I lower myself back against the pillow.
The ceiling is still cracked. The light through the curtains is pale and thin and gray, the color of a city that hasn’t committed to morning yet. My Tribeca apartment—the glass box, as I described it to Saylor—is perfectly climate-controlled, perfectly silent, perfectly empty. Two thousand square feet of Italian marble and custom cabinetry and not a single person to hear me if I screamed.
This is the part they don’t put in the profiles. The Forbes features and the Women in Business roundtables and the magazine spreads where I’m photographed in my atelier looking purposeful and backlit—none of them capture this. The six a.m. version. The woman coated in anti-aging night creams and serums from a twelve-step beauty routine to fight her cruel fateof aging, lying in a bed designed for two and occupied by one, trying to calculate whether she has enough structural integrity to get vertical.
I think about Eleanor, and the calculation fails.
Eleanor, who has a legal team and a Scarsdale estate and the particular confidence of a woman who has never once questioned whether she deserves what she’s asking for. Eleanor, who looked at me across a courtyard and saidwhat are you here to collectlike I was a debt she didn’t want to honor instead of a person. Eleanor, who is at this very moment building a case that I—Celeste Brinley, CEO, designer, the woman who can identify thread count by touch—am not fit to raise a child.
And the worst part. The part that keeps me awake at four thirty and drills holes in my skull at six. She might be right. Not about the custody. About me. About the glass box and the empty apartment and the eighteen-hour workdays that leave no room for anything soft. I built this life on purpose. I designed it the way I design a collection. Every element intentional, every choice deliberate, every vulnerability eliminated at the pattern stage. And now I can’t let a caseworker walk through this apartment and see exactly what I built: a showcase. Beautiful, cold, and utterly inhospitable to a child.
I think about Whit, and the headache deepens.
Whit, who wanted to be a mother more than she wanted anything. Whit, who chose me out of everyone in her life, including the mother who raised her, to protect the thing she wanted most. Whitney, who I hadn’t spoken to in two years because I was too proud, too scared, too busy choosing the wrong man over the right friend.
I think about Greg, and I want to throw something. Right off my penthouse balcony.
Greg, who is somewhere in this city right now, probably sleeping soundly in whatever apartment he’s renting withwhatever portion of my company’s revenue he’s siphoning, unbothered by custody battles or caseworkers or the particular agony of being a woman who is expected to perform competence in every arena simultaneously and without complaint.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. A calendar reminder.Valencia—fabric sign-off—seventy-five minutes.
I pick up the phone. My hand is trembling, which I resent. My hands are the steadiest part of me. They cut fabric and sketch and gesture and hold—they are the instruments of my entire career, and right now they are shaking like I’ve had seven espressos, when in fact I’ve had nothing, because getting to the kitchen requires standing and standing requires a version of me that hasn’t reported for duty.
And I don’t think I’m in control of it.
My head is throbbing, the intrusive, depressing thoughts ricocheting off my brain like a pinball machine that launched too many balls at once. It’s debilitating chaos and I can’t form a single coherent thought for the world of fashion this morning. I have no choice.
I do something I never do.
I open my email and type a message to my VP of production.
From: C. Brinley, CEO
Subject line: URGENT AS ALL HELL
Maria,
Sorry for the late notice, but I need you to take the Valencia call alone this morning. I trust your eye. Sign off on the organza if the hand is right. If it’s not, tell them I’ll call Monday. I’m unwell.
-Celeste
The word looks foreign on the screen. Unwell. I’ve worked through fevers. I’ve taken calls from hospital beds. I’ve shown up to a fitting twelve hours after my divorce was finalized, pinning a hemline with hands that had just signed away a decade of my life. Unwell is not a word in my vocabulary. It’s not in my brand guidelines.
Still, I press send.
Then I open my texts. Saylor’s name is there—a new contact, added from the business card exchange that somehow became the most loaded moment of my week. I type with the trembling hands of a woman admitting defeat:
Me
I’m sorry, Saylor. I need to reschedule our drive to Westchester. I’m not feeling well today. I’ll reach out when I’m back on my feet.
I send it before I can revise. Before I can add qualifiers or professional padding or the three additional sentences I’d normally include to ensure no one worries, no one reads too deeply, no one sees the cracks. Then I turn the phone off. Not silent.Off.The screen goes black and the room goes quiet and I am alone in the most complete way a person can be alone—by choice, by necessity, by the specific cowardice of a woman who would rather disappear than be seen like this.
I pull the duvet over my head. The darkness is immediate and total and warm in a way that feels like permission.
I close my eyes. And the dream comes, except it’s not a dream. It’s a memory wearing a dream’s clothes—perfectly preserved, mercilessly clear, playing behind my eyelids with the fidelity of something that never stopped happening.
La Fondue Douce on a Saturday night. And we have the whole restaurant to ourselves. I admit, it’s over-the-top but turning thirty-six felt like the kind of thing that deserved melted cheese and privacy. It’s tucked on a side street in the West Village—exposed brick, copper pots, the kind of candlelight that makes everyone look like a Vermeer painting. There are twenty guests. My favorites. Rina, a new friend, a few designers from the atelier, college friends who still text the group chat. Greg is at the head of the table because Greg is always at the head of the table, even when it’s not his table, even when it’s not his night.
