Chapter5

Celia's POV

The moment our eyes met across the room, I looked away first. For six years my body had known exactly one reflex in the second before a fight — chin down, shoulders in, voice dropping until it disappeared — and three days ago I had decided that reflex would never run me again.

So I turned back to Julian and to the glass in my hand. I could still feel the weight of him watching me, and I let it sit there. I didn't owe that stare one more minute of my attention.

The ache settled soft and heavy in my chest, but I pushed it aside. This night was not about him.

“Someone I’d like you to meet,” Julian said, gesturing to a man in his fifties nearby.

The man turned, his hands rough and weathered from years of outdoor work. “I’m Houghton,” he said.

Julian spoke next, using my full name. “This is Celia Hart. She has a doctorate in botany from Cornell. She drafted the Royal Conservatory’s design.”

Houghton nodded. “I’ve picked up an old estate upriver. I’m after a garden, nothing derivative, no copying other designers.”

Horton asked me several practical questions, and I answered him with the same direct candour I’d once used when speaking to my professors. I went on to tell him that I was a landscape designer and would soon be opening my own studio.

Then I reached into my bag and took out a card printed three days ago on cheap paper, with nothing on it but my name, my field, and an email address I had never used once. My hand did not shake, and that was the first time in six years I had offered my own name to a stranger with no husband standing in front of it.

I had just handed over my business card when Diana appeared, wine glass in hand, as if she were merely passing by. “This is Celia,” she said to Horton. “She hasn’t worked in six years. So if you’re interested, you might come to me instead. I have more experience.”

She held out her card, heavy matte stock with a foil edge, and everything she didn't say sat right on top of it. A beginner. Out of practice. Hire at your own risk.

Before I could answer, Arthur was there, close enough that his shoulder took the light. "Celia is my wife," he said. "She has spent the last six years at home. If you want this done well, Ms. Cartwright is the one to call."

One sentence wiped out my degree. The other wiped out the six years I had paid for it, and put me back in the kitchen where the family preferred to keep me.

My hand was still in the air with my thumb pressed into the corner of the card, creasing it. I looked around the room and priced everything in it.

I tarted to speak, ready to counter Arthur, but my eyes caught sight of two guests near the fireplace had turned toward us with their glasses low, first. I reined in my anger, resolving to settle things with him later.

Not because I was afraid. Because I had finally learned to price things, and this fight was worth less than the man standing in front of me.

Julian hung half a step back beside me and cut in. “She studied under the same professor I did, I can speak for her work.”

Horton took both cards and clutched them in one hand. He said he would think it over, then slipped away into the crowd.

After he left, I turned to Arthur. "You don't look like my husband," I said. "You look a lot more like hers." Somebody behind me breathed out fast. "But I don't care anymore. I'm divorcing you either way."

Then I rolled my eyes at both of them, slow and unhurried, and walked off with Julian to the greenhouse prints on the far wall.

I didn't have to look back to know what happened to Arthur's face. Divorce wasn't a new word — he had heard it three nights ago and shrugged it off on his way out the door.

What was new was the way I said it, in the voice I would use to read out a soil pH. Wanting nothing from him at all.

I stayed another hour and let the room watch me drink water and talk about drainage. When I told Julian I was running to the restroom, he nodded and stayed with the prints.

The corridor out back was lit with the cold kind of light that shows every line in your face. Diana was standing at the end of it alone with her bag in both hands.

She had been waiting for me, and I realised it after three steps. Still I kept walking, because to turn back would be to admit I was afraid of her.

As I walked past her, Diana stretched out a hand to stop me. I halted, waiting to see what she meant to do.

"I've been meaning to give you this," she said, and took a small watch out of her bag. "Leonie gave it to me. I heard you made it yourself — that it watches her heart rate and her temperature. Very kind. I don't need it."

She held it out at arm's length with her wrist turned so the tape showed. "Give it back to her for me."

I knew that watch before I knew her. The stitching inside the band was laid in short tight stitches I had put there myself.

The engraving on the back of the case, two letters and her birthday, I had scratched one stroke at a time with a needle file, because in those years I couldn't spare the machine work. A week of nights, after everyone was asleep.

She wore it for four years.

"No," I said. "Give it back to her yourself." I held it out to her flat on my palm, the way I would hand back a cutting.

She didn't take it. She looked at my hand, then past my shoulder, and something in her face changed like a curtain pulled for a show that hadn't started yet.

The watch dropped. She went down after it, backward, and the back of her skull met the wainscoting with a blunt wooden crack I felt in my teeth.

For two full seconds I stood there with my arm still out, and my first thought was not I never touched her. My first thought was, why would she fall here, where the floor is dry and there is nothing in this world to trip on.

I even looked down at the watch where it had rolled against the baseboard, its face still lit. Then a voice behind me, hard and low and perfectly articulate.

"Celia. What are you doing?"