I refresh my e-mail, watching new messages stack and stack, until I’ve got to scroll through to search for the name I’m looking for.
“Oh, wait!” I exclaim, straightening as I quickly scan the message from the print supplier I’ve been working with for the last few months. A smile spreads across my face as I see the good news. “Two weeks, they say. A full restock.”
“Whew,” Lachelle says. “Things are gettingdesperateover there.”
She gestures toward the somewhat empty-looking table at the front of the store, the special placement Cecelia and Lachelle have reserved for me since the new line launched three months ago. I may not be part owner of this shop with my two friends, but the sign that proclaims this store the “birthplace” of the new Meg Mackworth line makes me feel warm with contentment, included in the most perfect possible way.
Despite this evening’s sojourn in the back of the shop, I’m not really back in the wedding business. Instead, I’m back in my own business, a new version of it that I’ve had to rebuild, somewhat, in the aftermath of the Coster Capital fallout. With a lot of determined, difficult work—and the occasional character reference from everyone’s favorite princess—I’d managed to keep most of my clients. But there’d been costs to having my name in the news—time spent fending off the press, reconsideration of my website and social media, the realization that I couldn’t keep up with enough new clients to make up for the losses.
So in the end, I didn’t really have a choice. I’d needed to pivot.
I’d needed to find a way to do my work the way I’d wanted to do it. The way that I’d broken through my block for.
Lachelle and I both drift over to the table, and I start straightening the products that are left, a burst of pride going through me each time I see the logo I designed.
Harbinger, I’d called it, my new product line. Journals and planners, stickers and stationery, no hidden messages necessary. These pieces, they’re the right kind of signs—letters that remind you of a place, a season, a feeling, an ambition. Letters that say more than the words on the page.
Lachelle can’t keep them in stock.
“These are still my favorite,” she says now, fanning out a diminished stack of soft-cover notebooks, part of my New York Parks series. Botanicals—they’re always going to be popular, but I’m pretty proud that there’s not a singleBloom Where You’re Plantedin sight. “But right now it’s that pink houndstooth I can’t keep in stock! I wonder why?” She grins over at me.
“She’s the best,” I say, smiling as I think of Lark, who’s made sure to be photographed with her new Harbinger planner twice since she’s gone back to LA—withoutCameron—where she’s started filming a rom-com series for a massive streaming platform. But even beyond those supposedly candid paparazzi shots, whenever she posts something on her social media from the set, she makes sure that planner is somewhere in sight—on the small banquette table inside her trailer, resting on top of the crinkled, marked-up pages of her script, on her lap while someone touches up her makeup, her hair up in huge, bright purple velcro rollers, or tucked under her arm while she and one of her costars pose for a goofy selfie.
she always texts me, right before one of these posts goes up.
We stay in touch, texts and phone calls and twice, her visits back here. Secretly, I think me and Sibby and Lachelle all hold out hope she might come back to the East Coast for good. But each time I see her big, toothy smile in the California sunshine, I get the sense that maybe Lark is in her true home.
“What I’m thinking,” Lachelle says, “is that it’s time for coloring books. Exclusives, for this shop. I know you turned it down before, when all the trial stuff was happening, but now you could—”
We’re interrupted by the door to the shop opening, and I sense him even before I look up to see him.
Still, I like to look up and see him there. Tall, lean, triple-take-face Reid, his eyes lighting on me immediately, not a trace of sadness in them.
“Good evening,” he says seriously, always more formal when there are other people around.
“Oh, here he is,” says Lachelle. “Listen, I need your help with this payroll software. Now there’s this whole section about allowances for—”
“Lachelle,” I say teasingly. “He’s not a small business consultant.”
“What’s it matter?” she says. “He knows the numbers. So anyway, I need . . .”
Reid hasn’t said anything beyond his initial greeting, but still he steps farther in, listening to Lachelle with a serious expression on his face, offering her the occasional brief nod of understanding as she recounts a long list of grievances about the tax code. This is, in fact, the primary way Reid and Lachelle had bonded, back when she’d first met him. She calls him Robin Hood most of the time, a tribute to his heroic whistleblower status, even though most of the time he also sees fit to clarify for her that he didn’t steal from anyone.
“I only tried to point out the stealing someone else was doing,” he says, usually with that slight flush on his cheeks.
I’m finishing my tidying of the display when I hear Reid offering his suggestions to Lachelle—the same steady, assured tone I’m sure makes him excellent at his new job. Within seconds she’s thanking him, letting us know she’s going to go “handle this” right now, before she forgets every single thing Reid said to her.
“Looking sparse,” Reid says, nodding at the table.
I smile at him. “Quite,” I say pointedly, and heswoonshes.
The startup at Harbinger had been something of a fight between me and Reid. I didn’t have the funds on my own to get it going—the contract with the supplier, the more sophisticated software and scanning equipment I’d needed. But Reid—practical, numbers-minded Reid—definitely did, and all he’d wanted was to give me some of it.
“Think of what you’ve done for me,” he’d said, practically begging me. But I hadn’t really seen any of what he’d been referring to as something I’d done for him. It’d been forus. Away for us to start our lives even as we were weathering the storm. After a couple of months, it hadn’t made sense for Reid to stay in his apartment. It’d made better sense to move into mine—farther away from the chaos of the Coster fallout, farther away from the job he’d used to have. Closer to the job he’d hoped to have.
Anyway, it wasn’t as though he didn’t pay rent.
Still, Reid said it was more—more I’d done, more I’d had to face for him. All the times I’d come with him to meetings, depositions, days in court, my head held high when reporters would shout questions at the both of us. All theLet’s walk around Brooklyngames I’d distracted him with as he’d struggled with worry over Avery, who had—not long after her father’s arrest—reconciled herself to the depth of his crimes. All the evenings I sat quietly with him after some other random “source” connected to Coster claimed anew that Reid was nothing more than a hack, a guy with an ax to grind. All the days I never gave up, even when it seemed as if the attention was never going to go away.
