeling — the specific feeling of himself at twenty-eight, before the company became what it became, before the weight of his grandfather’s name and his father’s expectations and his own relentless forward motion had compressed him into someone who moved through his life very effectively and felt almost none of it.
Claire was extraordinary. She was brilliant and direct and she’d looked at him in October with an expression he recognized as kindness and said: I think I came back to find out if I’d made a mistake. And I think the mistake I made was coming back.
She’d said: You’ve been here with me for six months and I’ve felt you missing someone else for all of them. I think you know who.
He’d sat in the silence of that and found he couldn’t argue.
Claire left.
He’d been alone since October.
Twelve months of understanding, with increasing clarity, what he’d done.
He’d heard Isla’s proposal was going to come in.
Not from Rachel — Rachel ran the division cleanly, without involving him in small decisions. From a contact at a competing firm who mentioned, casually, that March & Park had turned down two other significant commissions in the past year.
She’d been turning down the big work.
He’d known why. He’d done the math.
He’d gone to Rachel and said: For the Hudson Yards Phase Three commission — approach March & Park Interiors first.
Rachel had looked at him for one beat too long.
He’d said: They’re the best firm for this scope. That’s the reason.
It was the reason.
It was also not the only reason.
He was done pretending those were different categories.
She’d called him Mr. Ashworth and he’d felt it in his sternum.
He’d been Dominic to her for four years.
He’d been Dom, on the good mornings when she was in the kitchen making coffee and her guard was down and the light was coming through the east window of their Upper East Side apartment the way it came through that window in a way he’d never seen in any other room.
Mr. Ashworth.
She was telling him something. He heard it.
He drove home and stood in his current apartment — the Tribeca place he’d moved to after Claire, which was good and right-sized and had excellent bones and felt like absolutely nothing — and he thought about the penthouse.
He thought about what she would do with it.
He already knew, in the abstract. He’d been watching her work for eighteen months — quietly, from a distance, through the publications and the industry press and the occasional social feed she didn’t know he followed.
She’d been doing smaller work than she should have been doing.
Sharp, precise, brilliant work — but compressed. Under her actual capacity.
She’d been giving herself less room.
That was the thing he’d done to her. Not just the divorce.
The specific narrowing he’d watched happen in the last year of their marriage when he’d been so deep in the company and so far from the thing he was actually afraid of that he’d stopped seeing her as she was and started seeing her as a constant — reliable, present, known — which was the worst thing you could do to someone you loved.
He’d taken her for granted in ways he hadn’t understood he was doing until she was gone.
Then he’d done something worse.
He’d left her for the feeling he’d had before he knew how to love anyone properly.
He opened his laptop.
He looked at the Phase Three commission brief.
He thought: make it right. Not her — the space. Make it possible for her to do the work she should be doing.
He wrote Rachel a note expanding the brief.
Open budget. Complete creative latitude. No approval requirement for design decisions under a certain scope. Her firm, her vision, her project.
He hit send.
He thought: it’s not enough.
He thought: it’s a start.