Chapter Five — Grace
"We got it," I said. "Tiffany, we got it."
She screamed loud enough that I had to hold the phone away from my ear, and then she was in the studio twenty minutes later with a bottle of prosecco she'd apparently kept in her office fridge for exactly this occasion, still in her running shoes because she'd left a workout class early.
"This is the biggest thing we've ever landed," I said, still slightly in shock, staring at the contract terms spread across my monitor.
"Three properties initially, with an option for two more next year if the first phase goes well.
Corinne said our proposal was the strongest of the five they reviewed. "
"You won it," Tiffany said, popping the cork with a towel wrapped around the neck of the bottle like she'd seen someone do in a movie once.
"You. Not the studio, not luck. You put together a proposal that made a room full of hospitality executives choose a studio that didn't exist five years ago over three firms with twenty years of history each. "
"I still can't believe Corinne actually pushed for us over Hargrove and Associates. They've done half the luxury hotels on the East Coast."
"Hargrove and Associates probably phoned in their pitch because they assumed they had it locked. You didn't have that luxury, so you actually tried."
"I need to figure out the production schedule around Magnus's Q3 expansion push," I said, already pulling up my calendar, "because he's going to be in Denver and Phoenix a lot for the West Coast planning, and if I'm also traveling for client walkthroughs, we need someone reliable home to handle the mail and the dog-sitter and—"
"Grace." Tiffany set her glass down hard enough that it clinked against the counter. "You won it. Maybe figure out what it means for you before you figure out what it means for Magnus's Q3."
"That's fair. I just do the math automatically at this point."
"I've noticed. It's a little alarming, honestly, how automatic it is."
"Is it that obvious?"
"Only to someone who's watched you do it for eight years straight."
I laughed it off, the way I always laughed off things that got too close to something I didn't examine too closely, and went back to the spreadsheet, mapping the production calendar against a life that had two schedules braided into it so tightly I'd stopped being able to tell where mine started.
That night I told Magnus over dinner, and his reaction erased any doubt I might have carried about how he'd take it.
He was on his feet before I'd even finished the sentence, pulling a bottle of champagne from the back of the fridge that I hadn't known was there, apparently purchased weeks ago on the chance this exact moment would arrive.
"You did it," he said, kissing my forehead, my cheek, laughing into my hair while I tried to keep holding my wine glass steady. "God, Grace. Three properties. Do you know what this means?"
"It means a lot of very stressful production weeks."
"It means you built something that a hundred-year-old hotel group looked at and decided they wanted, over people who've been doing this since before you were born.
" He poured two glasses and handed me one, his eyes bright in a way that made my chest ache with how much I loved him.
"I might need to hire someone else. Full-time, not contract.
Priscilla can't handle five properties' worth of production alone once she starts. "
"Then hire someone else." He set his glass down and took both my hands in his, serious now underneath the excitement.
"You've spent enough years making your life fit around mine, Grace.
Every trip I've taken, every stretch where the company needed more of me than it should have, you were the one holding everything else together so I didn't have to think about it.
Build the thing you actually want. I mean that. "
I heard it as generosity, the words landing exactly the way he meant them to, or so I believed. I heard a man who'd watched me shrink my ambitions to accommodate his travel schedule for over a decade finally telling me to stop, finally handing me permission I hadn't known I'd been waiting on.
What I didn't hear, because I had no reason to listen for it, was the particular unease underneath his voice, a note I would only recognize much later for what it actually was.
A guilt he wasn't naming, sitting right there in the same sentence as his pride.
A man toasting his wife's success while somewhere in the back of his mind a different version of this exact conversation was already playing on a loop, one where he'd told other people that marrying young had cost him the freedom to take his own risks, and here was Grace, finally taking one of her own in front of him, and some ugly, quiet part of him didn't know what to do with the discomfort that created.
We stayed up late that night, talking through logistics, staffing, the studio's lease and whether we'd need a bigger space sooner than planned, Magnus asking real questions, engaged in a way that felt like partnership.
We celebrated properly that weekend, a dinner at the Italian place downtown where we'd had our first anniversary, a tradition we kept more out of nostalgia than any real belief in the food, which had gotten worse over the years while the prices had only gone up.
Magnus ordered the same overpriced bottle of wine he always ordered there, a small ritual neither of us ever discussed out loud, and raised his glass across the table.
"To Sable and Ink," he said. "To my wife, who apparently builds things a hundred-year-old company decides it can't live without."
