Chapter Seven
AVIANCE
Remy finds me the one-bedroom apartment on Eastland Avenue, second floor, with tall windows that face south and pull in light from mid-morning to late afternoon in a long, generous pour across the wooden floors.
The kitchen is small but has good counter space and a window above the sink that looks at a magnolia tree.
The rent is manageable on my designer's salary, which is not extravagant but is mine, which matters more than extravagance at this particular moment in my life.
I sign the lease on a Wednesday in late April, four days before Moore's attorney contacts Carla with an opening offer, and I carry my boxes up the stairs myself.
Remy helps. Petra brings a house plant — a large, healthy fiddle-leaf fig — and sets it in the corner by the south window and says, "That is your new roommate.
His name is Franklin and he does not leave for his secretary. "
I laugh so hard I have to sit on the floor.
It is the first time I have laughed, full-body and genuine, since October.
I set up my drafting table by the window.
I put my books on the shelves that were already there.
I buy a rug — cream and terracotta, a combination Moore would have vetoed because he thought warm tones were "too much" — and I put it in the center of the living room and I stand on it and it looks exactly right.
It looks like me. The apartment looks like me: the mix of clean lines and warmth, the graphic prints I've designed myself and had printed at cost, the reading lamp with the brass finish, the shelf of design books arranged by spine color.
I didn't realize how much of the apartment Moore and I shared had been edited down from the person I actually am. Not maliciously. Just gradually. The accumulated compromises of living with another person, slowly pressing you into a smaller and less vivid version of yourself.
Not anymore.
I get a job notification on Thursday — a freelance contract from a brand I've been pitching for three months, bigger than anything I've landed before. A full rebrand for a hospitality group with five locations across Tennessee. Six weeks of work, substantial payment, total creative control.
I sit at my drafting table in the apartment that is entirely mine and I open the email and I say, out loud, to no one: "Okay. Okay, we're going."