Chapter 2
ISABELLE
Douglas showed up on a Wednesday without calling first, which was how she knew it was really him and not some grown-up version who'd learned manners in the years between.
She was in the garden, on her knees beside the stone wall she'd been meaning to replant for two seasons.
The roses along the south side had gone leggy and blind, all wood and no bloom, and she'd spent the morning cutting them back hard enough that the neighbors would think she was killing them.
Her gloves were filthy. Her hair was up in something that had started as a bun and was now closer to a bird's nest. She had dirt on her jaw and a scratch on her forearm from a thorn she hadn't seen, and when the gate creaked she looked up expecting the gardener.
"Jesus Christ," Douglas said. "You look feral."
She stared at him for a full five seconds. He was leaning against the gate with a paper bag from Tartine in one hand and a coffee in the other. He looked almost exactly like he had at twenty-two except that his shoulders had filled out, and his hair was shorter.
"Doug! What are you doing here?"
"I moved back. A few weeks ago. I was going to call, but then I thought, why ruin a perfectly good entrance." He held up the bag. "I brought pastries. You look like you need pastries."
She stood up, pulled off her gloves, and hugged him so hard the coffee almost went over.
He smelled like cedar, citrus and something underneath that was just Douglas, unchanged since Berkeley, since the apartment on Bancroft where they'd lived on opposite sides of a wall so thin she could hear him singing in the shower every morning.
He'd sung terribly. He still probably sang terribly.
"Five years," she said into his shoulder.
"Six."
"You're a terrible friend."
"I'm an incredible friend. I brought almond croissants."
They sat on the garden bench with the pastries between them, the fog sitting low over the rooftops, and it took about four minutes for the six years to collapse into nothing.
That was the thing about Douglas. Other friendships required maintenance, careful upkeep, a rhythm of calls and texts and scheduled dinners.
Douglas required nothing. You picked him up where you'd left him and kept walking.
He'd been in New York. Then London for a stretch, something in finance that he described with enough deliberate vagueness that she'd stopped asking.
Then Singapore for a year. Then back to New York.
And now San Francisco, because his mother was getting older and because, he said, he'd gotten tired of cities that didn't know how to do fog properly.
"Nobody does fog like this," he said, gesturing at the gray pressing down over Pacific Heights. "New York tries. London thinks it invented it. But this is the real thing. This is fog with commitment issues."
She laughed. She’d missed him, Douglas asked questions, actually listened to the answers and said rude things when rude things were appropriate and never once, in all the years she'd known him, made her feel small.
They'd met at Berkeley. She'd been nineteen, a sophomore who'd already started to suspect she was in the wrong life, studying art history because her mother had said it was "appropriate" and because she hadn't yet learned that appropriate was just another word for small.
Douglas had been in the architecture program, a year ahead, and they'd collided over a shared obsession with Arts and Crafts bungalows and a mutual loathing of a professor named Hennigan who pronounced "Bauhaus" with a fake German accent.
He'd become her person. Her real person, separate from the Monroe family machinery and the society circles her mother kept oiled and running.
Douglas had never cared that her family had money.
He had money too, and more importantly, he had opinions, and even more importantly, he had no interest whatsoever in Isabelle Monroe as a commodity.
She'd known he was gay before he told her.
He'd told her in the Bancroft apartment, sitting on the kitchen counter with a bottle of wine between them, and she'd said, "I know.” He'd said, "Of course you know, you insufferable woman," they'd finished the bottle and never discussed it as a revelation again.
It wasn't a secret, exactly. His close friends knew. His mother knew and had processed it through several stages of Catholic negotiation before arriving at something that resembled acceptance. But Douglas didn't broadcast it, and he let people into the rooms he chose.
"So tell me everything," Douglas said, brushing pastry flakes off his coat. "The house looks incredible, by the way. You did the front steps?"
"Bluestone. I found a guy in Half Moon Bay who still does wet-laid."
"Of course you did." He looked at her with genuine attention, his chin propped on his hand. "And the rest? How are you? How's the marriage? How's the everything?"
"The everything is good."
"Iz.”
"It is. Xavier's... he's wonderful. You know he's wonderful."
