CHAPTER 5: Nicolas Crane

The offices of Crane & Aldous Creative were nothing like the corporate environments I had spent four years moving through as Dominic's wife. No uniformed staff, no marble atrium, no sense that the building itself was trying to communicate net worth. Crane & Aldous occupied the third and fourth floors of a converted warehouse in SoHo — exposed brick, open plan, the kind of organized creative chaos that had coffee rings on desks and good art on the walls and the particular productive noise of people who liked what they did.

I loved it immediately and told myself not to count on that.

The receptionist, a college-aged kid with paint on his sneakers, brought me to a glass-walled conference room and told me Nicolas would be with me in a moment. I set my portfolio on the table and straightened my jacket — a deep burgundy blazer I had bought the day before because the old Selene wore Dominic-adjacent neutrals and I was actively, consciously dismantling her — and looked out the glass at the open floor.

The designers were all ages. There was a woman in her fifties with silver-streaked hair and headphones, deeply focused. Three younger designers clustered around a monitor, gesturing. Someone had stuck a hand-lettered sign above the coffee machine that said: 'Good work requires bad drafts.'

I thought: yes. Exactly.

"You're Selene Whitmore."

I turned.

Nicolas Crane was not what I had expected from the name on the door, which had conjured something older and more corporate. He was in his early thirties, brown-skinned and broad-shouldered, in dark jeans and a white shirt rolled to the elbows. He had the kind of face that was open in a way that was not naive — open the way a well-designed space is open, intentionally, with structure underneath.

He was smiling, and unlike most professional smiles I had encountered in four years of Dominic's world, it reached his eyes.

"I am," I said. "Or I'm working on being her again."

He tilted his head. "That's either a complicated joke or a very interesting opening line for an interview."

"Both," I said. "I'm recently divorced. I'm trying not to let it be the most interesting thing about me."

He laughed — a real one, unguarded — and pulled out a chair across from me and sat down. "I appreciate the directness. Most people spend the first ten minutes pretending their personal life isn't relevant to how they work. It always is."

"Does that concern you? The divorce?"

"Only in the sense that I want to understand where you are. Not because it's a liability." He folded his hands on the table. "Your portfolio is extraordinary, by the way. The Aldous bookshop rebrand alone — I've shown that to every new hire for six months as an example of how to give a small client a large story."

Something warm moved through my chest. I had done that project for almost nothing, in the margins of a marriage, in a studio that was meant to be a consolation prize. I had not known it would end up on anyone's wall.

"Thank you," I said, and meant it more than was probably professionally appropriate.

* * *

He offered me the position before I left. Senior Designer, with a path to Creative Director within eighteen months if things went the way he expected. The salary was more than I had made at the firm I'd turned down three years ago. The office had that light, that noise, those people.

I said I needed twenty-four hours to think, because I had learned to be careful with yeses.

I called my mother from the street outside.

"He's charming," she said, before I could finish describing the meeting.

"That's not — I'm calling about the job, Mom."

"I know what you're calling about. I'm telling you what I heard in your voice. He's charming and the job is good and you want both and you're frightened."

I stopped on the sidewalk. A couple walked past me hand-in-hand, not looking where they were going, the way people in new love never look where they're going.

"The last time I was charmed —" I started.

"Nicolas Crane isn't Dominic Hartley," she said. "And you aren't twenty-four. Take the job. Trust the process. Give yourself permission to begin."

That night I called Nicolas Crane and told him yes.

And on the other side of the city, in an apartment where someone had recently removed all the objects from a windowsill, Dominic Hartley received a phone call from his father.

"I ran into Selene's mother at the symphony," Fletcher Hartley said.

Dominic's jaw tightened. "Is that relevant?"

"She says Selene has a new job. SoHo. Design firm." A pause. "She sounds well, apparently. Happy."

"Good," Dominic said. The word came out flat.

"You don't sound like you think it's good."

"I'm the one who filed, Dad."

"Yes," his father said. "I know. That's what I've been trying to figure out."

Dominic said nothing. Outside his window, the city did what it always did — moved, lit, continued, indifferent.

"She signed the same day," he said, finally.

"I know."

"I thought she'd —" He stopped.

"Call?" his father said quietly. "Fight? Ask you what the hell you were doing?"

Dominic pressed his thumb into the center of his palm.

"I thought she'd do something," he said. "I thought she —" He cut himself off again. Because what he was about to say was something a man like Dominic Hartley was not supposed to say, something that had been sitting in his chest since Tuesday morning and growing heavier every day.

I thought she still loved me enough to fight for us.

And I don't know what it means that she didn't.

"Get some sleep, son," his father said, and hung up.

Dominic Hartley stood at his window for a long time after that. The city moved below him. Selene Whitmore was somewhere in it, beginning something, and he had no idea what.

For the first time in longer than he could remember, that mattered to him enormou