CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ISLA
The week before the opening.
She was at the studio when she finally said it out loud.
Not to Josie. To herself, which was the harder version.
She was sitting at the worktable late, reviewing the final signage proofs for the penthouse, and she stopped in the middle of page four and put down the proof and said, to the empty studio:
I love him.
Just that.
She sat with it.
She’d been carrying it around for — she wasn’t sure how long. Since the Thursday dinners. Since the schematics. Since he’d called her mother. Since he’d told her you are the most important thing in this building.
Maybe longer.
Maybe always.
She hadn’t said it because saying it changed the terms. Once she said it to herself it became something she was going to have to say to him, eventually, and saying it to him meant she was asking for something in return, and asking for something in return meant being vulnerable in the specific way she’d spent eighteen months reinforcing against.
She sat in the empty studio.
She thought about reinforcement.
She thought about what Josie had said eight months ago: at some point you’re going to have to stop protecting yourself from the possibility that things are complicated.
She thought about what Patricia had said: your job is to make it possible for her to be completely herself.
She thought: my job is to let him.
She picked up her phone.
She texted him: Are you awake?
He replied in thirty seconds: Yes.
She wrote: I need to say something and I don’t want to say it over text.
He wrote: I’m twenty minutes away.
She wrote: Come.
He came.
He knocked at twenty-three minutes past eleven.
She opened the door.
He was in the clothes of someone who’d been home and working — no jacket, slightly informal, the specific quality of a man who’d come without managing his presentation.
She stepped back and let him in.
He stood in her studio and looked at her.
“Say it,” he said.
She looked at him.
“I love you,” she said.
The studio was very quiet.
She kept his gaze.
“I’ve probably loved you for most of the past four years including the eighteen months when I was furious at you for what you did,” she said.
“That was — not a convenient truth. I’ve been working around it.
” She paused. “I’m telling you now because the opening is next week and the project is ending and I don’t want the transition out of this context to happen without you knowing where I actually am. ”
He crossed the studio.
He stopped in front of her.
He said: “I’ve loved you since the second year of our marriage.
I understood it badly and I let the fear of it drive the worst decision of my life.
And I have spent eighteen months understanding it better and building something that deserved to be in the same room as it.
” He held her gaze. “I am not afraid of it anymore.”
She looked at him.
“You’re sure?” she said.
“I’m absolutely sure,” he said.
She reached up and put her hand on his face.
He put his hand over hers.
She said: “Don’t leave again.”
“I’m not leaving,” he said. “I’m staying. That’s what I’m here to do.”
She kissed him.
The studio was quiet and warm and full of the things she’d made.
He held her like something he understood the value of.
She held him back.