Chapter Twenty-One — Grace
The coffee ritual with Alden had started almost by accident, a single apologetic meetup after the mixer that turned into something neither of us had quite planned to keep doing, every couple of weeks since, an odd friendship that had grown out of guilt on his end and gratitude on mine.
"I keep waiting for this to feel strange," Alden admitted once, a few weeks into the pattern. "Getting coffee with my friend's estranged wife. But it doesn't, really. I think I just like knowing you as an actual person instead of a story Magnus told at dinner."
"I like knowing you too. Even though the circumstances are strange."
"Strange origin story. Good friendship, though, I think."
"Does Elodie mind? The two of us getting coffee this regularly."
"She thinks it's good for both of us, actually. She said something about how healing sometimes needs weirder shapes than people expect, which sounded like something from a book, so I assume it was."
"Tell her I said that's oddly wise for a stolen quote."
"I'll pass it along. She'll be thrilled to be caught."
We'd started trading small updates about our lives beyond the obvious subject too, Alden mentioning a property deal that had finally closed after months of wrangling, me telling him about a client who wanted an entire wedding suite themed around a couple's shared love of astronomy, constellations worked into the calligraphy in a way that had taken three revisions to get right without looking gimmicky.
"You actually enjoy this," Alden said, surprised, listening to me describe the astronomy suite. "The problem-solving part, I mean. Not just the finished product."
"It's my favorite part, honestly. Anyone can execute a good idea once you've found it. Finding it is the actual work."
"I never thought about design that way. I thought it was just taste."
"Taste is maybe ten percent of it. The rest is just stubbornly refusing to accept the first three ideas that don't quite work."
It was during one of these regular coffees, the two of us meeting at the same café where Elodie had once told me Magnus seemed devoted to me, a detail neither of us commented on but that I suspected we'd both noticed, that Alden mentioned it almost by accident.
"Magnus came and told us," he said, stirring his coffee slowly.
"About a month back. Corrected the whole story, said what he'd told us about Singapore and the acquisition wasn't true, said he'd made you responsible for his own fear.
Garrett tried to laugh it off and Magnus didn't let him.
Dale looked like someone had pulled a rug out from under him.
He told me afterward he'd been carrying around this idea of you for years without ever meeting you more than that one time at the charity thing, just based on what Magnus had said. "
I hadn't known any of it. He'd never mentioned it, not once, in any of our practical conversations about the house or the accounts, not even the day we sat at that table for two hours sorting through paperwork.
"Why didn't he tell me?" I asked, half to myself, though I already knew part of the answer, having asked him the same question directly a few weeks back.
"I asked him that," Alden said. "He said it wasn't for you. Said he wasn't doing it to get credit, that if he told you about it in the same breath as apologizing to you directly, it would just look like another move in trying to win you back."
I sat with that for a long moment, stirring my own coffee without drinking it.
A year ago, I might have expected any correction he made to arrive with an announcement, evidence presented for my consideration, a case built for reconciliation, the kind of gesture designed to be witnessed.
This one had happened quietly, in a room I wasn't in, for no audience except the men who'd needed to hear the truth corrected.
He hadn't used it as leverage. He hadn't mentioned it to make himself look better in a negotiation I hadn't known we were having.
"How's Elodie?" I asked, changing the subject slightly, because I'd been meaning to ask for weeks and kept forgetting.
"Better, actually. I think all of this made her see how much guilt she'd been carrying that wasn't entirely hers to carry. She feels like she should have told you sooner too."
"Tell her I'm not angry with her. I'm glad she finally did."
"I will."
I ran into Elodie herself a few days later, at the grocery store of all places, both of us reaching for the same brand of coffee, and the encounter felt entirely different from the strained café meetings of months before.
"Grace. I've been meaning to call you, actually.
" Elodie looked lighter than I'd seen her in a year, some old tension gone from around her eyes.
"I wanted to tell you myself, not through Alden.
I'm sorry it took me as long as it did to say something.
I kept telling myself it wasn't my place, and I think that was mostly just fear talking. "
"I understand why you hesitated. I'm not holding it against you."
"I appreciate that. I really do." She hesitated, then added, "For what it's worth, I always thought you two were good together.
Watching this whole thing play out, I kept hoping the version of Magnus at those dinners wasn't the real one.
I'm glad it turned out there was a real one worth hoping for. "
I confirmed our fourth hire that week at the studio, an operations coordinator named Delphine who would let me finally stop personally checking every proof that left the building, a genuine relief after months of doing the work of three people.
Her first week nearly went sideways when a vendor shipped the wrong paper weight for the Charleston reorder, and I watched her catch the error herself, on her own initiative, before it ever reached my desk, calling the vendor directly and negotiating a rush replacement without once asking me to intervene.
