CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DOMINIC
He had dinner with Patricia March on a Tuesday in July.
He’d called her four months ago and asked. She’d said: Give me some time. He’d given her some time. She’d called in July and said: Come for dinner Sunday.
He came for dinner Sunday.
She served roast chicken and a bottle of wine that was better than he deserved and she asked him direct questions for three hours.
He answered every one.
She asked about the marriage. He told her what he’d told Isla — the fear, the nostalgia, the specific way he’d used Claire as an avoidance mechanism.
She asked about Claire. He told her what had happened honestly, including the part where he’d been the kind of man who could let six months pass before understanding what he’d done.
She asked about the past eighteen months. He told her about the work — the board restructure, the project decisions, the Thursday dinners, the schematics.
She looked at him over the roast chicken.
“Why the schematics?” she said.
“Because they’re what she makes,” he said. “Because understanding what she makes is how I understand her. She thinks in drawings. Her intelligence exists spatially in a way I’ve always found — extraordinary. I wanted to be inside it properly.”
Patricia looked at him for a long time.
“She was always in love with you,” Patricia said.
He held very still.
“More than you knew,” Patricia said. “She doesn’t — she doesn’t perform love. She inhabits it. You lived with her for four years and I don’t think you saw the full scope of it.”
He looked at the table.
“I know that now,” he said.
“Do you understand what it cost her?”
“Yes,” he said. “She told me.”
Patricia nodded. She picked up her wine.
“I’m going to say something,” she said. “I said it to Isla already. I’ll say it to you.”
He waited.
“She has learned to be smaller than she is,” Patricia said. “Not completely — the work is coming back. But in her daily life, in the space she allows herself, in how much she lets herself want things out loud. She got smaller.” She looked at him. “I don’t want her to stay small.”
“She’s not—” He stopped. “She’s getting bigger again.”
“Yes,” Patricia said. “She is.” She paused.
“I’m telling you because I need you to understand that your job — if you want there to be a job here — isn’t to make her feel safe.
She knows how to feel safe. She built her safety herself.
” She held his gaze. “Your job is to make it possible for her to be completely herself. All of it. The size of her. Do you understand the difference?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I don’t think you did before.”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t.”
Patricia refilled his wine.
“Eat your chicken,” she said. “It’s getting cold.”
He ate his chicken.
After dinner, at the door, Patricia held out her hand.
He shook it.
She said: “Don’t mess it up again.”
“I don’t intend to,” he said.
“Intentions are not plans,” Patricia said. “Plan.”
He went home.
He thought about plans.
He thought about what a plan looked like for the specific situation he was in — not the company, not the board, the specific situation of a woman he’d wronged who was letting him back in slowly and who deserved to have the entry done right.
He thought about the Hudson Yards opening.
The building was scheduled to complete in November. Isla’s work would be done in October. The launch event — the press opening, the institutional preview, the moment the building became public — was mid-November.
He was going to speak at the launch.
He’d been planning to speak at the launch — he always spoke at major project completions. What he was deciding now was what he was going to say.
He opened his laptop.
He started writing.
Not the speech he’d given at every other launch. Something different.
Something that named what had been made.
Not the building.
The person who’d made it.