Chapter 13
ISABELLE
The Soto house was coming alive.
Grace Soto and her boyfriend, Mel, had stood in the parlor last week and watched Isabelle peel back a strip of wallpaper above the fireplace to reveal the original picture rail underneath.
Mel’s eyes had widened, and he’d turned to look at Isabelle. “Oh my God. How did you know that was there?”
"The nail pattern in the plaster. You can read it if you know what to look for,” Isabelle had replied.
She'd known what to look for. She'd always known. She just hadn't known that knowing was a career.
The interior design work was running parallel to the restoration, and this was where Isabelle discovered something about herself that surprised her. She'd expected the design to be the easy part, the intuitive part, the part that came from the eye Xavier had always praised.
Instead, she found that the design decisions were harder than the restoration because they required her to listen.
Grace wanted warmth. Mel wanted light. Grace liked saturated color.
Mel liked white. The house itself wanted neither and both: it was a Queen Anne, built for shadow and ornament, but the south-facing windows on the second floor flooded the bedrooms with a clear, cool light that would wash out anything too rich.
Isabelle spent a week on the color palette alone.
She brought samples to the house and held them against the restored trim, watching what happened at different hours of the day.
She mixed test patches on scraps of drywall, propped them in windows and came back at noon and again at four.
She found a green that worked in the parlor, deep and saturated enough to honor the period but muted enough to let the millwork take center stage.
She found a white for the upstairs that wasn't white at all but a barely-there blue that would catch the south light and hold it.
When she presented the palette to Grace and Mel, they'd both gone quiet. Grace had touched the green sample and said, "That's exactly right. How did you do that?"
"I listened to the house," Isabelle said. And then, because she was learning to say things she used to leave unsaid: "And I listened to both of you. You wanted different things. The house wanted a different thing. The job was finding where all of it overlapped."
Grace had looked at Mel. Mel had looked at Isabelle. And then Grace had said the sentence that Isabelle played back in her head every night before she fell asleep.
"We have a friend in Noe Valley who just bought a Victorian. The kitchen is a crime scene. Can I give her your name?"
A second client. A referral. The word spreading from one person to the next based entirely on the quality of her work, and Isabelle had said, "Yes. Absolutely.”
She was twelve weeks pregnant. The nausea had finally eased, replaced by a hunger so constant and so indiscriminate that she'd eaten a cold leftover burrito at seven in the morning and felt no shame about it.
Her belly was slightly visible now, a gentle rounding beneath her shirts that strangers couldn't see but she could, that she tracked in the bathroom mirror each morning with a wonder that hadn't dimmed.
The baby was the size of a lemon. She'd started talking to it while she worked, quietly, under her breath, narrating what she was doing. “See this bracket? Eighteen-ninety-two. Hand-carved. Someone made this and someone buried it and we're bringing it back.”
The baby couldn't hear her yet, she knew. She talked anyway.
Douglas even came to the Soto house and walked through the rooms with his hands in his pockets, not touching anything, which was unusual for Douglas, who touched everything.
He stood in the parlor and looked at the restored trim, the green walls and the original pocket doors Isabelle had gotten working again. He was quiet for a long time.
"Iz," he said.
"What?"
"This is extraordinary."
"It's a paint color and some trim work."
"This is extraordinary and you know it. If you deflect one more time I'm going to start a fight in front of your clients."
She laughed. Douglas looked at her, and his expression went soft.
"You're happy," he said.
Her smile faded. Her love for Xavier was still there, Xavier was still there, in her every thought. “I’m getting there."
At home that evening she sat in the living room with the lights off, her feet up on the sofa and her hand on her belly.
The house was quiet, except now the quiet had a different quality.
It wasn't waiting for Xavier's key in the door.
It was just quiet. Her quiet. The sound of her own life, running on its own rhythm, in rooms she'd built.
She missed her husband.
She missed him every day and the missing had changed over the weeks from something jagged and desperate into something deeper, more persistent.
She missed him in the mornings when she made coffee for one.
She missed him at the doctor's appointments, where he stood by the wall with his hands at his sides, his eyes on the monitor and his face open in a way she'd never seen from him before the separation.
