《My Ex's Boss is My Baby's Father》全部章節：第 161 章 - 第 170 章

The first time Ji-young asked a question that was not an assistant question, they were in the third week of the installation's construction phase, standing in the gallery space with the suspension rigging newly installed and the first three garments waiting in their transport cases on the floor.Emma had been describing the height differential she wanted between the pieces, the way the variation in suspension would create a sense of movement through the space even when the garments were still. Ji-young was making notes on her tablet in the efficient shorthand she used for technical specifications.Then she stopped making notes and said: "Why does the lowest one need to be at that height specifically."Emma looked at her."If it were thirty centimetres lower," Ji-young said, "it would be within reach. A person standing in the space could touch it if they extended their arm.""The pieces aren't meant to be touched," Emma said."I know. That's why I'm asking about the height." Ji-young l

Saoirse left on a Sunday.The week between the conversation and the leaving had been good in the specific way of time that had been made honest: easier in some respects than the weeks before the conversation, the unspoken thing having taken up more space than the spoken thing did. They had gone to Gyeongbokgung on the Thursday, walking the palace grounds in the January cold, Saoirse stopping to look at things with the unhurried attention she gave to old structures, the way stone had been fitted and the way it had settled across centuries. They had eaten well and slept well and worked in companionable parallel in the studio on the Friday, Saoirse on her Cork commission drawings and Emma on the fourth rotation, neither of them returning to the conversation but both of them living in the space it had cleared.The leaving at the airport was the same as the October leaving and different from it. Longer. Both of them knowing what the other was thinking and neither saying it because they had

The opening was on a Thursday evening in late February, six weeks before the installation's run ended and the final rotation would be assembled and then, for the last time, taken down.Emma had been in the gallery since seven in the morning, which was not unusual for an opening day and which Ji-young had accommodated by arriving at seven-fifteen with two coffees and the clipboard she used for the day-of logistics. They had spent the morning on final adjustments: the lowest garment, the one that was almost within reach, had developed a slight rotation overnight from an air current near the ventilation system that Emma wanted corrected before the public saw it. The correction took forty minutes and was invisible once completed and was entirely necessary.Park Jisoo arrived at noon, the museum's curator who had overseen the commission and who had, since Emma's introduction of Ji-young three months earlier, been in regular conversation with her about the spring emerging artists programme.

The Murphys lived in Westmeath, two hours from Dublin by car, in a house outside a town called Mullingar that Saoirse had described as her mother's house with her father in it, which Emma had understood as a description of the domestic architecture of their marriage rather than a statement about ownership.They had met Saoirse's parents twice before: once in Dublin at a gallery opening two years ago, briefly, in the context of the event rather than the context of the relationship, which meant the introductions had been light and the expectations minimal. Once in London, even more briefly, when Saoirse's mother had been visiting a friend and they had had lunch, the three of them, which had been warm and slightly performed in the way of a first real meeting that both parties were trying to get right.This was different. This was the first weekend, invited explicitly as Saoirse's partner, staying in the house, in the category of introduction that meant: this is a person who is part of my

The wedding was in October, in a converted chapel on the grounds of a small estate outside Dublin, the kind of venue that had once been something else entirely and had been given over, with care, to becoming what it was now needed for.The Cross family arrived in full, which meant a level of logistical complexity that Lucien took on with the quiet efficiency he had brought to every family event for thirty years and that retirement had not diminished, only relocated. He had spent the week before coordinating flights and accommodations and the specific requirements of moving a family that now spanned three generations and several countries into a single Irish location for four days. Leo and Daniel arrived from London with Clara, now ten and full of opinions about Irish wildlife she had researched in advance, and Matteo, seven, who had brought a small bag of marine specimens he had collected on a previous trip and wanted to compare against whatever he found on the Irish coast. Jack and P