Chapter 033: Building Something Hers

Natasha's POV

"Tell me you're not still living on gas station coffee and adrenaline."

Priya said it the second she walked through the office door, two paper cups balanced in one hand, a garment bag over her shoulder that turned out to hold, when she finally set it down, three framed prints she'd apparently had made without asking me — old event photos, ones from years back at Bloom & Co. that neither of us had ever gotten proper credit for.

"I switched to real coffee yesterday," I said. "Progress."

"Barely." She looked around the space with an expression somewhere between pride and disbelief, taking in the exposed brick, the long worktable I'd found secondhand and had refinished myself over a weekend, the single elegant chandelier the previous tenant had left behind that I'd decided, against all reasonable financial sense, was nonnegotiable. "It's real, Natasha. Two weeks ago this was a sketch on a napkin. Now it's — this."

"It's real," I agreed, and felt the truth of that settle somewhere warm in my chest.

I hadn't expected the work itself to feel this different. I'd assumed, going in, that event planning was event planning regardless of whose name was on the door — the same floral orders, the same seating charts, the same delicate art of managing difficult clients without letting them see you manage them.

What I hadn't expected was how much lighter every single task felt once none of it existed to prop up anyone else's reputation but my own.

I'd hired Priya within the first three days, no real deliberation involved, because loyalty didn't need deliberation once you understood what it had actually cost the other person to earn it.

She'd walked away from Bloom & Co.'s comfortable seniority to come build something unproven and risky alongside me, and she'd done it the same week she found out Diane was genuinely sorry to lose her, which told me everything I needed to know about where her actual priorities sat.

"You know what's strange," I said, unpacking a box of client folders onto the new shelving, "is that this is the first thing since the scandal broke that hasn't come with Ace's name attached anywhere.

Not the funding — that's his, obviously, but he made sure of the one condition, and I've held to it completely. No Stone Industries contracts. No convenient introductions. Every single lead so far has come in cold."

"How does that feel?"

I thought about it honestly before I answered, because I owed myself the honest version rather than the easy one. "Terrifying. And better than almost anything else has felt in over the past few months."

It had been, I realized, genuinely over some months now since the scandal first broke — the club video, the wedding disaster, the marriage that had started as a business arrangement and quietly, without either of us fully agreeing to the change, stopped being one.

Months of being defined, in one way or another, by other people's actions. Ethan's cruelty. Noel's campaign. Even Ace's protection, generous and real as it was, had still been something happening to me rather than something I'd built myself.

This was different. This was mine, built from a napkin sketch and a secondhand worktable and Priya's stubborn loyalty, and for the first time in longer than I could easily measure, I recognized the woman doing the building.

Not the quiet, overlooked planner who'd let her work speak because she'd never trusted her own voice to.

Someone braver than that.

Someone who'd earned the right to take up a little more space.

The inquiry came in on a Thursday, buried among a modest handful of others that had trickled in that first week — nothing flashy yet, nothing that would make a headline, which suited me perfectly fine. I'd expected to build slowly. I hadn't expected the very first genuinely significant request to arrive quite this early.

Client: Private inquiry — name withheld by request.

Event type: Consultation — special occasion, complete discretion required.

Preferred contact method: In person only.

I read it twice, feeling a small, genuine thrill move through me. This was exactly the kind of client MaCarro Events needed early — someone who wanted discretion, who wasn't coming for the Stone name because, per the terms of the funding, there simply wasn't a Stone name attached to any of it.

Someone who'd found me, specifically, on the strength of the work itself.

"Book it," I told Priya, barely glancing up from the intake form. "Tomorrow afternoon if she's available. I want our first major consultation to go perfectly."

"No name at all?"

"Some people like keeping things private until the first meeting — high-profile clients do it all the time, you know that." I was already moving on to the next folder, mind half on floral vendors, half on the seating layout I still needed to finalize for a smaller event that weekend. "We'll get the full picture tomorrow. That's kind of the point of a consultation."

I didn't think about it again that night. I told Ace about it over dinner, mentioned it almost in passing, more excited about the fact of a serious inquiry at all than curious about who exactly was behind the vague, deliberately blank request. He asked, mildly, whether I wanted him to have Marcus run a background check before the meeting — standard practice now, given everything — and I told him, gently but firmly, that this was precisely the kind of thing I needed to handle entirely on my own. My company. My judgment. My risk to take.

He didn't push. I appreciated that more than I said out loud.

The next afternoon, I dressed carefully — not for Ace's world this time, not for board members or cameras, but for myself, a blazer I'd chosen specifically because it made me feel like the woman running this office rather than a woman borrowing someone else's confidence to sit in it.

Priya set out water, arranged the small conference table with the careful precision she brought to everything, and at exactly two o'clock, the buzzer sounded.

I opened the door already smiling, already halfway through the warm, practiced greeting I'd used a hundred times with a hundred nervous clients, the words forming easily on autopilot while some small, distracted part of my mind was still finishing a thought about seating charts.

"Welcome to MaCarro Events, I'm so glad you could—"

The words simply stopped. My smile fading into thin air the moment I saw a familiar figure.

A woman stood in my doorway, her back facing me. Dressed impeccably, composed in a way that felt almost rehearsed, wearing an expression of perfectly calm, perfectly pleasant interest that didn't quite reach her eyes. She turned around to face me fully and I noticed

she wasn't a stranger. I understood that much instantly, in the half-second before recognition fully landed — something about the tilt of her chin, the unbothered ease of a woman who had never once in her life needed to knock before entering a room.

I just couldn't, for one long, suspended moment, make myself finish putting a name to her.

"Surprised?" she said softly, stepping past me into the office without waiting to be invited. "I figured my real name would have gotten me turned away at the door. Discretion seemed like the more honest approach, all things considered."

I stood frozen in my own doorway, hand still half-extended in a greeting I never finished, every professional instinct I'd spent three years building screaming at me to recover, to smile, to somehow salvage a meeting I already understood, with a slow, sinking certainty, had nothing whatsoever to do with planning an event.