The marble floor beneath her feet is worn smooth in the center, generations of footsteps having traced the same path from door to staircase. Theodora finds herself wondering how many anxious authors have stood exactly where she’s standing, clutching manuscripts instead of portfolios, waiting to learn whether their words would be deemed worthy of the Fairfax imprint. The thought is simultaneously comforting and unsettling. She’s part of a continuum, but also just another hopeful petitioner at the gates.
She bends to retrieve her portfolio case, her fingers finding the leather handle worn soft by her own nervous grip during the past week of preparation. The weight of it grounds her. Inside are her best pieces, the illustrations that represent not just technical skill but the particular vision she brings to storytelling. Jules has already seen samples, of course, has already approved her for this commission, but Theodora can’t shake the feeling that the building itself requires convincing.
A woman appears at the top of the staircase, silhouetted against a window that casts her in amber light. For a disorienting moment, Theodora thinks it might be Jules, but the figure is too angular, moving with a different quality of purpose. The woman descends three steps, then pauses, one hand on the banister, and Theodora realizes she’s being assessed with the same cool appraisal as the portraits.
“You must be the illustrator,” the woman says, her voice carrying easily down the stairwell despite its softness. Not a question, but not quite a statement either: something in between, leaving Theodora uncertain whether she’s expected to confirm or elaborate.
“Theodora Ashworth,” she offers, keeping her voice level, professional. “I’m here to see Jules Pemberton.”
The woman nods slowly, as though this information requires consideration, then continues her descent with measured steps.
She sets her portfolio case down on the checkered marble, the sound echoing up the stairwell with more finality than she’d intended, and takes a moment to steady her breathing. The building smells exactly as she’d imagined from Jules’s descriptions over the years. Old paper and furniture polish and something indefinably musty, like opening a book that hasn’t been read in decades. It’s the scent of accumulated stories, she thinks, though whether that’s poetic or pretentious she can’t quite decide.
Through an open doorway to her left, she glimpses a cluttered office where someone is speaking urgently into a phone about print runs and distribution, their voice rising with each sentence. The panic is palpable even from here, and Theodora finds herself cataloguing the details instinctively: the precarious stacks of manuscripts, the coffee ring on the desk, the way the speaker’s free hand gestures emphatically at no one.
She’s already composing the scene in her mind, translating it into line and shadow, the way she always does when nervous. It’s an old habit, this retreat into observation, this transformation of the world into something she might capture on paper.
A young woman with a lanyard and an armful of manuscripts hurries past, offering a distracted smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes before disappearing down a corridor. Theodora catches fragments of conversation drifting from upper floors, laughter, then a raised voice, the rhythmic clacking of a keyboard suddenly silenced. The building feels alive in a way her quiet studio never does, inhabited by a century of literary ambitions and disappointments, and she wonders how many other artists have stood in this exact spot, portfolio in hand, hoping to prove themselves worthy. How many were still standing here years later, and how many had their portfolios returned with polite rejections, their names forgotten before they’d even properly arrived?
Her fingers itch for a pencil to capture the composition. These men arranged in descending chronological order, their expressions growing progressively less certain as the decades advance. The most recent portrait, dated 1987-2019, shows a woman: Helena Fairfax, whose painted eyes hold something the men’s lack. Resignation, perhaps. Or foreknowledge. Theodora wonders where Dominic’s portrait will hang, if he ever allows one to be painted, and whether the wall has space left for refusal.
Footsteps descend the staircase (measured, purposeful) and Theodora’s breath catches. The sound carries weight, expectation, the accumulated pressure of fifteen years compressed into approaching seconds. Her pulse quickens stupidly, as though her body hasn’t learned that reunions are never simple resurrections. She adjusts her portfolio strap, a habitual gesture of armour, and watches the landing where Jules will materialize, wondering which of them has changed more, and whether that change will prove navigable or merely polite.
Jules’s embrace is firm and real, smelling of the same jasmine perfume she wore as a teenager, and for a moment Theodora feels the years collapse: they’re fifteen again, sprawled on Jules’s bedroom floor making lists of books they’d publish someday, arguing over whether literary fiction could survive without commercial compromise. Jules had been certain it could; Theodora had been less sure even then.
