Chapter 7; His name in My New Life

I did not respond to Priya’s text that night.

I made dinner instead. Pasta again, because apparently that was what I did now when something unsettled me. I stood in my narrow kitchen and boiled water and told myself it was fine. That it was just a professional overlap. That the design world in New York was not actually that large and this kind of thing happened all the time and it did not mean anything.

The pasta was good. The reasoning was not.

I knew Dominic. I knew how he operated. He did not do coincidences. He did not let things happen to him, he arranged them, quietly, from a distance, with the specific patience of a man who had spent his entire adult life turning situations to his advantage. The Hargrove account had a Hartley subsidiary attached to it and he had made sure I knew before anyone else told me, which meant he had been watching closely enough to know in the first place.

That was not nothing.

I washed the dishes, dried them, put them away, and went to bed. I lay there for a while staring at the ceiling and then I picked up my phone and texted Camille.

I told her about Priya’s message. Three sentences, plain and factual.

Her reply came in under a minute: “He is absolutely doing this on purpose and I need you to know that I am not even a little bit surprised.”

I put the phone face-down and closed my eyes.

In the morning I got up early, made coffee, and decided that whatever Dominic was doing, it was not going to touch my work. The Hargrove brief was sitting on my kitchen counter where I had left it the night before. I opened it while the coffee brewed and read through my own notes from the day before with fresh eyes.

The line I had written in the margin was still there. What does it feel like to arrive somewhere and actually feel it?

I circled it.

Then I got dressed and went to work.

Nicolas called a project meeting at nine. The whole team around the communal table, coffees in hand, the Hargrove brief printed and laid out between us. Nicolas ran meetings the way I wished all meetings were run: direct, no filler, everyone’s voice actually in the room.

“Selene has creative lead,” he said, which I already knew, but saying it in front of the team made it real in a different way. Dax nodded like it made sense. Petra had already pulled up a research folder she had clearly been building since the night before. Ro had three open tabs on his laptop and the barely contained energy of someone who had been thinking about this since breakfast.

I put my notebook on the table and told them my instinct.

“Hargrove is trying to be everything,” I said. “That’s the problem. Their current branding is trying to speak to everyone, which means it lands with nobody. I want to narrow the story. I want someone to walk into a Hargrove property and feel like the hotel already knows them. Not luxury for luxury’s sake. Familiarity. Warmth. The feeling of arriving somewhere that was expecting you.”

The room was quiet for a second.

Then Petra said, “That’s the brief nobody wrote but everyone felt.”

Dax leaned back in his chair. “It’s going to be harder to sell to the client than a standard refresh.”

“I know,” I said. “Let’s make it impossible to say no to.”

Nicolas had not said anything yet. I glanced at him and he was looking at me with an expression that was hard to read, somewhere between professional approval and something quieter. He caught me looking and nodded once.

“Let’s build it,” he said.

We worked through the morning. By noon we had a rough creative direction and a presentation skeleton that had real bones. I was in the middle of pulling reference images when my work email opened to a new message.

The sender was listed as Hartley Industries, Office of the CEO.

My hand went still on the mouse.

I read it once. Then again.

It was formal and short. It stated that as the Hartley subsidiary attached to the Hargrove account, Hartley Industries would require a liaison point of contact at Crane and Aldous Creative for project coordination purposes. It requested that the assigned contact reach out to schedule an initial alignment call at their earliest convenience.

It was signed by Priya on Dominic’s behalf.

I sat with it for a moment. My coffee had gone cold at my elbow. Ro was laughing at something Dax had said across the room and the sound felt very far away.

I forwarded the email to Nicolas with one line: “Saw this come in. Wanted you to see it before I responded.”

His reply came four minutes later: “Thanks for flagging. You okay to handle the liaison role given your history, or do you want me to reassign?”

I stared at that question for longer than it should have taken.

The easy answer was to ask him to reassign it. Clean, professional, no drama. Nobody would question it. Nicolas would handle it without making me explain and that would be the end of it.

I typed back: “I can handle it.”

I hit send before I could think about it too much.

That afternoon I drafted a response to the Hartley Industries email. Short, professional, zero personal warmth and zero hostility. I proposed three time slots for an initial alignment call the following week. I addressed it to Priya. I did not address it to Dominic and I did not acknowledge that I knew there was any connection beyond a professional one.

I read it over twice, sent it, and went back to my mood board.

At five o’clock, as people were packing up around me, my personal phone buzzed on the desk. Not a text this time. A call.

Dominic’s name was not on the screen because I had deleted his contact months ago. But I knew the number. Four years of marriage leaves certain things in your memory whether you want them there or not.

I let it ring.

It rang six times and went to voicemail.

I put my phone in my bag, said goodnight to Petra, and took the stairs down to the street. The evening was cool and the city was doing its loud indifferent thing all around me and I walked to the subway and told myself I had made the right call.

My phone buzzed again at the bottom of the stairs.

A voicemail notification.

I stood on the platform with the train coming in hot and loud and I pressed play.

His voice came through the speaker, low and careful, the way it got when he was choosing every word.

“Selene. I know you saw the email. I know you know what this is.” A pause. Not a dramatic one. Just a man collecting himself. “I’m not trying to make your life difficult. I just need you to know that I’m not going away. Not this time.”

The train doors opened.

I got on.

I did not delete the voicemail.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​