Holland
Chapter Fifteen
Sloane’s guest room had better light than my entire marriage.
It was the kind of thought my brain served up now—a small, sharp detail to focus on when the whole truth felt too large to look at directly.
The room faced east. Morning came in soft and clean through white curtains, spilling across the hardwood floor and the edge of the desk Sloane had cleared for me without asking.
She’d moved a stack of nonprofit binders to the hallway, set out a spare lamp, and left a legal pad beside it like she knew I’d need somewhere to put the thoughts I wasn’t ready to say out loud.
On the top line, in my own handwriting, were the words I’d written at two in the morning.
What is mine?
Underneath it, the list was already longer than I wanted it to be.
The Morrison lakefront estate.
The Thompson underpinning fix.
The Alden stair hall correction.
The original cantilever sketch.
The lakefront design language.
The client relationships.
The seed money.
The company history.
My name.
I stared at the list until the words stopped being words.
Seven years of work, and I had never once thought to protect it. Drawings, phone calls, site visits, revisions, client dinners, late nights at the kitchen island with a cup of coffee going cold beside my laptop. It had felt like breathing. You don’t document breathing.
But an attorney would. Dates. Documents. Authorship. Contribution. Ownership.
Proof.
My phone buzzed on the desk.
Callum.
I didn’t answer.
The call rang out, stopped, then immediately started again.
I watched his name light up the screen for the second time, and I felt nothing close to panic.
Not even anger. Just a tired, flat recognition.
The kind I felt when a contractor ignored a structural warning and then called me after the wall cracked.
A problem had become visible.
That didn’t make it mine to fix.
When the call stopped, a voicemail appeared. Then a text.
This has gone on long enough. The gala is in five weeks. We need to present a united front. You’re putting both of us in an impossible position.
I read it once.
Then I set the phone facedown.
Both of us.
Not our marriage. Not the company. Not the clients. Not the truth.
Both of us.
Because that was still how Callum saw the world: a space defined by his image and his inconvenience. His needs, and the people obstructing them. If I wasn’t helping, I was hurting. If I wasn’t quiet, I was unreasonable. If I wasn’t available, I was making things difficult.
I picked up my pen and added another line to the legal pad.
He still thinks my silence belongs to him.
A knock sounded at the door.
“Alive?” Sloane called.
“Unfortunately.”
The door opened a crack, and my sister looked in with two mugs of coffee in her hands and a look of quiet certainty that told me she had already decided what the rest of my day was going to look like.
Her hair was clipped up, her glasses were sliding down her nose, and she was wearing a blazer over pajama pants.
“Good,” she said. “Because I made coffee strong enough to qualify as a controlled substance.”
“I love you.”
“I know. That’s why I’m risking my blood pressure.”
She came in and set one mug beside my legal pad. Her eyes dropped to the list, but she didn’t touch it, her hands staying on her own coffee mug.
“That’s a lot,” she said.
“It’s not even all of it.”
Her mouth tightened. “I hate him.”
“You’ve always hated him.”
“I disliked him. There’s a difference. Hate requires evidence. Now I have a spreadsheet.”
A smile touched my mouth. My face didn’t quite know what to do with it.
Sloane sat on the edge of the bed and nodded toward my phone. “Was that him?”
“Twice.”
“Did you answer?”
“No.”
“Good.”
The simplicity of it almost undid me. Good. Not Are you sure? Not Maybe you should talk to him. Not Marriage is complicated. Just good, like my refusal to keep stepping into the same trap was not only acceptable but overdue.
“He says I’m putting both of us in an impossible position,” I said.
Sloane snorted. “That man built the impossible position, furnished it, and let his mistress redecorate. He can’t complain now that you’ve stopped paying the rent.”
I looked at her.
“What? Too much?”
“No. Annoyingly accurate.”
“I contain multitudes.”
I wrapped both hands around the coffee mug. The heat pressed into my palms, steady and specific. “I don’t know what the gala is going to be now.”
“What do you mean?”
“The anniversary gala. It was supposed to be a celebration of seven years of Crestline. Callum’s been planning it for months.
Laura’s been planning it for months. I was barely included.
Mostly logistics. Guest list corrections.
Client preferences. Seating notes.” I looked down at the legal pad.
“But now I think they’re going to use it. ”
“For what?”