But when Jules pulls back, her smile is complicated by something Theodora can’t quite read, a flicker of calculation behind the warmth that suggests their reunion serves multiple purposes. It’s there in the way Jules’s hands linger on Theodora’s shoulders for half a beat too long, as though assessing structural integrity. As though determining whether Theodora can bear weight.
“You look exactly the same,” Jules says, which is both generous and untrue. “Still got paint under your nails.”
“And you’ve gone terrifyingly competent.” Theodora gestures at Jules’s immaculate suit, the leather portfolio tucked under one arm. “Editorial Director. Christ, Jules. We really did get old.”
“Speak for yourself.” But Jules’s laugh has an edge of exhaustion. “Come on, I’ll show you where you’ll be working. Fair warning: the third floor’s a bit chaotic at the moment. Restructuring.”
The word lands with peculiar emphasis, and Theodora files it away alongside the other small strangeness: the receptionist’s too-bright greeting, the way the ground-floor editor had looked up sharply when Jules said Theodora’s name, then away again just as quickly. The building itself feels tense, as though holding its breath.
“Restructuring sounds ominous,” Theodora says carefully, following Jules toward the staircase.
“Does it?” Jules’s tone is studiedly light. “Just the usual publishing drama. You know how it is. Everyone convinced the industry’s dying, panicking accordingly.” She starts climbing, her heels clicking against the worn wood. “We’re actually doing rather well, all things considered.”
The qualification, all things considered, hangs in the air like smoke.
As they ascend, Jules’s hand trails along the bannister with the unconscious possession of someone who’s climbed these stairs a thousand times, and she gestures toward the second-floor landing where a Fairfax ancestor supposedly dueled over a rejected manuscript in 1873. The bloodstain long since scrubbed away but the story preserved in house mythology, growing more baroque with each retelling. “Probably apocryphal,” Jules says, “but we like our legends.”
Theodora notices how Jules’s anecdotes carefully circle around certain subjects, creating conversational gaps that feel deliberate. She mentions Dominic’s academic sabbatical, Lillian’s impressive acquisition record, the new intern who keeps mixing up the filing system: but there are names conspicuously absent, spaces where other people should logically appear in these stories. It’s the editorial equivalent of airbrushing, and Theodora recognizes the technique from her own avoidance strategies.
“Who else is on three?” she asks, testing the boundary.
Jules’s pause is fractional but perceptible. “Oh, the usual crowd. You’ll meet everyone at the staff meeting tomorrow.” Her smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Easier to do introductions all at once, I think.”
Which means, Theodora translates silently, there’s someone Jules would rather she didn’t meet alone first.
On the third-floor landing, Jules pauses to straighten a crooked portrait of some stern Victorian Fairfax and Theodora catches the way her friend’s jaw tightens, the muscle jumping beneath her carefully applied makeup. The gesture is too deliberate, a manufactured moment of distraction that allows Jules to turn her face away.
“It’s been a complicated few months,” Jules says quietly, still fussing with the frame’s alignment though it’s already perfectly straight. The understatement hangs between them like a held breath, an invitation to ask questions Theodora isn’t sure she’s ready to have answered. The portrait gazes down at them both with Fairfax judgment, and Theodora wonders what complications warrant this particular quality of careful silence.
Jules pushes open the door with her shoulder, “This one always sticks in humid weather”, and the room unfolds before them, all lofty ceilings and dusty sunlight slanting through tall windows that haven’t seen a proper cleaning in months. She gestures toward a corner workspace, already cleared and waiting. The thoughtfulness touches Theodora even as she registers the territorial glances from other staff members, the subtle recalibration of social geometry around this newcomer who doesn’t yet understand the room’s invisible borders.
Theodora watches Jules disappear down the corridor, already speaking urgently into her phone, and feels the peculiar vertigo of standing in a room full of strangers who somehow know her story. Or think they do. She turns to the desk and notices someone has left a small potted succulent on the corner, a gesture of welcome that feels both generous and slightly performative, as though the office itself is auditioning for her approval.
