PLEASE CHOOSE ONE TO LOVE

The Sewing Room

Cassandra’s Pov

I came home through the garden gate at eleven, with my father’s card in my coat pocket and a brown envelope pressed flat against my ribs, and I found a stranger’s suitcase standing in my hallway.

It was white leather with gold corners. A housekeeper was carrying it toward the stairs, and when she saw me she lowered her eyes and kept walking, which told me everything I needed to know about whose orders she followed.

“Mrs. Rossi,” she said quietly. “Miss Wells asked for the sunny room.”

“Which sunny room?”

She did not answer. She did not have to.

The sewing room sat at the end of the east corridor, and it was the only room in that house I ever decorated for myself. I painted the walls pale yellow. I bought a drafting table from an estate sale and a secondhand sewing machine that smelled of machine oil and old thread.

In the first year of our marriage I spent my afternoons there with the window open, drawing patterns for a fabric line I told myself I would launch when the company settled down.

The company never settled down. The door of the room stayed closed for two years, and I let it.

Now it stood wide open.

Tiana was in the middle of the floor in a cream sweater and soft grey trousers, with her hair twisted up in a clip, directing a man in a delivery uniform who was carrying out my drafting table. She wore the pearl bracelet. Of course she did.

“Careful with the legs,” she told him. “Cassandra will want to keep that for the garage.”

“For the garage,” I repeated.

She turned, and her face rearranged itself into gentle surprise with a speed that would have impressed me if it had been aimed at anyone else. “Oh, Cassandra, you’re back. I hoped to finish before you came home. Angelo said you would not mind.”

“Angelo said.”

“He thinks I need the light for my morning calls. The press is camping outside my apartment, and I can’t sleep with the noise.” She touched my arm. Her fingers were cool and light. “I told him it was your room, but he said you never use it, and honestly, sweetheart, it was just collecting dust.”

I looked at the floor. A cardboard box sat near the door, and on top of it lay a stack of paper held together with a rubber band. I knew the stack. It was three years of sketches, florals and geometrics, the pattern I called Hudson because it came to me during a storm the week before my wedding.

“Those are in the way,” Tiana said, following my eyes. “I was going to ask the housekeeper to take them to the bins.”

“You were going to put my work in the trash.”

“It’s only drawings.” She tilted her head in kind confusion. “You said yourself you stopped designing. I assumed you were done with them.”

There is a kind of anger that makes noise and a kind that makes everything very clear. I felt the second kind arrive in my chest and settle, and my voice came out so level that the delivery man stopped walking.

“Put the table down,” I said to him.

He glanced at Tiana. Tiana smiled at him warmly and nodded.

“Not there,” I said. “Back where you found it.”

“Cassandra.” Tiana’s voice dropped, wounded. “I did not mean to upset you. Angelo asked me to…”

“Then Angelo can ask me himself.”

I picked up the box and held it against my chest. The man set the drafting table down at an angle, and I did not wait to see whether Tiana would argue. I walked down the corridor to our bedroom, shut the door, and sat on the floor with the box in my lap until my breathing slowed.

The sketches were all there, softened at the edges, with the faint smell of lavender from the drawer where I kept them. I turned over Hudson Rain, and a smaller page slipped out from behind it, a letter on cream stationery from a Milan textile house.

Dear Ms. Moore, we remain eager to discuss your collection. Our offer stands until the twentieth of this month, after which we must give the studio space to another designer. We hope to hear from you.

The twentieth of this month was the date of the Halloran gala.

I read it three times.

%%%%%

Angelo came home at six. I heard his car on the gravel, then his footsteps on the stairs, then the knock he never bothers to soften.

“Cass.” He did not wait before he opened the door. “Tiana is in tears downstairs. What did you say to her?”

I was sitting at the little desk by the window with the sketchbook open in front of me and a pencil in my hand. I did not turn around right away. I finished the curve of the petal I was drawing, and only then did I set down the pencil.

“I asked her to put my drafting table back.”

“You embarrassed her in front of a delivery man.”

“She was throwing my drawings into the bin.”

“She was clearing space.” He came further into the room, and I smelled his cologne and the cold air that clung to his coat. “I told her she could have that room. It’s the only one with a south window, and she has been under tremendous pressure.”

“You told her she could have my room without asking me.”

“It isn’t your room, it’s a room in my house.” He said it without heat, as a fact, the way you would say that water is wet. “You are being territorial about a space you have not used in two years.”

“I did not use it because you needed me elsewhere.”

“That is not what happened.”

“It is exactly what happened.” I stood up. “You told me the company needed a hostess, and I stopped painting. You told me the Milan studio was a distraction, and I turned them down. You said I could return to it once things settled, and I believed you.”

Angelo stared at me. He appeared genuinely puzzled, and that was the worst part, because I could see him searching his memory for any of those conversations and finding nothing.

“I don’t remember saying that,” he said.

“I know.”

“If I said it, I meant that things would settle soon.” He rubbed his forehead. “Cass, I cannot do this tonight. I have the Halloran dinner, a board meeting at seven, and a friend who is falling apart downstairs. Please. Apologize to her and let this go.”

My eyes dropped to the open sketchbook on the desk. He followed the look. Before I could close the cover, he stepped past me and picked it up.

I braced for the dismissal. I expected a shrug, a smirk, or the word hobby.

Instead he turned a page, then another. His thumb moved slowly across the paper. In the lamplight his face lost its hard, tired edges, and for a moment I saw the man who once sat on the floor of my first apartment, eating takeout noodles while I explained why a fabric pattern needs to breathe.

“This one is good,” he said quietly. He held up the page with the rain-washed flowers. “This is very good, Cassandra.”

My throat closed. It was such a small sentence, and I was so hungry for it.

Then his phone buzzed in his pocket. He glanced at the screen, and the old softness in his face went out as fast as a lamp switched off.

“Tiana.” He closed the sketchbook and set it on the desk, not unkindly, but already turning toward the door. “I have to go. We’ll finish this tomorrow.”

“Angelo.”

“Tomorrow, Cass.”

He left the way he always left, and the door clicked shut, and I stood with my hand flat on the cover of the sketchbook where his had been.

I told myself it meant nothing. I told myself that a man can praise a drawing and still sign away his wife’s name without reading it. Both things can be true, and I knew that. I knew it better than anyone.

But I had spent three years learning not to hope, and one sentence, this is very good, nearly undid all of it.

I sat back down at the desk and picked up the pencil. My phone lit up on the bedspread, and I did not need to look to know it was Marcus. I looked anyway.

Marcus Hale: The notary’s assistant will talk if someone she trusts asks. Do you know anyone she trusts?

I turned the phone over and drew another petal, slower this time.

Then I picked it up again and typed one word back.

Me: Yes.