Shattered crown

Chapter Four

The Site Visit

Thursday came quickly, which I resented.

The Ashworth building on Park Avenue was in the state of dignified chaos that all major renovations go through a period where everything looks worse before it looks better, where walls are open and floors are raw and you need a particular kind of vision to see what it will become rather than what it currently is. I had always been good at that. Seeing the after inside the before.

I arrived at eight. The project manager, a brisk woman named Dana who I liked immediately, walked me through the site and the timeline. We were deep into a discussion about the atrium sightlines when I heard the elevator.

I had told myself I was prepared. I had rehearsed my professional composure on the subway. I had given myself a specific, exacting pep talk in the reflection of the elevator doors. I was prepared.

Dominic stepped off the elevator in a coat that was doing absolutely nothing to make this easier, and I realised I was not, in any meaningful sense, prepared.

"Ms. Voss."

"Mr. Ashworth. I didn't expect you to be here."

"It's my building."

"It will be your building. Currently it's a construction site."

Something shifted in his expression not quite a smile. The ghost of one. He turned to Dana.

"Give us a few minutes."

Dana evaporated the way efficient people do. I held my site plans against my chest like a shield.

He stood six feet away and looked at me the way he had been looking at me since Monday with something too complicated to be simple curiosity and too restrained to be anything he was willing to name.

"How long have you been in New York?"

"Five years."

"And you built Voss Studio at that time."

"Yes."

"Alone?"

"With Marcus."

"Right."

The word had a texture to it. Something underneath. He had never liked Marcus had always been faintly suspicious of the warmth between us, though Marcus had told him a hundred times he was categorically not interested in women. Old jealousies.

"What do you want, Dominic?"

His name. I hadn't meant to use it. It fell out before I could stop it and I watched him absorb it the sound of it in my mouth after five years of silence.

"I want to know why you left,"

he said.

Not what I expected. Not even close to what I expected.

"That's not a conversation for a building site."

"You've been avoiding it for five years. I'll take a building site."

"I'm here as your contractor"

"Don't."

One word. Quiet, but with something underneath it that stopped me.

"Don't use the professional language with me. We were engaged. You vanished. I spent a year trying to find out if you were alive and then two more years telling myself it didn't matter, and now you are standing in my building and I am asking you a simple question."

"It wasn't a simple situation."

"Then explain it to me."

I looked at him at the jaw I had traced with my fingers, at the eyes my daughter had inherited and I felt the truth pressing against the inside of my chest like water behind glass.

"I found out what was happening between you and Celeste,"

I said. Flat. Clean. No drama.

He went very still.

"Aria"

"I came home early. I heard her. I didn't need to see anything more."

"Why didn't you say something? Why didn't you"

"Because I was twenty-six and I was humiliated and the person I trusted most in the world was in my bedroom with the man I was going to marry."

My voice was steady. I was almost proud of it.

"And I made a decision. I left. That's all."

"That's all?"

"That's all."

He stepped forward. One step. Close enough that I had to hold my ground deliberately.

"That is not all. Something happened to you that night that you're still not telling me. I can see it every time you look at me. Something that makes you angrier than you should be at a man you've spent five years forgetting."

My grip on the site plans tightened.

"The project specs are on Dana's desk,"

I said. "I'd like to begin the wall assessment by the endof the week."

He didn't move.

"You deserved better than what I gave you,"

he said quietly. "I know that. I have known that every day since you left."

It was the last thing I expected him to say. And it was the cruelest not because it was a manipulation, but because I could see he meant it entirely.

"Dominic,"

I said, and my voice was softer than I wanted it to be. "Please don't."

"Why not?"

"Because I built something without you. And I need it to stay built."

He said nothing to that. We stood in the gutted bones of his building, six feet apart, with five years of silence between us like a wall neither of us knew how to cross cleanly.

Then his phone rang. He looked at the screen. Something in his face closed.

"I have to take this."

"Of course."

He answered it as he walked away. I heard one word before he turned the corner.

"Celeste."

The name landed like a stone in still water.

I made myself look down at my site plans. I made myself focus on ceiling heights and structural load-bearing walls and the eighteen things I needed to measure before Thursday afternoon.

I did not think about the look on his face when he said he had known, every day, that I deserved better.

I did not think about that at all.