“To rewrite the company in public.” The words came out quieter than I meant them to.
“To make Laura the future. To make me the past. Or worse, to make me support. A nice little mention in the speech. Thank you to my wife for believing in me. Thank you to Holland for standing beside me. Thank you for being useful, invisible, and quiet.”
Sloane’s face changed. It wasn’t dramatic. She went still, the way a room goes quiet when someone picks up a weapon.
“Have you seen the seating chart?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“Can you get it?”
“Probably. David might have a copy. Or someone in planning.”
“Get it.”
I met her gaze. “You think it matters?”
“I think everything matters now.” She tapped the legal pad with one finger.
“If they’ve put you somewhere that separates you from the clients who know your work, you need to know that.
If they’ve placed Laura beside Callum and the legacy clients, you need to know that.
If they’re planning to control who gets access to you before anyone gives a speech, you need it before you walk into that room. ”
Access.
The word landed like a misplaced load, a dead weight settling in the center of my chest.
“I don’t even know what I own,” I admitted.
Sloane’s expression softened. “Then that’s where you start.”
“I know about the trust money. I have the bank records somewhere. The founding documents too, I think.”
“You think?”
“They’re at the condo.”
“Then you need to go get them.”
My stomach tightened. It wasn’t fear, but a visceral rejection of place. The condo, the kitchen, the study, Callum’s office—my body recoiled from the thought of those rooms, spaces I had designed but that no longer felt like they belonged to me.
“I don’t want to go back there.”
“I know.”
“If he’s there—”
“Then you leave. Or you take me. Or you take Finn. Or you take an attorney. You don’t have to do it alone.”
At Finn’s name, something shifted in the room.
Sloane noticed. Of course she did. Her gaze sharpened, missing nothing. She took a slow sip of coffee and watched me over the rim.
“So,” she said.
“No.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said ‘so’ in your older-sister voice.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
“It’s one of several.”
“Holland.”
I stared into my coffee. The surface had gone still, a dark mirror in a white mug.
“Finn is not the reason I left Callum,” I said.
“I didn’t think he was.”
“He’s not my escape plan.”
“No one said he was.”
“I’m serious, Sloane.”
“So am I.” Her voice gentled, which somehow made it worse. “You don’t have to defend yourself to me. I know you. You don’t burn down your life because a man with good cheekbones offers you coffee and basic respect.”
I let out a breath. “His cheekbones are not the point.”
“So they are good.”
“Sloane.”
“I’m just gathering facts.”
I pressed my fingers to my eyes, a small smile loosening the tightness in my chest.
Sloane reached over and squeezed my knee. “I’m not judging you. I’m watching you come back to yourself, and if Finn is one of the people reminding you what being seen feels like, I’m not going to make that ugly for you.”
I stared down at the dark surface of my coffee, unable to meet her eyes.
“But,” she continued, because she was still Sloane, “I am going to tell you to be careful. Not because of him. Because of Callum. If he finds out before the legal pieces are in motion, he’ll use it.
He’ll make your entire professional claim about your personal life.
He’ll say you’re emotional, impulsive, having an affair, rewriting the marriage because you want someone else. ”
The words hit too close to the bruise.
“I know.”
“Good. Then be smarter than him.”
“I am smarter than him.”
“There she is.”
My phone buzzed again.
This time it was David.
I picked it up so fast coffee sloshed against the side of the mug.
David
Probably shouldn’t be sending this. But you need to see it.
A second later, an attachment came through.
Draft seating chart.
I opened it.
My eyes scanned the screen, the names and numbers resolving into a blueprint for my own erasure. The main table seated Callum, Laura, the investors, the Aldens, the Morrisons, the Thompsons—everyone whose trust I had earned. My name was not there.
I scrolled.
Table seven.
Holland Hart.
No title. No founding designer. No design principal. No seat beside my husband. No seat beside the clients whose homes I had designed, whose families I knew, whose trust had kept Crestline alive for years.
Just my name, tucked between a junior associate and a supplier’s wife.
A laugh came out of me. It sounded strange. Thin and sharp and nothing like humor.
Sloane stood. “What?”
I turned the phone toward her.
She read it. Then read it again.
“Oh. They’re stupid.”
That made me look up.
She handed the phone back. “They think the insult is the point. It’s not. The insult is a tool. The placement is the strategy.”
“What do you mean?”