Shattered crown

Chapter Five

Celeste

She arrived on a Tuesday.

I didn't know that yet. I was in the office with two junior designers, arguing pleasantly about load-bearing aesthetics and eating a croissant. I had no business eating over structural drawings, when Marcus came in from his lunch break and closed the door behind him with a precision that meant something.

"What?"

"Don't react."

"Marcus."

"Celeste Marchand-Ashworth flew in from London last night. She's apparently at The Mark. Someone I know from the Ashworth London office just texted me."

I set the croissant down.

Five years. Five years of building a fortress, of choosing New York partly because the Atlantic was between me and the people who had broken me. And now the Atlantic had become insufficient, and Celeste was in the same city, in a hotel that was four minutes from this office.

"Does she know I'm here?"

"She knows the firm that won the Ashworth contract is called Voss Studio. Whether she's connected that to you specifically"

"She will. Celeste connects everything."

This was true. Celeste Marchand had been the most strategically intelligent person I had ever known. It was one of the things I had loved about her, once the way she could read a room, a situation, a relationship, and understand its structure instantly. I had thought we were using those skills together. I had been wrong about what we were using them for.

Marcus sat down. He had a look on his face I didn't like the careful look, the one that meant he was building to something I wasn't going to enjoy.

"There's something else."

"Of course there is."

"She's been in contact with Dominic's London team. Daily, for the last three weeks. Before the New York transition. Before the pitch."

I absorbed this. Rearranged it.

"She knew,"

I said slowly. "She knew he was moving to New York for this project. She let it happen."

"Or she arranged for you to land the contract knowing it would put you in the same room as him."

The thought was cold and clean and it made my skin prickle.

"Why would she do that?"

"Because she's Celeste,"

Marcus said simply. "She doesn't leave things to chance. She curates them."

I stood up and went to the window. The city outside was doing its relentless thing: taxis and pedestrians and a man arguing into a phone and a woman with a stroller navigating the curb with the calm authority of someone who has accepted that New York will not adjust itself for her.

"She wants to watch,"

I said.

"Or she wants to manage. Celeste in the same city as Dominic, Dominic working with you — that's a situation she can't control from London. She's here to control it personally."

My phone buzzed. I looked at it. An email from Dana: Mr. Ashworth has requested you join the project debrief tomorrow. Bring the full preliminary specs.

"What do I do?"

Marcus was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was careful.

"You could walk away from the contract."

"I'm not walking away from my contract."

"I know. I just wanted to say it so we could take it off the table and move on."

"What are my actual options?"

"You finish the job. You stay professional. You don't let either of them close enough to see anything they shouldn't see."

"And Isla?"

The name was a weight we both felt.

"Isla has my schedule and yours. She's covered by people who love her. And she doesn't leave the schoolgrounds without one of us."

"You think it could get to that?"

"I think Celeste flew across an ocean to manage a situation. I think that's someone who feels threatened. And threatened people are unpredictable."

I had known Celeste for eight years. I knew her capable of extraordinary kindness. I knew, now, that I had never understood the full architecture of what she was capable of.

She found me the next afternoon.

I had just come out of the Ashworth building the debrief had run long, and Dominic had been present for all of it, and we had managedtwo hours of almost-professional interaction interrupted by exactly three moments where our eyes met for too long and we both looked away at the same second.

Progress, of a kind.

I was on the pavement, pulling up the subway map on my phone, when I heard heels on concrete and a voice that I would recognise in any crowd, in any city, in any life.

"Aria."

She looked extraordinary. She always had. Celeste Marchand moved through the world as though it had been staged for her the coat was camel and impeccable, the hair was that same deep auburn, the smile was the one I had once believed was exclusively mine.

"Hello, Celeste."

"Five years. You look wonderful."

"Do I?"

Not a question. She heard it.

She tilted her head slightly. An assessment.

"I heard you won the Ashworth contract. Your firm Voss Studio. I always knew you'd build something remarkable."

"Is that why you're here? To congratulate me?"

"I'm here to see my husband."

Husband. She let it land. Watch me absorb it.

"Of course,"

I said.

"I thought perhaps we could have coffee. Catch up."

"I don't think that would be useful for either of us, Celeste."

Something moved behind her eyes. Quick and cold and there-and-gone.

"We were friends once,"

she said.

"Yes,"

I agreed. "We were."

I put my phone in my pocket and I looked at her at the woman who had taken my life apart and built herself a better one from the pieces and I felt something I hadn't expected. Not the old grief. Not the old rage.

Clarity.

She had not come to New York for Dominic. Or not only. She had come because she sensed that something was shifting and she could not afford to let it shift without her hands on it.

"It was lovely to see you,"

I said, in the same pleasant, even tone she had used on me.

Then I walked to the subway, and I did not look back, and I did not let the shaking reach my hands until I was underground and the train was coming and the noise of it swallowed everything else.

She knows you're here,

I told myself.

Now you know she's here.

Stop reacting. Start thinking.

The train came. I got on. I thought about Isla, and the grey crayon, and the man in the corner of her drawing.

I thought about how long I had been surviving.

I thought about what it might feel like to do something more than that.

SHATTERED CROWN |