Chapter Seven — Grace
The signage walkthrough that morning had already put me in a strange mood before Elodie ever entered the picture.
Fontaine's counterpart at the Raleigh property, a fastidious operations director named Perrin, had rejected three rounds of proofs over what he kept calling "font personality," a phrase that meant something different every time he used it, and by the time I sat down at the café to wait for him to arrive fifteen minutes late, I had a folder of rejected mockups and a headache that had nothing to do with anyone's marriage.
I'd texted Magnus on the drive over, half-venting, half-joking.
Perrin rejected round three because the font didn't have enough "personality.
" I don't know what that means and I don't think he does either.
He'd texted back a string of increasingly absurd font suggestions, Comic Sans, Papyrus, something called Curlz, each one worse than the last, and I was still smiling at my phone when I walked into the café.
I ran into Elodie at the little café near my studio, the one with the good almond croissants, while I was still waiting on Perrin.
Elodie was two tables over with a book she wasn't reading, her coffee gone cold in front of her, and when she saw me, something in her face did the same strange flicker I'd noticed at the gala.
"Grace. Hi." She closed the book, marking her place with a napkin. "How's the studio?"
"Busy. Good busy. We just landed the Ashford account, actually, five properties now."
"That's wonderful." She meant it, I think, but there was something distracted underneath the warmth, her eyes moving to the window and back like she was checking for an exit.
She looked at me for a second too long and then said, almost involuntarily, like the sentence had escaped before she could stop it, "Magnus really does seem devoted to you. "
It was such an odd thing to say, unprompted, out of nowhere, that I laughed. "He is. Where's this coming from?"
Elodie's expression did something I couldn't name. Worse, somehow, for my answer instead of better, like I'd confirmed something she'd been hoping wasn't true. "Nothing. Just an observation. You two have been married a long time."
"Twelve years."
"That's rare, these days."
"I guess it is." I studied her for a moment. "Is everything okay, Elodie? You seem distracted."
"Yes. Sorry. Long week." She smiled in a way that didn't reach anything behind it, the corners of her mouth arranged into a smile without any of the substance.
"Alden's been stressed about a property downtown, and it's been bleeding into everything at home.
It was good running into you, though. I hope the Ashford project goes well. "
"Thank you. Take care of yourself, Elodie. Seriously."
"You too, Grace." She said it with an odd emphasis, like the sentence was carrying more than its plain meaning, and gathered her things a beat too quickly, as if she'd stayed exactly as long as she could manage.
Perrin arrived a few minutes later, apologizing for traffic, a coffee stain already blooming on his shirt cuff that he kept glancing down at with visible irritation, and the walkthrough that followed was its own small ordeal.
He rejected the fourth round of proofs too, this time because the brass finish on the sample plaque photographed "too yellow" under the lobby's specific lighting, a problem I suspected had more to do with his phone's camera settings than with the actual metal, though I didn't say so.
"What if we did a matte bronze instead," I offered, pulling up an alternate sample on my tablet. "Warmer than brass, but it won't read gold under fluorescents."
He considered it for a long moment, tilting his head like the decision required an act of real physical effort. "Send me three finishes by Thursday."
"You'll have them by Wednesday."
"Why Wednesday if I said Thursday?"
"Because you'll change your mind about something else by Thursday morning, and I'd rather have a buffer day than lose the whole week to your revision cycle."
Perrin actually laughed at that, the first genuine reaction I'd gotten out of him in three meetings. "That's fair. That's happened before."
"It's happened every single time, Perrin."
"Wednesday, then." He gathered his things, still smiling slightly. "You're better at this than the last firm we used, for what it's worth. They just did whatever I asked without pushing back. You push back. It's annoying and also exactly what I need."
I took the compliment, backhanded as it was, and drove back to the studio feeling slightly better about the day than I had that morning, one small professional win tucked in among the general chaos of everything else.
The moment with Elodie stayed lodged somewhere in the back of my mind through all of it, an itch I couldn't quite locate to scratch, the word devoted turning over and over between finish samples and font personalities.
I ran the rest of the walkthrough on autopilot, half my brain still on her face, the way she'd said the word like she'd been testing it, checking to see if it still fit something she'd once believed.
That night, at home, Magnus was entirely himself.
We made dinner together, him butchering the garlic while I did everything else, the two of us bumping shoulders at the stove the way we always did, the kitchen radio playing something from the nineties that he insisted on singing along to badly.
