CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ISLA
December arrived.
The Hudson Yards project was handed over. The penthouse was occupied. The building was alive.
She stood outside it one morning in December and looked at it from the street and felt the specific satisfaction of a completed thing — not finished, because buildings were never finished when people were in them, but complete.
Hers and not hers.
That was how the best work felt.
She had three new commission inquiries from the press coverage. Two of them were exactly the kind of project she’d been too careful to pursue for the past eighteen months. She was going to take both.
She called Josie.
“The Caldwell commission,” she said. “And the Riverside Drive renovation.”
“Yes,” Josie said immediately.
“We’re not too stretched?”
“We will be,” Josie said. “We should be. That’s what capacity means.” She paused. “Isla.”
“What.”
“You’re back,” Josie said.
She stood outside the building in the December cold.
“Yes,” she said. “I am.”
She put her phone in her pocket.
She looked up at the building.
She thought about the east bedroom. The morning light. The forty square feet retrieved from a wrong configuration.
She thought: all of this space. All of it mine.
She went back to work.
Dominic came to the West Village apartment on a Friday in December with wine and a small package.
She looked at the package.
“What is that?” she said.
“Open it,” he said.
She opened it.
Inside was a small framed blueprint — the original schematic for the east bedroom closet configuration, the wrong one, before her reconfiguration. On the back, in his handwriting: What was blocking the light, before you fixed it.
She looked at it.
She looked at him.
“It’s not a romantic gift,” he said. “It’s not that.”
“I know what it is,” she said.
“It’s a record,” he said. “Of the wrong configuration. And that the wrong configuration was removed.”
She held the frame.
She thought about the sentence she’d been fighting for eighteen months. You were always second.
She’d been fighting the wrong sentence.
She’d been first. She’d been so clearly first that the wrongness was his fear, not her worth.
She set the frame on the kitchen shelf.
She turned to him.
“Stay tonight,” she said.
He looked at her.
“Not as a—” She stopped. “Stay. In the way you stay when you’re building something.”
“Yes,” he said.
She nodded.
She went to make tea.
He sat at her kitchen table with his wine and looked at the blueprint on the shelf and felt the specific weight of something that had been wrong for a long time being finally, quietly, correctly placed.