CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ISLA
Summer arrived.
The project deepened.
She was in the penthouse almost every day now — the installation phase, the precise and exacting work of making the space become what the drawings had always known it was.
She had a team of four, excellent people, and the weeks had a rhythm that she found productive in the specific way of work that has enough weight to hold you fully.
Dominic was present in the building. Less than before — she thought he was managing his presence deliberately, which she appreciated and which she also found, quietly, evidence of something.
He was learning her.
He was learning, in real time, in the lived context of working in the same building, how to be near her without consuming her space. She watched him figure it out and found it — she wouldn’t call it endearing, that wasn’t the register. Found it real.
He was doing the work. Not dramatically. Just daily, consistently, in the ordinary way.
They had dinner on Thursdays.
It had become Thursday, which neither of them had formally declared. It had just become Thursday and neither of them had suggested changing it.
The dinners were good.
She’d remembered, over the course of the Thursday dinners, the specific quality of conversation with him that she’d always found irreplaceable.
He was — interested. Genuinely, comprehensively interested in the things she was thinking about, the work she was doing, the problems she was solving.
He listened in the way of someone who was actually building a model in their mind rather than waiting for their turn to speak.
She’d missed that.
She was being careful not to miss it too loudly.
“You look different,” Josie said.
They were at the site on a Wednesday, reviewing the threshold installation.
“Different how,” Isla said.
“Lighter.” Josie looked at the threshold detail. “Not happier necessarily. Lighter. Like something you were carrying has been redistributed.”
“That’s an architectural metaphor.”
“I am an architect,” Josie said. “I like architectural metaphors.”
Isla looked at the threshold.
The light source was installed — concealed exactly as she’d specified, creating the warmth at the entry point that made the body register arrival before the mind caught up.
“We’re having dinner on Thursdays,” Isla said.
“I know,” Josie said. “You’ve been having dinner on Thursdays for six weeks.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“The only person you didn’t tell is yourself,” Josie said mildly.
Isla looked at the threshold light.
“I’m being careful,” she said.
“I know.”
“He’s been—” She stopped. “He’s been patient in a way that isn’t passive. Do you know what I mean? He’s not just waiting. He’s — present. But without pressure.”
Josie was quiet.
“He reads your schematics,” she said. “He leaves you alone on the site when you need to think. He had dinner with your mother.”
Isla looked at her. “How do you know he had dinner with my mother?”
“Your mother told me,” Josie said. “We have a text chain.”
“You have a text chain with my mother.”
“We’ve had a text chain with your mother for two years,” Josie said. “She’s very easy to text with.” She paused. “She said he called her to ask if she’d be willing to see him. She said yes.”
Isla looked at the threshold.
He’d called her mother.
He’d asked to see her mother.
She thought about that.
She thought about the specific choice of it — not the grand gesture, not the public thing. The quiet, ordinary, significant thing of going to the person who loved Isla most and asking to be seen.
“He knows what matters,” Josie said simply.
“He always knew what mattered,” Isla said. “He just — didn’t know how to trust himself with it.”
“And now?”
She looked at the threshold light.
“Now I think he does,” she said.
She pressed the concealed switch.
The light came on.