The desk accepts her belongings with the patience of wood that has witnessed a century of creative anxiety. Theodora runs her fingers along a particularly deep gouge near the edge: some long-dead editor’s moment of frustration, perhaps, or triumph carved too enthusiastically. The surface holds memory like rings in a tree.
She positions her pencils with the deliberation of someone performing a spell: 6H to 6B, left to right, the gradient from whisper to shout. Her brushes, sable, squirrel, synthetic, stand at attention in the jar she’s carried through three studio moves and one catastrophic relationship. The ceramic is chipped at the rim, a casualty of the night she’d thrown it at a wall (missing Rowan’s head by inches, though she’d aimed for the plaster). She’d glued it back together the next morning, alone, the crack now a visible seam she refuses to hide.
The portable lightbox clicks on with its familiar hum, a sound that means work in a language deeper than words. She angles it toward the window, where October light filters through glass that’s held its position since Victoria was queen. Dust motes drift in the illumination, lazy and indifferent to the human dramas unfolding around them.
Her hands move through these preparations with muscle memory, but her attention fractures outward, cataloguing the room’s inhabitants like a painter blocking in composition. She’s always worked this way: absorbing the emotional weather of a space before committing anything to paper. The atmosphere here is complex: ambition and anxiety braided together, the particular tension of creative people forced into commercial constraints, the weight of legacy pressing down on contemporary shoulders.
The succulent on the desk corner regards her with the stoicism of its species. Someone has overwatered it slightly; the soil is too dark, too damp. She makes a mental note to rescue it before kindness kills it entirely.
The watercolor palette emerges from its protective cloth like an artifact, its wells worn to different depths by her preferences. Cerulean and burnt sienna hollowed deeper than the cadmium yellow she uses sparingly. She positions it beside the lightbox, and the action completes some internal circuit: now she could work, if work were required.
But the room demands attention first.
Lillian’s voice crests again, that particular pitch that means she’s losing ground in whatever negotiation she’s conducting. “Marcus, I’ve told you the timeline,” A pause, during which her free hand clenches. “No, I can’t simply,” The laugh that follows could cut glass. Theodora watches the light fracture through that enormous ring, scattering tiny rainbows across the wall.
Dominic’s perambulations have brought him to the poetry section, where he stands with one finger tracing spine after spine, not pulling anything free. His lips move slightly. Reciting something, perhaps, or arguing with a memory.
From Kit’s office: papers shifting with the deliberate care of someone who knows they’re being observed. A drawer slides closed. The chair protests under redistributed weight: someone trying to find a position that doesn’t hurt.
The junior editor materialises beside the printer with that particular shuffle of someone trying to appear casual while executing a reconnaissance mission. She’s perhaps twenty-three, with a silver nose ring catching the afternoon light and manuscripts clutched against her chest like protective armour.
“I’m Priya,” she offers, her smile carefully calibrated: warm enough to seem genuine, guarded enough to permit retreat. “Editorial assistant. Well, assistant to the assistants, really.” A self-deprecating laugh that sounds rehearsed.
Theodora recognises the expression immediately: the studied friendliness of someone who’s been briefed. Be welcoming to the new illustrator. Jules wants her comfortable. But no one’s explained why it matters, why this particular freelancer warrants special attention. Priya’s curiosity radiates from her like heat, competing with caution.
“Jules mentioned you’d worked with the house before?” The question emerges too carefully, fishing.
Through the partially open door across the hall, Theodora watches Kit’s hand reach for what appears to be a hospital letterhead (the distinctive blue header unmistakable even at this distance) hesitate mid-air as though the paper itself might burn, then deliberately place it face-down beneath a manuscript stack with the careful precision of someone who’s performed this concealment ritual countless times before. Their eyes meet across the intervening space: Kit’s gaze sharp, assessing, daring her to acknowledge what she’s witnessed. Then they return their attention to the papers with such pointed finality that Theodora understands she’s been warned.
The sketches pin easily to cork that’s already punctured with a hundred previous holes, each tiny crater a ghost of projects past. Theodora steps back to assess the composition (a woman’s silhouette dissolving into typography, the kind of literary metaphor that sells) and catches her reflection in the window glass: paint already smudging her collar, hair escaping its pins, looking exactly as she did fifteen years ago when she last worked in publishing, before everything fell apart.
