Chapter Three
964 Words
What Isla Drew
I told myself that evening, while Isla was in the bath and Marcus was opening a bottle of wine he'd had the foresight to bring, that this was manageable. Dominic Ashworth was a client. A powerful client. A devastatingly attractive client who had once been my entire world, but still a client. I had worked with difficult men before. I had worked with men who doubted me, underpaid me, talked over me. I had survived every single one of them.
This was fine.
This was completely fine.
"You're doing the thing,"
Marcus said from the kitchen.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you convince yourself everything is fine until you actually believe it and then something falls apart dramatically."
"I'm not.."
"You've reorganised the coffee mugs twice since we got home."
I looked down at the mugs. They were, in fact, arranged by size.
"I like order."
"You like control. There's a difference. Sit down, Aria."
I sat. He poured. We were quiet for a moment in the way that only long friendships allow the comfortable silence that doesn't require filling.
"He looked at you the whole time,"
Marcus said finally.
"He was assessing the pitch."
"He was assessing you. Trust me I was watching. Every time you looked away, he looked. Every time you spoke, he listened in this very specific way. The way people listen when they're trying not to show that they're listening."
"Marcus"
"I'm not saying it to upset you. I'm saying it because you need to know what you're walking into."
I turned my glass in my hands. From down the hallway, I could hear Isla narrating something to her rubber duck, an elaborate story involving a castle and what appeared to be a morally complicated octopus. She did this invented whole worlds while she thought no one was listening. She got that from me.
"He can't find out about Isla,"
I said.
The words landed on the table between us like something heavy.
"Aria"
"I know what you're going to say."
"She's five. She asks questions now. Last week she asked the school librarian why some people have two parents and some people have one, and the librarian told me she asked it very calmly, like she was conducting a survey."
I closed my eyes.
"She's fine,"
I said. I didn't know who I was convincing.
"She drew a picture today,"
Marcus said quietly. "Her teacher showed me when I picked her up."
I looked at him.
"It was a family portrait. You, her, me. And then separate from the rest, in the corner a tall man. Grey crayon. The teacher asked who it was, and Isla said she didn't know. She said, and I'm quoting here, 'He's the man in Mummy's sad look.'"
The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard.
I stood up. I went down the hallway. I opened the bathroom door and sat on the closed toilet lid, and Isla looked up at me from the water with those grey, unreadable eyes his eyes and smiled.
"Mummy. Gerald ate the princess."
"Who is Gerald?"
"The octopus. He's bad. But she forgave him."
"That's very generous of her."
"He was sorry,"
Isla said simply. "People can be sorry."
I looked at my daughter this fierce, brilliant, complicated small person and I felt something inside me shift in a way I had been resisting for five years.
"Were you okay at school today?"
"I drew a picture."
"I heard. Who was the man in the corner?"
She considered this with the solemn gravity she brought to all important questions.
"I don't know,"
she said. "But he makes you sad. I don't want him to make you sad anymore."
I got off the toilet lid and I sat on the cold tile floor and I pulled my daughter out of the bath and wrapped her in her towel the yellow one with the duck hood and I held her until she squirmed.
"Mummy. I'm wet."
"I know."
"You're getting sad on me."
"I know. Sorry."
She patted my cheek. A very small, very firm pat.
"It's okay,"
she said. "Gerald was sad too. Then he said sorry and felt better."
I laughed. I actually laughed, broken and sudden and real, into my daughter's damp hair.
After Isla was asleep, I stood in the doorway of her room for a long time, watching the rise and fall of her breathing.
Marcus was right. She was five, and she was watching me more carefully than I had understood, and she was building a picture of her world out of the things she saw in my face when I thought I wasn't being looked at.
I had told myself for five years that my silence was protection. That not telling Dominic was the right choice. That a man who had let Celeste dismantle me was not a man who deserved access to the most important person in my life.
But standing there in the dark, listening to my daughter breathe, I began to feel the first cold tremor of doubt.
Not about him. Never about him.
About me. About whether protection and avoidance had somewhere, quietly, without my noticing, become the same thing.
I took out my phone. I had two emails from Dominic's project manager about onboarding paperwork and a calendar invite for a site visit on Thursday.
I accepted the invite. I set my alarm. I went to bed.
I lay in the dark for a long time, staring at the ceiling.
He's a client,
I told myself.
He's just a client.
In the corner of my mind, a five-year-old girl drew a man in grey crayon and said: he makes you sad.
I did not sleep for a very long time.
- Writer