Isabelle was still wounded. The accusation lived inside her like a splinter that had gone too deep to reach.
Some nights she'd lie in bed and hear his voice in the kitchen saying the timing, and that she should leave.
The sound of it would flood through her: she'd have to get up, walk through the house and stand in the hallway with her hand on the wall until it passed.
He'd looked at her and decided that ten years of faithfulness, of her absolute devotion to him, weren't enough.
And that choice had broken something that she wasn't sure could be mended, no matter how many carnitas lunches they sat through, no matter how many doctor's appointments he attended with his tie off and his eyes wet.
But.
There was a but, and the but was what made everything so complicated.
He was… different. She could see it. The restraint in his texts.
The questions about her health that never pushed into questions about them.
The way he'd said "that's exactly right" when she'd told him about the Soto project, instead of "that's incredible, baby," which was what he would have said before.
He was listening. He was trying to learn a language he'd never spoken, and the effort was visible.
Her phone buzzed on the sofa cushion beside her. She picked it up.
Xavier. But not a text. A voice message.
Isabelle stared at it. Her thumb hovered over the play button.
She should wait. She should listen to it later, or tomorrow, or never.
She should protect the quiet evening and the peace she'd earned in this house.
She should not sit in the dark and listen to her husband's voice and let it undo the careful distance she'd been building for weeks.
She pressed play.
"Isabelle." His voice was low. Careful. She could hear the apartment behind him, the hollow acoustics of a room with no furniture that mattered.
"I know you didn't ask for this and I know you don't owe me anything, not even listening to this, so if you stop it right here that's okay. I'll understand."
A pause. She could hear him breathing.
"I started therapy. I've been going for a few weeks now.
I don't say that for credit. I say it because you should know.
She's making me talk about things I've never talked about.
My mother. What it did to me. What I turned it into.
" Another pause, longer. "What I turned it into was you.
I turned all of it into you. I made you the answer to every question I was too afraid to ask, and then when the fear got big enough I made you the enemy, and you were never the enemy, Bella. You were never anything but the truth."
His voice broke. She could hear him collecting himself, the breath in, the steadying.
"I don't know what we are right now. I don't know if we're going to find our way back to each other.
I know I want to, more than anything. I know I want to earn that.
I know that earning it doesn't look like flowers or grand gestures or convincing you.
It looks like me becoming someone who deserves what you gave me for ten years.
Someone who sees you. Actually sees you.
The woman who is starting her own business and is going to be extraordinary at it because she's always been extraordinary and I was too busy being afraid to notice. "
A long silence. She could hear him swallow.
"I'm not asking you to come back. I'm not asking for anything.
I'm just telling you that I'm here. I'm in this apartment that has terrible walls and no sconces and nothing beautiful in it, and I'm working on becoming the man you needed me to be in the kitchen that night.
The man who could look at you and say I believe you.
I wasn't him then. I'm trying to become him now. "
Another pause.
"That's all. Take care of yourself. Take care of our baby. Goodnight, Bella."
The message ended. Isabelle sat on the sofa in the dark with the phone in her hand and tears running down her face.
She played it again.
She hated herself for playing it again, but she played it again anyway.
His voice filled the dark living room and she pressed her hand against her stomach where the baby was the size of a lemon and she cried.
A different cry than the one on Margaret's sofa, which had been grief, shock and exhaustion.
This was something else. This was the sound of a door that she'd locked very carefully beginning to creak, just barely, just enough to let a sliver of light through.
Yet the light was terrifying because hope was more dangerous than anger.
Anger she could live inside. Anger was a house with walls and a roof. Hope was an open field.
Isabelle put the phone down on the cushion beside her.
She wiped her face. She looked at the hallway, where the sconces still pulled gold.
She thought about the salvage dealer in Tiburon, the unlacquered brass that would patina down over time, go almost green, and she thought: I'm going to fix those sconces.
I'm going to finish the Soto house. I'm going to meet the client in Noe Valley. I'm going to have this baby.
And then, maybe, she was going to figure out what to do about the man on the voice message who sounded, for the first time in all the years she'd known him, like someone telling the truth about who he was.