The satchel lands with a satisfying thump, real leather, not the synthetic stuff that pretends at durability, and Theodora unclasps the brass buckles that have oxidized to a mottled green over fifteen years of use. The desk beneath accepts it without complaint, its surface a palimpsest of creative violence: gouges from X-Acto knives wielded with deadline desperation, overlapping rings where countless mugs have sweated their tannin signatures, initials carved by bored editorial assistants who’ve long since moved to better-paying positions at Penguin or Bloomsbury.
She begins the ritual that transforms any surface into hers. Brushes first: sable and synthetic, arranged by size in the ceramic jar she’d thrown herself during a brief pottery phase, its glaze crackled but serviceable. The inks come next, organized not alphabetically but by color temperature, warm to cool, because that’s how her mind works: burnt sienna bleeding into raw umber into Payne’s grey into Prussian blue. Her favorite palette knife, its wooden handle worn smooth by her thumb, finds its place at precisely two o’clock from her dominant hand. Close enough to grab without looking, far enough to avoid accidental sweeps when she’s gesturing.
Each object is a small flag planted in foreign territory, a declaration that she has a right to occupy this corner, this window, this particular configuration of light and air. Even as she arranges them, though, her peripheral vision, that artist’s curse of seeing everything at once, catches the junior editor three desks over, a young woman with asymmetrical hair and multiple ear piercings, watching her with undisguised curiosity before snapping her attention back to her screen with performative intensity.
Theodora knows that look. It’s the expression of someone who’s been briefed, warned, or gossiped to about the new arrival. Someone who knows things Theodora doesn’t yet know about herself.
She’s halfway through unpacking her watercolor set, the little pans of pigment nested in their tin like jeweled secrets, when Lillian breezes past in a cloud of expensive perfume and barely contained chaos, phone pressed to her ear. Her voice shifts mid-sentence from professional warmth, “absolutely, I completely understand your concerns”, to clipped irritation, “Marcus, I told you I can’t discuss this now”, the transition so abrupt it’s almost violent.
Theodora pretends to focus on arranging her pencils by hardness, 6B to 4H, a gradient of graphite potential, while actually tracking the sudden silence that falls over the neighboring desks like snow. Fingers pause over keyboards mid-word. The junior editor with the asymmetrical hair freezes with her coffee mug halfway to her lips. Even Dominic, visible through the glass partition of his office, glances up from whatever eighteenth-century correspondence he’s been using as emotional armor.
It’s the collective held breath of people waiting for something. An explosion, a revelation, the next act of a drama Theodora hasn’t been given the script for. The air feels thick with anticipation, and she realizes with creeping unease that she might be the only person in the building who doesn’t know what everyone’s waiting for.
The cramped third-floor kitchen becomes unavoidable when she needs water for her brushes. She enters to find two editorial assistants mid-conversation, their words dying the moment they register her presence. The silence has texture, guilty, awkward, almost apologetic.
“Lovely weather,” one offers, her smile so bright it could power the building.
“For November,” the other adds, as though this matters.
Theodora fills her jar at the sink, the tap’s metallic shriek the only honest sound in the room. She can feel the weight of everything they’re not saying pressing against her shoulder blades like physical touch. They want her gone. Not maliciously. They simply need her absence to resume their interrupted narrative, and she’s an inconvenient witness to secrets she hasn’t earned the right to know.
Her pencil stills over the paper. The office arranges itself into a composition of careful distances and deliberate proximities. People who orbit each other without touching, spaces charged with significance she can’t decode. She recognizes the grammar of workplace tension, but here the syntax feels baroque, layered with history. Every glance carries footnotes she hasn’t read.
She catches fragments. A manuscript title mentioned in hushed tones, someone’s name that makes shoulders tense, the phrase “before the diagnosis” cut short when she rounds a corner. The publishing house operates in two registers: the surface conversation about cover designs and market trends, and beneath it, a subterranean current of meaning she can’t yet access. Her outsider status feels suddenly precarious, like standing on ice whose thickness she cannot judge.
