Chapter twelve

I’ve  always believed in systems. In the quiet logic of things that didn’t betray you. Grids, measurements, sound structures. Numbers didn’t lie, steel didn’t change its mind, and walls never walked away. When my  marriage ended, I built my survival around those truths. I dedicated myself  to designing the perfect house for other people’s happiness while avoiding the mess of my own. I stopped looking at rooms as places to live and started seeing them as things to solve. But she, Sasha, the woman who cooked her thoughts into meals was unsolvable. She existed in gradients. Her laughter, her silences too full. She didn’t plan her feelings, she felt them and I found that both terrifying and magnetic. When my ex wife left, the divorce had been clean on paper but messy in spirit. I loved her with precision, but not the kind of love that burns or breaks rules. I had thought steadiness would be enough. It wasn’t.

Work became the language I understood best. I ran my firm on discipline. Respected, distant, never unkind but never too close. I mentored my younger staff, took on clients who didn’t drain me, and filled my office with drawings of buildings that looked solid enough to outlast failure. My kids, my beautiful boys were the most precious gifts my previous marriage left me with. I wasn’t a perfect parent but I showed up, every weekend, tried to make the small moments count. Breakfast at Lou Mitchell’s, kite-flying at Montrose Harbor, Saturday Lego marathons on the floor. They didn’t know the full story. They just knew that Daddy came when he said he would and that was something I’d sworn never to fail at. Before her, I never had any substantial relationship. One night stands without any sort of attachment. Sasha showed up like color bleeding into grayscale. At first, I told myself it was just attraction and admiration. The pull I felt towards her that morning after we had sex the first time scared me and had me running out the door. I couldn’t run for long.

Now, when I look at her, her ambition, her soft stubbornness, her ability to survive the world without apology. I feel both admiration and fear. Because she was real. Not an ideal. Not a distraction. Real meant risk. Real meant I could lose her, too. I’d catch myself watching her sometimes, not the obvious kind of watching, but the quiet observation of someone memorizing presence. The way she leaned on one hip when she was thinking. The way her hands moved when she described a dish, like she was sculpting the air. And when she laughed, that open, unfiltered sound, something loosened in me, something that had been locked for a while. Still, I was careful. I didn’t want to need her so much that it’ll scare her away. I didn’t want to repeat the cycle of intensity that had ruined me before. But every time she walked out the door, my restraint felt less like discipline and more like denial.

I started to look forward to her calls in the middle of workday. To the way she said “hey”, soft, like she wasn’t sure if I was busy, but hoping I wasn’t. I started to check my phone without meaning to. Still, I struggled to find the language for it. How do you tell someone you want them without sounding like you’re asking them to save you? I didn’t want to repeat old patterns. I didn’t want her to think she was filling an empty space left by someone else. I wanted her to know she was the space, the one I hadn’t known I’d been designing toward all along. The truth? I wanted her in ways that terrified me. Not just in my bed or my arms, but in every aspect of my life. In my mornings, my chaos, my fatherhood, my blueprint of what peace looked like.

I stood  by my office window, coffee cooling in my hand, absentmindedly watching the morning crowd below. People hurried past each other in lines and clusters, heads down, faces washed in blue light from their phones. I sighed and dragged myself back to reality and the workload on my desk. Work was supposed to anchor me. Drafting, scaling, reimagining space. But the lines refused to stay straight. Every drawing led me back to her. I didn’t want to need her but I did. I picked up my phone and scrolled to her message from earlier.

“Hey you, I was picking up some lunch orders and thought about you hunched over those blueprints. I’m sending something from the restaurant to your office. No arguing, consider it field testing for my new recipe. Xoxo.”

I didn’t realize I’d been lost and grinning at my phone like a lunatic, until my assistant cleared his throat by the door way. “Sir, I was saying the meeting with the Chinese real estate firm is in thirty minutes.” I quickly put my phone away and schooled my features into neutrality. “Do we have everything ready?” He nodded and left. Giving me a knowing smile.

 the restaurant — no arguing. Consider it field testing for my menu.