"I know he's very handsome, very rich and very devoted to you. I'm asking if you're happy."
She picked a flake of pastry off her knee.
She was happy. She was. The word was accurate.
It covered the territory. It just didn't cover all of it.
There were rooms in her life, too, some of them she hadn't opened for anyone, and the small celadon-green room at the end of the upstairs hall was only the most literal.
"I'm happy," she said. "I'm also restless, and I don't know what to do with that."
Douglas nodded. He didn't rush to fill the space, didn't offer a solution, didn't tell her she had nothing to be restless about. He just nodded, took another sip of his coffee and let the sentence exist without requiring her to qualify it.
"I've been thinking about doing something with interiors," she said. It was the first time she'd said it out loud to anyone. "Professionally, I mean. Restoration work. I've been doing it here for years, on this house, and I think I might actually be..." She stopped.
"Good at it," he finished.
"Yeah."
"You're better than good at it. I walked through your gate and I could see it.
The stonework, the plantings, the proportions of the front elevation.
This isn't a woman with a Pinterest board.
This is someone with an actual eye." He gestured at the garden wall.
"Those roses are going to come back beautifully, by the way.
You cut them at exactly the right height. "
Relief filled her… a tightness releasing. She'd spent so long absorbing the silence around her ability, the pleasant, dismissive silence, that hearing someone name it out loud made her throat ache.
"Xavier thinks I have good taste," she said.
"Xavier thinks you're an accessory with a credit card."
"That's not fair."
"Maybe not. But he doesn't know you laid your own kitchen floor, does he?”
She didn't answer. Douglas watched her not answer, and his expression softened.
"I'm not trying to start a war," he said.
"I just. I remember you at Berkeley. I remember you in Hennigan's studio pulling apart that Greene and Greene elevation and explaining the joinery to a room full of architecture students who couldn't keep up with you.
You were twenty years old and the smartest person in that room.
Then you married a man who thinks your talent is a personality trait. "
"He loves me."
"I know he does. That's not what I'm questioning."
They sat with that for a while. The fog had thickened, the garden had gone gray and soft around them. Somewhere down the hill a foghorn sounded its long low note.
"I missed you," she said.
"Obviously. I'm extraordinary."
"You're impossible."
"I'm back now." He bumped his shoulder against hers.
"I'm in a place on Fillmore. Tiny. Criminally expensive.
You'll hate the bathroom but love the crown molding.
Come see it. Come see it and tell me what to do with it, and I'll take you to dinner, and you can tell me about the restless thing when you're ready. "
"I'd like that."
"Saturday?"
"I have a thing Saturday. An Anderson thing. Xavier's world."
"Then Sunday. Bring wine. Bring opinions. Leave the husband at home."
He said it lightly, with the grin that crinkled the corners of his eyes. She smiled back and for a moment she was twenty again, sitting on a kitchen counter with cheap wine, talking to the one person who'd never asked her to be less than she was.
Douglas left around four. He kissed her cheek at the gate and promised to text his address, then walked off down the hill with his hands in his pockets, whistling something off-key. She watched him until the fog took him.
Xavier came home an hour later. She was back inside by then, cleaned up, starting dinner. He came through the hallway, loosening his tie, and kissed the back of her neck where she stood at the stove.
"Good day?" he asked.
"Douglas Torres stopped by. Do you remember Douglas? From Berkeley?"
"Vaguely." He opened the fridge, took out a bottle of water. "The one who was in New York?"
"London, then Singapore, then New York. He's moved back."
"Mm." Xavier drank. He leaned against the island and looked at her with an expression she couldn't quite read. "You two were close."
"We are close. He's one of my oldest friends."
"He just showed up? No call?"
"That's Douglas.”
Xavier smiled. But there was something behind it, something held back, a question he was choosing not to ask. His thumb tapped once against the water bottle. A small, rhythmic gesture. She might not have noticed it if she hadn't spent a decade learning every frequency of his body.
"That's nice," he said.
He kissed her forehead and went upstairs to change. Isabelle stood at the stove with a wooden spoon in her hand and tried to name what had just moved across his face.
She couldn't. Or wouldn't. She turned back to the onions, which were starting to catch, and told herself it was nothing.