The assessment in Kit’s eyes is surgical: not hostile, precisely, but clinical in its detachment. Theodora has been measured and categorized, filed away in whatever mental architecture Kit maintains to organize the world into manageable components. She finds herself cataloging in return: the expensive tailoring that can’t quite disguise the weight loss, the way Kit’s free hand rests against the doorframe for a moment before they push off, the controlled breathing of someone managing pain they refuse to acknowledge.
There’s something familiar in that refusal, though she can’t place it immediately. Then it surfaces: her mother, in those final months, insisting on lipstick and earrings for hospital appointments, as if presentation could hold back entropy. The memory arrives with the particular ache of recognition she’d rather not have.
Kit disappears into Jules’s office, the door closing with the soft, expensive click of original Victorian hardware. Through the frosted glass panel, Theodora can see their silhouettes, Jules standing, Kit settling into the chair opposite her desk with the careful lowering of someone whose body has become unreliable. The folder opens. Papers emerge. Jules’s posture shifts from welcoming to defensive, her shoulders drawing back.
Theodora returns her attention to her sketches, but her pencil has stilled. She’s supposed to be designing a cover for a debut novel about inheritance and estrangement, and the irony isn’t lost on her. The protagonist returns to her family home after years away, only to discover that absence hasn’t preserved anything: it’s merely allowed rot to progress unseen.
Around her, the publishing house continues its afternoon rhythms. Keyboards clatter. Someone laughs in the kitchen. The photocopier whirs and jams. But underneath, that other frequency persists: the one where something is ending, where decisions are being made that will reshape the topology of this place, where she has arrived at precisely the wrong moment, or perhaps exactly the right one, depending on whose story this turns out to be.
The coffee arrives in a Fairfax & Sons mug. One of the commemorative ones from the centenary, chipped at the rim. Lillian sets it down with the careful precision of someone performing a gesture they’ve seen others make, friendship as muscle memory rather than impulse.
“These are gorgeous,” she says, gesturing at the sketches without really looking at them. Her phone vibrates against her palm. She glances down, types something with her thumb, then seems to remember Theodora exists. “Sorry. Crisis with the spring catalog. Well, crisis is overselling it. Everything’s a crisis today, apparently.”
Her laugh has a brittle quality, like sugar spun too thin. The engagement ring catches the light as she gestures, and Theodora notices how Lillian’s other hand immediately moves to still it, as if the diamond’s brightness embarrasses her.
“Are you finding everything you need? Jules said to make sure you’re settled.” Another glance at the phone. “God, sorry. I’m being appalling. It’s just.”It’s lovely to have you here. Fresh perspective. We’ve all been circling the same conversations for too long.”
The phone vibrates again. Lillian’s smile becomes apologetic, then she’s gone.
The Georgian townhouse performs its own surveillance, Theodora realizes. Sound travels through the building’s bones with peculiar selectivity, Jules’s voice rising sharp in her office before the door closes with deliberate softness, footsteps approaching along the corridor only to hesitate, retreat, choose a different destination. The floorboards creak their announcements: someone pacing in Kit’s office, someone descending to the archive, someone standing just outside the editorial suite as if gathering courage or eavesdropping. Even the radiators participate, their clanking and hissing providing cover for whispered conversations in doorways. The building has witnessed 125 years of publishing dramas; it knows how to amplify tension, how to make privacy impossible, how to ensure that every secret eventually travels through its walls like damp.
Dominic drifts through the editorial suite twice within an hour, each time clutching different leather-bound volumes: first a burgundy tome, then something smaller, cloth-covered. The second time he slows near her workspace, mouth opening as if to speak, then visibly recalculates, continuing toward his office with the careful neutrality of someone who has learned that observation is safer than participation, that inherited family businesses come with inherited complications best avoided.
The transformation happens in increments too small for certainty yet too consistent for coincidence: Kit’s usual decisive stride becomes measured, economical, as though each movement requires calculation. Their hand rests against the doorframe longer than necessary (steadying or gathering, Theodora cannot tell) and when their gaze sweeps the office, it carries the peculiar weight of someone cataloguing what they might be leaving behind, memorizing ordinary things that have suddenly become precious.
