“It’s sitting there. Empty.”
“You’re still paying the rent?!” Steven’s voice cracks with a sharp, incredulous laugh. “Skyler, tell me you’re joking. You’re currently living in my guest room while paying three grand a month for a shrine to a relationship that ended at the altar?”
“It’s not a shrine,” I snap, though the bite in my voice is defensive. “It’s a placeholder. In case she…in case she wants to go home one day. I can’t let it go. If I give up the lease, I’m giving up the only place where we were actually happy. I can’t go back there, not without her, but I can’t let anyone else live there, either.”
Steven shakes his head, a slow, pitying motion. “Impractical sentimentality. It’s a Thompson trait, believe it or not. Let it go.”
I don’t answer. Instead, I reach for the newspaper Steven left on the coffee table. It’s a physical object, something tangible I can focus on to drown out the sound of my own failures. I flip past the business section—the names too familiar, too entangled with my father’s golf partners and the country club elite. I can’twork for a firm that considers the Thompson name a branding asset.
Fingers turning gray with newsprint, I skim the local sections, my eyes jumping over advertisements for luxury condos and “stately” renovations. It’s all the same: bleached wood, floor-to-ceiling glass, spaces for people who want to be seen but never truly looked at.
Then, I freeze.
There she is.
It’s a grainy, black-and-white photo on page four, tucked into an article about a court ruling against a predatory landlord. She isn’t the subject of the photo, but she’s in the background, standing behind a woman I recognize as Mrs. Delgado. Harley isn’t looking at the camera; she’s looking at her client, her hand on the woman’s shoulder, her face set in a line of fierce, uncompromising pride.
The headline reads:Victory for the Vulnerable: County Office Secures Stay of Eviction.
I stare at her. The pixels are rough, but I can see the intelligence in her eyes, the way she carries herself—not as a Thompson accessory, but as a woman who knows exactly what she’s worth. She looks powerfully real.
“Sky?” Steven’s voice is quieter now.
“Look at her,” I whisper, sliding the paper across the table.
Steven leans over, squinting at the image. “She looks good. Tough. Doing the work.”
“I’ve been a fool.” I sit up from my slump, the lethargy of the last three days falling away like dead skin. My posture, usually a product of social conditioning, becomes a product of intent.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to win her back,” I continue, my voice gaining a clarity I haven’t felt since I proposed. “I thought if I just apologized enough, or bought enough flowers,or showed her the apartment was ready, she’d see me. But she saw me at the altar. She saw exactly who I was.”
I glance at the photo again. Harley isn’t waiting for a rescue…she’s the one doing the rescuing.
“I don’t need to win her back,” I say. “I need to become someone she can actually respect. Whether she ever talks to me again or not.”
Carefully folding the newspaper along the creases, I make sure Harley’s face is protected in a small, neat square. Then, I tuck it into the pocket of my bag. Not as a shrine or a memento, but as a blueprint.
“I’m not taking a job at a firm like Peterson’s,” I tell Steven. He’s watching me now, his skepticism replaced by a cautious, dark interest. “I don’t want to design another mansion for people who only care about the crown molding. I’m going to find work that matters, even if it’s small and ugly.”
“Not to self, Sky, don’t call the job ‘small and ugly’ during the interview.” I shoot him a look and he continues with a warning, “The Thompson Foundation won’t like that.”
“The Thompson Foundation can rot.”
Harley Matthews didn’t walk out to make me a better man; she walked out to save herself.
And the least I can do is finally start building a man worth saving.
Chapter 22
Harley–Two Months Later
The fluorescent light overhead has been flickering since one o’clock. It hums at a frequency that vibrates right in the back of my molars, a steady, irritating reminder that the county hasn’t updated this building since the Obama administration. But I don’t mind it today. The erratic pulse of the bulb reminds me that my life is imperfect—just how I like it. In this office, if something is broken, it stays broken until someone with a screwdriver and a grudge fixes it. There’s no management team to hide the flaws.
I lean back in my chair, the springs groaning in protest. On my desk, a stack of folders sits like a mountain of lives waiting for a signature. At the top is the Delgado file. It’s thick, tattered at the edges, and smells faintly of the bodega downstairs where Mrs. Delgado buys her milk and eggs.
I pick up the final housing authorization and press my stamp onto the bottom right corner. The sound of the rubber hitting the paper is the most satisfying thing I’ve heard in weeks.
Permanent housing. Securing it didn’t require a six-figure grant from a foundation with a gilded crest. It didn’t require me to stand at an altar and trade my dignity for a legal aid fund. It took fourteen phone calls, three visits to the housing authority, and a literal shouting match with a clerk who didn’t want to file the paperwork on a Friday afternoon.