He talked about a vacation idea, somewhere with water and no cell service, maybe over the holidays once the Ashford rollout settled, and reached for me automatically every time he passed behind my chair, a hand on my shoulder, a kiss at my temple, nothing performed, nothing new, nothing that read as anything but the ordinary physical vocabulary of a marriage that had been doing this for years.
"Where's this water-and-no-cell-service place, exactly?" I asked, chopping vegetables while he butchered the garlic beside me.
"I was thinking somewhere in the Caribbean. Somewhere with an overwater bungalow, because I've always wanted to stay in one of those and pretend I'm the kind of person who does that regularly."
"You'd hate it after two days. You check your phone every four minutes."
"I would not."
"You checked it during our wedding reception, Magnus."
"That was one time, and it was a work emergency."
"It was Garrett asking if you'd seen the game."
"That's a kind of emergency." He grinned, unrepentant, and I threw a piece of bell pepper at him, which he caught and ate, which felt like exactly the kind of small, ridiculous domestic moment that made up the actual texture of a marriage, more than any of the grand gestures ever did.
"Fine. No overwater bungalow. What's your counteroffer?"
"Somewhere with actual walls and a kitchen, so you don't starve when the resort restaurant closes at nine for no reason."
"That's oddly specific for a hypothetical vacation."
"I've done research. I take vacation planning seriously, unlike some people who just want to float on the ocean and call it a plan."
"Floating on the ocean is a perfectly good plan."
"It's a plan with no backup, Magnus. That's the whole issue."
"Brynn says hi, by the way," Magnus mentioned, setting the table. "Ran into her in the parking garage. She asked how you were doing."
"That's nice of her. Tell her hi back."
"She also asked how long we'd been married, which was a weirdly specific thing to ask in a parking garage." He shrugged it off, clearly not thinking much of it. "I think she's doing some project on employee retention and family stability or something. Corporate stuff."
I kept that comment in the back of my mind without remarking on it, another small oddity added to a growing pile I didn't yet have a shape for, and mentioned Elodie's odd comment instead, half-joking, testing it out loud the way you do with something that doesn't quite sit right.
"She told me you seem devoted to me. Like it was a diagnosis.
Like she was double-checking something."
Magnus laughed, easy, not missing a beat as he stirred the sauce. "I am devoted to you. Is that news to somebody?"
"No. It was just a weird thing to say. And she's been weird every time I've seen her lately, honestly. At the gala too."
"People go through stuff. Maybe things aren't great with Alden and she's projecting.
" He turned from the stove and kissed me, quick and warm, tasting like the wine he'd been sipping while cooking.
"You want to worry about somebody, worry about Marcus.
Tiffany told me he's been living on gas station coffee for a week trying to source paper stock. "
"I'm going to buy him an actual meal tomorrow."
"There's my wife. Solving everyone's problems except her own sleep schedule."
I did buy Marcus lunch the next day, dragging him bodily away from his desk to the sandwich place two doors down, and made him sit through an actual meal instead of eating standing up over the light table the way he'd been doing all week.
"You know the paper stock crisis is basically solved," he said, halfway through a sandwich he was eating like he hadn't seen food in days.
"I found a domestic supplier who can match the oyster shell finish within a shade.
I just haven't had a chance to tell you because every time I try to bring it up, something else catches fire. "
"Tell me now. We're contractually obligated to discuss work during this sandwich."
"Is that in my employment contract?"
"It's in the unwritten one. The one where I buy you lunch and you tell me good news in exchange."
He walked me through the new vendor's samples on his phone, genuinely good work, close enough to the original spec that Corinne would likely never notice the switch, and I felt the specific relief of a problem actually resolving instead of just being managed, one less thing pulling at the edges of a week that already felt overfull.
"You didn't have to buy me lunch for this, by the way," Marcus said, folding his sandwich wrapper into a neat square out of some nervous habit. "I would have found the vendor either way."
"I know. I wanted to. You've been running on fumes for a week and I noticed."
"I appreciate it. Genuinely." He hesitated, then added, "You're a good boss, Grace. I don't think I say that enough."
"You've never said that at all, actually."
"Well. Now I have. Don't let it go to your head."
"Too late. Already framing it."
I let it go, because there was no reason not to, because twelve years of a good marriage does not get undone by one woman's strange face over a croissant and one colleague's odd question in a parking garage, because the man in front of me was laughing about paper stock and singing badly to a song from 1997 and had no visible evidence of anything wrong beneath the surface of him.
I told myself I was reading into nothing.
I was, in fact, reading into exactly the right thing, and simply didn't have enough information yet to know it.