She watches the staff begin their end-of-day rituals, Lillian organizing manuscripts into color-coded stacks with mechanical precision, Dominic shelving books with the reverent care of someone handling sacred objects, a junior editor whose name she hasn’t learned yet refreshing their email compulsively as if waiting for news. And recognizes the choreography of collective anxiety, the way people create busy-work to avoid confronting what they cannot control.
It’s the small deviations that tell the truth. Lillian’s color-coding system has become baroque, unnecessarily elaborate: she’s subdivided the urgent manuscripts into gradations of urgency that serve no practical purpose, creating distinctions without differences. Dominic doesn’t simply shelve books; he adjusts their spines until they align with geometric perfection, then returns minutes later to verify they haven’t shifted. The junior editor. Sophie?: has developed a rhythm to her email checking: refresh, scan, deflate, wait exactly forty-seven seconds, repeat. Theodora has been counting.
These are the rituals of people who have lost faith in their ability to influence outcomes, who have redirected their need for control toward the minutiae they can still command. She’s seen it before, in hospital waiting rooms and solicitors’ offices, this transformation of competent adults into superstitious children who believe that if they just perform the right sequence of meaningless actions, they can hold catastrophe at bay.
Jules moves through the space with studied normalcy, pausing at each desk to offer words Theodora cannot hear but can read in the slight relaxation of shoulders, the momentary softening of anxious faces. It’s a performance of leadership, of steadiness, and Theodora wonders how much effort it requires to maintain that facade when surely Jules must feel the same vertigo they all do, standing on ground that shifts beneath them.
The light has changed quality now, gone honeyed and elegiac, the kind of light that makes everything look already remembered, already lost.
The building’s exhalation becomes more pronounced as shadows lengthen. A sigh that seems to emanate from the walls themselves. Theodora’s illustrator’s eye catalogs the visual grammar of decline: watermarks spreading across the ornate ceiling like continents on an antique map, their edges soft and inexorable. The computer monitors are relics from a decade past, their thick bezels and bluish cast aging everyone who works beneath them, adding years to faces already marked by professional anxiety.
What strikes her most is the acoustic landscape. Conversations don’t simply happen quietly here. They’re deliberately muted, as though the staff have collectively agreed that certain volumes are dangerous. It’s not reverence for the library-like atmosphere; it’s something more primal. The way people lower their voices in hospitals. In churches. In rooms where someone is dying.
She notices how carefully people move through the space, avoiding the floorboards that protest most loudly, sidestepping the loose carpet edge near the filing cabinets. They’ve mapped the building’s vulnerabilities and learned to navigate around them, the way one learns to avoid topics that might trigger an argument, subjects too painful to name directly.
Jules passes through the editorial suite with a stack of contracts, her heels clicking a deliberate rhythm against the floorboards. She pauses at Theodora’s makeshift workspace, and the hand that settles on Theodora’s shoulder carries a complicated weight: part welcome, part plea, part apology for something not yet named.
The touch is warm, familiar in the way of childhood friendships that survive decades of silence, yet there’s a tremor in it. A vibration that speaks of impossible calculations being performed in real time: how to honor a hundred and twenty-five years of history while the quarterly reports sketch an increasingly bleak trajectory. How to choose between the people you’ve known since you were seven and the survival of an institution that employed your mother, your aunt, the neighbors who brought casseroles when your father died.
Theodora doesn’t turn, doesn’t acknowledge the gesture beyond a slight lean into the pressure, but she understands. Jules is carrying everyone’s futures in those contracts, and the weight is becoming unbearable.
Through the half-open door, Theodora catches fragments (“prognosis,” “timeline,” “arrangements”) words that belong to hospital corridors, not publishing houses. Kit’s voice drops to something almost pleading before snapping back to steel, and Theodora recognizes the performance: her own mother had sounded exactly like this, bargaining with oncologists as though cancer were merely another contract to be renegotiated, another clause to be amended through sheer force of will.
Her hands move automatically, capping bottles and wiping brushes, whilst her mind catalogues the signs she’d been too eager to miss: the hushed urgency, the careful kindness, the way people here move through rooms as though already practising absence. She knows this choreography intimately. The exhausting dance of carrying on whilst the ground shifts beneath you, pretending solidity where there’s only sand.