"To Murphy Freight Solutions," I said back, "and its owner, who once told me a delivery truck was, and I quote, 'basically a spaceship if you think about the logistics of it,' and somehow made me agree with him."
"It is basically a spaceship."
"It is a truck, Magnus."
"A truck that defies time zones and coordinates hundreds of moving parts to deliver a package to a stranger's porch by a specific hour. That's a small miracle happening constantly and nobody appreciates it."
"You're describing a truck like it's the moon landing."
"I contain multitudes." He reached across the table for my hand, his thumb moving over my knuckles the way it always did, an unconscious gesture I'd stopped noticing until its absence, months later, made me miss it more than almost anything else. "I'm proud of you. I don't think I say that enough."
"You say it plenty."
"I could say it more." He was quiet for a moment, turning his wine glass by the stem. "Do you ever think about how far we've come from the apartment with the radiator that only worked in the bathroom?"
"Constantly. Usually when I'm cold in some other, less charming way."
"We used to sit in that bathroom just to be warm. That's a genuinely insane way to have lived, in retrospect."
"We were twenty-four and broke. Everything was a little insane."
"I liked it, though. Being broke together. It felt like we were building toward something, even when we had no idea what it would actually look like." He squeezed my hand. "I like this better, obviously. But I don't think I'd trade out that year even if I could."
"Neither would I," I said, and meant it, the two of us sitting there a moment in the specific glow of a couple who'd built something real out of very little, exactly the way it felt that night, and exactly the way it would feel to remember it later, after everything else had changed.
Priscilla's interview happened that Friday, in the small conference room we'd converted from what used to be a supply closet, and I nearly talked myself out of hiring her twice during the hour we spent together, intimidated by a portfolio that included work for two hotel chains I'd only ever dreamed of pitching.
"Why leave a firm that size for something this small?" I asked her, genuinely curious.
"Because everything I touch there gets filtered through six layers of brand approval before it ever reaches a client.
I want to actually build something instead of polishing someone else's vision for the fortieth time.
" She looked around the cramped little room, at the paint samples taped haphazardly to one wall, at Marcus visible through the glass door, hunched over what looked like a paper cut emergency.
"Also, I looked up your Ashford win. That's not a small thing, landing that as an independent studio. "
I hired her on the spot, a decision I second-guessed for exactly one night before Priscilla showed up Monday morning with a binder already organized by property, timeline, and vendor, and I understood within the first hour that I'd made the right call.
Her first week overlapped with a minor crisis of my own making, a mislabeled shipment of embossing plates that arrived at the wrong property entirely, and I watched her handle the fallout with a calm I hadn't quite expected from someone three days into a new job, on the phone with the shipping company for twenty minutes without once raising her voice, then turning to me afterward with a plan already sketched out on a legal pad.
"I redirected it through the Charlotte hub," she said. "We'll have it at the right property by Thursday instead of losing the week entirely."
"How did you even know Charlotte had a hub that could reroute it?"
"I used to handle logistics coordination at my old firm before I moved into design proper. Old habits."
"That's an absurdly useful skill to have accidentally hired alongside the design talent."
"I contain multitudes too," she said, echoing Magnus's line from the restaurant without knowing she was doing it, and I laughed harder than the joke probably deserved, mostly out of relief that I'd found someone who could hold pieces of the business I hadn't known I needed held.
That night, telling Magnus about it over dinner, he listened with the specific attention he always gave to stories about the studio, asking follow-up questions that showed he was actually tracking the details instead of just waiting for his turn to talk.
"Sounds like you didn't just hire a designer," he said. "You hired an operations person who happens to also be a designer."
"I got lucky."
"You got good at interviewing. There's a difference." He topped off my wine, unprompted. "You should give yourself credit for building a team that can catch things like that. Most people would've panicked and called the printer themselves."
"You're very generous with the compliments tonight."
"I mean every one of them. I don't hand them out just to hand them out." He set the bottle down and looked at me properly, the way he did sometimes when he wanted a moment to actually register instead of sliding past. "I like watching you build something. I don't think I say that plainly enough."
"You say it plenty."
"Maybe. I could still say it more."
I fell asleep with my head on his chest, his heartbeat steady under my ear, and I thought: this is a good night. I thought: I am lucky. I had no idea any of what I was feeling was about to become evidence in a case I didn't yet know I'd need to build.