CHAPTER EIGHT
ISLA
She processed the dinner the way she processed everything that mattered: by working.
She went to the site on Friday at seven and stayed until three.
She measured walls that didn’t need measuring. She walked the entry sequence twelve times. She stood in the east bedroom with the morning light coming in and thought about the closet reconfiguration and about what it meant to retrieve space that had been blocked by a wrong decision.
Retrieve, she thought.
She didn’t pursue the metaphor.
She called Josie from the site at ten.
“He told me why,” she said.
Josie was quiet for a moment. “And?”
“He said he was afraid of being enough for me. So he left before I could find out he wasn’t.”
A long silence.
“Oh,” Josie said.
“Yes.”
“That’s—” Josie stopped. “That’s not the story I was expecting.”
“It’s not the story I was carrying.”
“No.” Another pause. “How are you?”
“I’m in the east bedroom standing in morning light that was being blocked by an incorrectly placed closet.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know.” Isla looked at the light on the floor. “I’m — processing. I don’t know what to do with it yet. The information changes things. What things, I don’t know.”
“Does it make it easier?” Josie asked carefully.
Isla thought about that.
“It makes it different,” she said. “Eighteen months I’ve been fighting a sentence.
You were always second. I’ve been fighting it in my work and in my sleep and in every decision I’ve made about how much space I was allowed to take up.
” She paused. “And it turns out the sentence was wrong. Not — not that it didn’t feel true. But it was wrong.”
“You were always first,” Josie said quietly.
“I was so clearly first that it terrified him.”
Josie was very quiet.
“Isla,” she said. “That is—”
“I don’t know what to do with it yet,” Isla said. “I genuinely don’t.”
“You don’t have to do anything with it yet.”
“I know.” She turned from the window. “I’m going to go look at the south wall.”
“Okay,” Josie said. “Come in before five. We have a materials decision.”
She went to look at the south wall.
She stood in front of it for a long time.
He texted that afternoon.
I know last night was a lot. I’m not asking for anything. I just wanted to say thank you for listening.
She read it twice.
She typed: Thank you for finally saying it.
She sent it before she could think better of it.
He replied in three minutes: I should have said it eighteen months ago.
She looked at that.
She typed: Yes. You should have. Then, after a pause: But you said it now. That’s different from not saying it.
A longer pause from him. Then: Is it enough of a difference?
She stared at the phone.
She typed: I don’t know yet. Then: I’m working on it.
She put the phone in her pocket.
She went back to the south wall.
Working on it was the most honest thing she could say.
She was genuinely, actively working on it.
The specific work of deciding whether a person who’d explained their failure clearly and understood it completely and demonstrated by their presence and their patience and their schematics-reading that they’d changed — whether that person was someone she was ready to let back in.
The work was not finished.
But it was underway.
She had dinner with her mother that Sunday.
Her mother, Patricia March, was sixty-two, a retired structural engineer, and the person from whom Isla had inherited the specific combination of precision and stubbornness that characterized most of her major decisions.
Patricia knew about the divorce. Patricia had been careful not to overstate her opinion of Dominic’s decision at the time because she understood that Isla needed to process it without a chorus and she understood that her daughter’s feelings about her marriage were complicated and private.
She was less careful now.
“The Hudson Yards commission,” Patricia said, over the second glass of wine.
“Yes.”
“Ashworth Properties.”
“Yes, Mom.”
“His building.”
“His company’s building. Yes.”
Patricia looked at her with the expression she’d always used for things she considered poorly thought through. “And you took it.”
“Because it’s the right project for where we are as a firm.”
“And also?”
Isla looked at her wine.
“And also,” Isla said, “because I didn’t want to keep choosing my professional life around the fact of my divorce.
Every time I turned down something because it was in his orbit — every commission I avoided, every event I didn’t attend, every Midtown building I walked around — I was making him the center of my map.
I was building my life in relation to him by subtraction. ” She paused. “I was done doing that.”
Patricia was quiet.
“Good,” she said.
Isla looked at her.
“I’ve been waiting for you to be done doing that,” Patricia said. “Since about month four.” She picked up her wine. “He called me, you know. About eight months ago.”
Isla stilled.
“He called you.”
“He asked how you were. I told him I wasn’t going to discuss you with him.” Patricia paused. “But I also told him that you were working. That you were good at your work and you were doing it.” She looked at Isla. “He said: I know. I’ve been following it.”
Isla looked at the table.
“I’ve been following it,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Eight months ago he told you he was following my work.”
“Yes.”
She pressed her fingers to her mouth briefly.
“Mom.”
“I’m not making a case for him,” Patricia said. “I’m giving you complete information.” She paused. “I didn’t like what he did. I want to be clear about that. But I’ve also watched you spend eighteen months being smaller than yourself. And I want to be clear about that too.”
Isla looked at her mother.
“He told me why,” she said.
Patricia was quiet.
“Last Thursday. He said he was afraid of being enough for me.”
Patricia looked at her. Something moved through her expression — not surprise, exactly. Recognition.
“I see,” she said.
“You’re not surprised,” Isla said.
“I suspected something like that,” Patricia said. “Your father had a similar — not the same situation. But I’ve seen what it looks like when a man who isn’t used to being clearly loved makes a bad decision about it.” She paused. “It doesn’t excuse it.”
“No,” Isla said.
“But it changes what you’re forgiving,” Patricia said. “If you get there. You’re not forgiving someone who thought you were second. You’re forgiving someone who thought you were so first that they ran.”
Isla looked at her.
“That’s exactly what Josie said,” she told her mother.
“Josie is very smart,” Patricia said.
They ate.
Later, walking home, Isla thought about the east bedroom and the blocked closet and the forty square feet of space that had always been there waiting to be retrieved.
She thought: I’ve been blocking my own light.
She thought: I know how to fix that.