CHAPTER THREE
ISLA
She told Josie about seeing him at the site visit on the walk back to the studio.
Josie listened. She was very good at listening — specifically at the kind of listening that involved hearing what wasn’t being said alongside what was.
“He was there at the site,” Josie said.
“Yes.”
“He claims it was about the light.”
“He didn’t claim anything. He said he wanted to show me the east exposure personally.”
“Which is a claim.”
“Which is a reason that isn’t the real reason,” Isla said. “Yes.”
“And then you called him Mr. Ashworth and left.”
“Yes.”
They walked for half a block.
“How did he look?” Josie asked.
“Don’t.”
“I’m asking practically. Not romantically. I need a baseline.”
Isla pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose. “Thin. Tired. Like someone who’s been working too hard and sleeping too little for an extended period.”
“That’s eighteen months of an unhappy person.”
“Or of a very busy executive.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive,” Josie said. “And you know which one it is.”
Isla said nothing.
“He requested us for the commission,” Josie said. It wasn’t a question.
“Probably.”
“Not probably. Definitely. A project this scale doesn’t come to a firm our size through standard procurement without someone at the top making a specific call.”
“I know.”
“So he made the call knowing you’d see his name on the brief.”
“Yes.”
“That means something.”
“It means he needs an architect,” Isla said.
Josie looked at her sideways.
“Isla.”
“What.”
“At some point,” Josie said carefully, “you’re going to have to stop protecting yourself from the possibility that things are complicated.”
“I protect myself from the possibility of being stupid again,” Isla said. “That’s different.”
“Is it.”
“He left me for his first love,” Isla said. Her voice flat and precise. “That’s not complicated. That’s very clear.”
“He left you,” Josie said. “The second part is — I’m not saying it doesn’t matter. But the reason matters for understanding what actually happened.”
Isla stopped walking.
She turned to look at Josie.
“I know what happened,” she said. “I was there.”
Josie held her gaze. “I know. I’m just saying—don’t close the case before you have all the evidence.”
A cab passed. A pedestrian navigated around them.
“Can we talk about the project?” Isla said.
Josie nodded. “We’re taking it.”
“We’re taking it,” Isla agreed.
She worked late every night that week.
Not on the Hudson Yards proposal specifically — on the thinking that preceded the proposal. The thing she always did before she began: sitting with a space, understanding what it wanted to be before she decided what to make it.
The Phase Three penthouse wanted to feel like arrival.
Rachel had said that. Like they’ve always belonged here.
She’d been turning that over.
The people who bought penthouses at that price point — she knew them, had designed for them, had sat across from them in consultation rooms and asked what home felt like and listened to the answers carefully.
They were people who’d built or inherited or married their way into significant wealth and who were, most of them, searching for the thing that wealth kept promising and never quite delivering: the specific sense that they’d arrived at the version of their life that was actually theirs.
Home as proof of self.
She understood this from the outside now in a way she hadn’t when she’d been inside it.
She’d lived in Dominic’s world for four years. The Upper East Side apartment, the dinners, the weekends in the Hamptons house where his father played golf and his mother arranged flowers and the whole machine of old money ran on its well-oiled track.
She’d been good at it.
She’d also always known, somewhere underneath, that she was a guest in a structure that had been built without her.
That specific feeling — the feeling of being in a beautiful space that wasn’t yours — was what she was building against.
She sketched for three hours.
What she found, at the end of the three hours, was something she hadn’t expected: a design that was warm.
Not the cool minimalism she’d been making for the past eighteen months — the clean, spare work of a person who’d stripped down to load-bearing walls.
This was warm. Textured. The kind of space that held things.
She stared at the sketches for a long time.
She thought: this is what I’ve been waiting to make.
She picked up her phone.
She almost called Dominic.
She put the phone down.
She was not ready for that.
She went to bed and lay in the dark for a long time thinking about what it meant that the first space she’d been genuinely excited about in eighteen months was his building.
She didn’t reach a conclusion.
She went to sleep anyway.
The proposal went in on Monday.
Tuesday, Rachel called: We’d like to proceed. When can we discuss next steps?
Isla said: Thursday.
The Thursday meeting was at the Cross Meridian offices — Ashworth Properties’ main building, Midtown, the building she’d been in hundreds of times over four years of marriage.
She arrived exactly on time.
She was shown to a conference room she didn’t recognize — new, renovated since she’d last been here.
Dominic was at the table.
She sat down across from him.
She opened her portfolio.
“The proposal,” she said. “Page three. I want to talk about the structural approach to the entry sequence—”
“I read it,” he said.
“All of it?”
“Cover to cover,” he said.
She looked at him.
“Then you know I’m proposing to change the entire relationship between the entry space and the main living area,” she said. “That requires structural sign-off that typically comes from—”
“Approved,” he said.
She paused. “You haven’t seen the detailed schematics.”
“I don’t need to.”
She held his gaze.
“That’s not how you run commissions,” she said. “You review every structural change. I’ve watched you do it. You don’t sign off without the detail.”
Something moved through his expression. The specific quality of being seen accurately by someone who knew your habits well enough to call you on them.
“I trust your judgment,” he said.
“Then trust it through the proper approval process,” she said. “I don’t want shortcuts.”
A beat.
“All right,” he said. “Send the schematics to Rachel.”
“I will.” She looked at her portfolio. “Page five. The materials approach — I’m proposing something specific for the east-facing surfaces. Can we discuss it now or would you prefer—”
“Now,” he said.
She talked. He listened.
He was good at this — had always been good at listening to her work, which was one of the things that had made her fall in love with him in the first place. The specific quality of his attention, how it made her feel like everything she said was being received rather than processed.
She didn’t let herself dwell on that.
She was professional. Thorough. She gave him the full picture.
At the end of the meeting she stood and gathered her portfolio.
He said: “Isla.”
She paused.
He said: “Thank you for taking the commission.”
She looked at him.
“It’s the right project,” she said. “That’s why I took it.”
She left.
In the elevator she stood with her portfolio in her arms and felt the very specific sensation of a person holding their ground with significant effort.
She was holding her ground.
That was the thing she’d learned to do in eighteen months of putting herself back together.
She was not going to let him see it cost anything.
Even though it cost everything.