"I would have looped you in if I couldn't fix it," she said afterward, a little uncertain about whether she'd overstepped.
"You didn't need to fix it and loop me in. You just needed to fix it. That's exactly what I hired you for."
Delphine turned out to be exactly the kind of hire that changes how a small business runs, quietly competent in ways that let everyone else do their jobs better.
Within a month she'd reorganized our entire vendor contact system, color-coded by property and turnaround time, a small thing that saved us collectively hours every week that we'd been losing to searching through old email threads.
Priscilla started referring to her, half-joking, as the studio's secret weapon, and I found I agreed, watching the production side of the business run with a smoothness it had never quite had before.
We celebrated the smoother system with an impromptu Friday lunch, the whole team crowded around the big table with takeout, Marcus insisting on a toast to Delphine's color-coded folders like they were a genuine achievement worth marking.
"To not losing another shipment to a mislabeled email thread," Marcus said, raising his paper cup of soda with mock solemnity.
"To Delphine, our secret weapon," Priscilla added.
"I'm just organized," Delphine said, clearly a little embarrassed by the attention. "It's not a personality trait, it's a filing system."
"It's absolutely a personality trait," Tiffany said. "Some of us are chaos goblins and some of us alphabetize. You're clearly the latter, and we are all better for it."
"I'm going to put 'chaos goblin' on my next performance review," Marcus said. "Self-assessment: accurate and thriving."
"Please don't actually write that," I said, laughing despite myself.
"Too late. Already drafting it in my head."
The lunch stretched longer than any of us meant it to, and I sat there at the end of the table watching a team I'd built, actually built, functioning without me having to hold every piece of it together myself, and felt something settle in my chest that had nothing to do with Magnus at all.
My independent arc, if I wanted to call it that, was no longer a reaction to Magnus.
It had become its own thing, solid enough to stand without the crisis that started it, and I found myself, watching Delphine set up her workstation on her first day, feeling something close to contentment that had nothing to do with anyone but myself.
Tiffany noticed it too. "You seem different lately," she said, the two of us reviewing invoices one evening after everyone else had gone home. "Not happier, exactly. Steadier."
"I think I finally know what my business actually looks like when I build it for myself instead of building it around someone else's schedule.
I look at the studio some mornings and I don't recognize it as the same place I started at my kitchen table.
And I don't mean that as a sad thing. I mean it as the opposite. "
"You should be proud of that regardless of what happens with Magnus."
"I am. It took me a while to let myself be, though. I kept waiting for the pride to feel like betraying the marriage somehow, like being proud of what I built alone meant admitting the marriage had been holding me back. It doesn't mean that. It just means I built something."
"Do you think you'll go back to him?"
I thought about the question for a long time before answering, longer than felt entirely comfortable. "I don't know yet. I think I need to see if the person he's becoming right now is who he actually is, or just who he is while he's trying to win me back. Those aren't always the same person."
"That's smart."
"It's also exhausting."
"Most smart things are." Tiffany closed the ledger and looked at me. "For what it's worth, Grace, whatever happens with Magnus, I think you've built something here that's entirely yours now. Nobody can take that away, no matter what you decide."
"Thank you for saying that. I think I needed to hear it from someone who isn't him."
"That's literally my job as your best friend. Saying true things he can't say without it sounding self-serving."
"You're very good at your job."
"I know. I don't even charge extra." She started gathering her things, then paused at the door. "You're going to be okay, Grace. Whatever you decide. I just wanted to say that part too, since we were on a roll."
"Have I said thank you for all of this? For letting me take over your guest room for months, for not getting sick of hearing about my marriage, for just being here."
"You've said it about a hundred times. You don't need to keep saying it.
That's what the room is for. That's what I'm for.
" She smiled. "Also you've been an excellent guest, for the record.
Better than my cousin who stayed for a week and left towels on the floor like the bathroom owed him something. "
"Low bar."
"The lowest bar. You've cleared it easily."
"I'll miss this, honestly. Whenever I do finally move out for good."
"You better visit constantly. I didn't sign up to lose my roommate entirely, just to gain back my guest room."
"Deal. Standing Sunday dinners, at minimum."
"Now that's a bar I can respect."
I thought about that on the drive home, past the house we used to share, its porch light on the way it always was, a habit Magnus had apparently kept even with no one there to come home to it, and understood that whatever happened between us going forward, I wasn't interested in shrinking back into the version of myself who'd once checked his calendar before her own, and if reconciliation ever happened, it would have to happen with the woman I was becoming, not the one I'd been.