Chapter4

Celia's POV

I waited for her reply. The plate was still in my hand, the kitchen light still on overhead, my daughter still standing in front of me in her pajamas with the sugar already pink across her cheeks. I have always believed that if you leave a child enough room, she will walk back toward you on her own.

She looked at her feet instead.

I thought about the second notebook, the one with the crack down its spine, where I had written out every food that gave her a bad night. Casein. Gluten. The citric acid in the orange cake she loved. All of it catalogued with dates and reactions, the way I used to catalogue leaf-vein specimens under a bench lamp at Cornell.

When she was three, because doctors said she was far too frail to fend off illness, I remodelled her bedroom into a space halfway between a nursery and a greenhouse. I prepared custom nourishing meals for her and kept snacks and sweets off‑limits.

"Aunt Diana doesn’t control me,” Leonie said at last. “She doesn’t make me eat food I dislike, and she never says no to me. She just makes me happy.”

She studied her bare feet on the tile, as if the answer had been written there all along.

"You always make me feel like I did something wrong," she said.

She said it without any heat, without the slightest idea that she had just taken the last thing holding the floor up under me. Then she waited, politely, for me to send her to bed.

So that’s how she’s always seen me. Thinking about everything I did for her, I feel a wave of helplessness wash over me.

"Then I won't manage you so much from now on," I said. "You take care of yourself."

I set the plate on the counter beside the rest of the cake. I picked up the two suitcases I had carried down, walked out through the hall, and went down the front steps without turning around once.

My hands stayed steady the whole way out through the gates. That surprised me, because I had spent six years assuming a night like this would break me in half.

I drove to the house Mother had bought for me before my wedding and carried the suitcases inside.

I pushed open the door, and dust swirled in the lamplight. Old pine planks curled up from the floor. In the corner stood a stack of paintings I had never finished. Three flower pots on the windowsill were pale and cracked, standing rigid in parched soil.

I carried the brooch upstairs and set it on the nightstand beside Mother’s flower press. Then I cleaned for an hour, before sinking onto the freshly tidied bed and falling asleep from exhaustion.

At half past eight in the morning, sunlight streaming through the garret windows woke me. I brewed coffee, slipped a slice of plain white bread into the toaster, and ate standing up, while the street below filled with people carrying easels and portfolios.

Halfway through my breakfast, I realized what was different about this morning. There was no one to tend to. No one to wait for. I would never again stand by the window, listening for a car that might not come. This quiet, undisturbed life did not sound so bad, and a faint spark of joy stirred in me.

After breakfast, I dug the research notebooks out of the bottom of the second suitcase. Graft trials, photoperiod tables, culture-medium ratios in three colors of ink. I laid them out beside a portfolio I had not opened since before Leonie was born.

The sketches had gone pale, but every line on them was still mine. Celia Hart was still in here, I said out loud, to nobody.

Now that I was no longer the one caring for Leonie full‑time, hours of my days lay empty. With Arthur having frozen my bank accounts, I needed to earn my own money. Everything I’d learned hadn’t faded. I wanted to pick back up the craft my mother had taught me.

I called a broker that same afternoon and I set out to reclaim what I knew, to open a studio. She showed me three empty spaces within four blocks of the Loft, and the third one was the only one where the light moved the way I needed it to. A gutted warehouse, original beams, two skylights, a faint smell of seed and wet gravel coming up through the floorboards.

I was standing under the north skylight with one hand out, measuring the angle by feel, when somebody said my name behind me.

It was Julian Finch. He had lost his mother as a boy and grown up without means. My mother adopted him and taught him everything she knew about landscape design. I used to call him my brother. Once I married Arthur, who disapproved of our friendship, I let our connection fade.

Julian Finch stood in the doorway in a charcoal coat, paper cup in his hand. The surprise on his face wasn’t the ordinary kind — it was the quiet shock of someone who’d waited years for something he’d hardly dared hope would happen.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I’m leaving Arthur,” I said. “I’m going to open a studio.”

He fell silent for a few seconds, then he didn’t press further. I noticed.

“I have an event in three days, a landscape design reception,” Julian said. “It might work out well for you, help with the studio. Would you come with me?”

Warmth flooded through me. “Yes,” I said quickly, smiling.

A shiver ran through me, like the heavy stone that had sat on my chest for years had shifted, if only just a little.

It had been far too long since I stepped foot in this world that was once mine. For years, I had been nothing but a wife and a mother, consumed by my child’s diet, sleep and ailments. My craft, my passion, the bright version of myself I once was — all of it had been tucked away, covered in dust.

Three days later, I put on the dark green dress I’d bought before the wedding and never had the right occasion to wear. I went to the dinner party with Julian, and now I finally got the chance to wear it. The dinner was held in a private house on the Upper East Side. In the first hour, Julian introduced me to a curator.

We talked about root structures and drainage. Not one word about my marriage, my daughter, or anyone's opinion of either.

Then the noise near the door thinned the way it does when somebody arrives, and I looked up.

Diana came in on Arthur's arm in an ivory dress, the tape still on the back of her left hand. Arthur came in beside her in a dark suit, at his usual distance from the floor, and the room turned toward them the way a field turns toward weather.

I overheard people nearby murmuring. “Is that Mr. and Mrs. Winston? They make such a lovely pair.”

“I think so. They look so close.”

A wave of loss washed over me. Six years married to Arthur, yet no one here even recognised me as Mrs. Winston in the eyes of these strangers. My marriage had been nothing short of a failure.

I turned my gaze toward them. Diana looked over too, and my eyes locked with Arthur’s.