My name.
On a door.
Not tucked beneath Callum’s on a letterhead. Not hidden in the fine print of a project proposal. Not attached to work I’d done while someone else took the meeting, the praise, the photograph, the credit.
Mine.
The studio wasn’t large. Not yet. It occupied the first floor of an old brick building that had once been a watch repair shop, then a tailor, then nothing for almost four years. The floors were original, and the windows stuck when the weather shifted. Every morning at 7:12, the heating made a clicking sound, like a tiny ghost in the vents objected to work hours.
I loved every inch of it.
The first time I’d walked through it, the walls had been stained, the ceiling had water damage, and the back room smelled faintly like dust and old glue.
Finn had stood beside me with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking up at the cracked plaster like he was listening to the building breathe.
“You’re smiling,” he’d said.
“I am not.”
“You are.”
“It’s awful.”
“It’s yours.”
That was the thing about Finn.
He saw the good bones in everything—buildings and people included.
The divorce was final, but the real freedom hadn’t come from a judge’s signature. It had come quietly, months later, when I realized a whole day had passed without me rehearsing an argument in my head. Callum had tried to make the end a performance, giving quotes about ‘private family matters’ to the same people who’d watched him erase me for years. But after the gala, the story moved faster than he could control. The proof was in the metadata, the timestamps, the quiet emails from junior designers. Laura was gone three months later. The walls I’d thought were solid had been paper all along, and all it took was one hard push to tear them open.
Officially, she resigned to “pursue independent consulting opportunities.”
Unofficially, no one wanted her in the room anymore.
Callum lasted longer, because he had spent years making himself the kind of man people hesitated to accuse. He knew how to look stable while everything around him rotted. Men like him knew how to lower their voices, straighten their cuffs, and make consequences sound like misunderstandings.
But the firm wasn’t what it had been.
Neither was he.
The reports arrived in hushed tones, from people with wide eyes, as if they were delivering news I had been waiting to hear.
The reports still trickled in. The latest came from an old colleague, who mentioned Callum had lost the West Loop hotel pitch. He’d looked terrible, she said. He’d even asked, his voice hesitant, how I was doing.
That last one came from an old vendor who clearly expected me to flinch.
I didn’t.
I was too busy choosing tile samples.
Healing didn’t look the way I thought it would.
It wasn’t one clean moment where the past loosened its grip and fell away.
It was quieter than that.
It was waking up in a bed no one had made feel cold on purpose. It was drinking coffee in my kitchen without rehearsing arguments. It was signing my first client contract and realizing my hand wasn’t shaking. It was laughing too loudly in a restaurant and not checking anyone’s face to see if I’d embarrassed them.
