Epilogue
AVIANCE
One year later.
The Calloway Design website has had twelve thousand unique visitors in the last month, which Petra says is the universe trying to tell me something and I say is a function of the Germantown project getting picked up by a regional interiors magazine.
We're both right.
I'm in my studio — I have a studio now, a proper one, in a shared creative space near Five Points that I moved into in August — and I'm looking at the mood board for a new project: a boutique inn in Leiper's Fork, old stone farmhouse, wants to feel like the kind of place you remember without being able to explain exactly why.
I know how to do this. I know exactly how to do this.
Petra comes in with two coffees and drops into the chair across from the work table.
"How is it going?"
"Well," I say, and I mean it.
She studies me. Petra has known me for seven years and she is among the world's foremost experts on when I am performing okay versus when I am actually okay.
"You're actually okay," she says.
"I am actually okay," I confirm.
"It's a good look on you."
Outside the studio windows, Nashville is doing its October thing — cool and golden and full of the particular energy of a city that is always slightly in the middle of becoming itself. I moved here for Moore and I stayed for me, and the staying has turned out to be the best decision I have made.
Jayceon is picking me up at six.
We're going to the opening of an exhibit at a gallery where a friend of his is showing sculpture, and afterward we'll probably find somewhere quiet to eat and talk for too long and walk back to whichever apartment we feel like being in.
There is no drama in it. There is no performance.
There is just — this. An clear evening with someone who chooses me. Specifically, consistently, without needing to be the emergency or manufacture one.
I look at the mood board a moment longer.
Then I think about Moore, briefly and without weight.
Not forgivingly or bitterly but just — the way you think about weather that has passed.
It happened. It shaped something in me, the same way anything difficult shapes you if you let it.
I learned what I need, and what I'm worth, and what it feels like to be in a room and know I'm the person someone chose to be there with.
I don't hate him. I don't wish him well with particular intensity. I wish him the kind of honest reckoning that results in someone becoming better. What he does with that reckoning is his.
I already did mine.
I close the mood board file and pick up my coffee.
Petra is scrolling her phone. Outside, a car passes playing something I half-recognize.
The afternoon light through the studio windows hits the surface of the oak worktable — a small piece, a practice piece, that Jayceon made me when I moved in, that I keep here to remember what it means to build something with care.
I run my fingers along the grain.
You can feel that someone made it.
That's everything.