The introductions happened in a blur of names and titles, Lillian from acquisitions with her diamond catching the light, Marcus from marketing whose handshake lasted a beat too long, someone from publicity whose name dissolved the moment it was spoken. But Theodora registered only Kit’s presence. The way they sat with perfect posture despite the evident exhaustion in their face, as if holding themselves upright required conscious effort. The deliberate placement of their hands on the mahogany table, fingers aligned with geometric precision, as if conserving energy for what truly mattered. The slight tightening around their mouth when Jules mentioned Theodora’s “previous work with us, years ago,” a phrase that hung in the air with deliberate vagueness.
She understood with cold clarity that this person knew something about her. Had already formed judgments. Had prepared for this encounter in ways she hadn’t.
“We’re particularly interested in your approach to literary fiction,” Jules was saying, her voice carrying that careful brightness people used when navigating minefields. “Your portfolio shows remarkable range.”
Kit’s eyes hadn’t left Theodora’s face. Not staring, exactly, that would be unprofessional, but observing with the focused attention of someone conducting an assessment. Theodora felt catalogued. Measured against some internal standard she couldn’t see.
“Range can be a double-edged sword,” Kit said, their voice surprisingly soft, almost gentle. Which somehow made it worse. “It suggests versatility, certainly. But also a lack of… distinctive vision.”
The other editors shifted in their seats. Lillian’s phone buzzed against the table, ignored.
“I’d be interested to understand,” Kit continued, still in that same measured tone, “what drives your aesthetic choices. Whether you’re led by the manuscript’s needs, or by market considerations, or by something else entirely.”
The question landed like a scalpel between Theodora’s ribs. Precise. Surgical. Designed to expose exactly what she’d been hoping to hide.
The portfolio felt heavier in Kit’s hands than it had in hers. They turned each page with the deliberateness of someone reading a contract for loopholes, their expression unchanging except for the smallest tightening at the corners of their mouth when they reached the romance cover: a clinch between a shirtless man and a woman in a ball gown, all heaving bosoms and windswept hair.
“This is interesting,” Kit said, which Theodora understood immediately meant the opposite. “The technical execution is flawless. The composition follows every convention of the genre.” They looked up, meeting her eyes with that unsettling directness. “Tell me. Did you enjoy creating this?”
The question was a trap. Say yes, and she’d be dismissed as commercially minded, lacking artistic integrity. Say no, and she’d be condemned for producing work without conviction, prostituting her talent for money.
“I enjoyed solving the problem it presented,” Theodora said carefully. “The publisher needed something that would sell. I gave them that.”
Kit’s smile didn’t reach their eyes. “How pragmatic.” They returned to the portfolio, fingers lingering on the next page. “And is that what you’ll give us? What sells?”
The silence stretched. Theodora watched Kit’s fingers trace the edge of an illustration: a woman dissolving into watercolor at the margins of the page, her face caught between definition and abstraction. The humming sound Kit made was low, almost inaudible, but it carried through the room like a tuning fork finding resonance.
Lillian’s phone screen illuminated her face in brief flashes. Dominic had discovered something fascinating in the roofline across the street. Jules sat with her hands folded on the table, wearing the expression of someone watching a chess match where she knew both players’ strategies but couldn’t intervene without disrupting the game entirely.
Kit turned another page. Then another. The methodical rhythm felt deliberately cruel, each pause a small cruelty of anticipation.
Kit’s fingers stopped on the illustration of a woman reading in a garden, light fragmenting through leaves onto the page in her hands: a recursive image, reading within reading. Their expression softened almost imperceptibly, a crack in the armor, and Theodora felt a dangerous flutter of hope before Kit spoke.
“Why did you stop taking risks like this?” The question arrived wrapped in velvet, devastating precisely because of its gentleness. “Your recent work feels so much… safer.”
The word hung between them like an indictment. Theodora felt it land in her chest, exposing the exact fear that had kept her staring at her ceiling at three in the morning, wondering if she’d traded her soul for solvency.
Theodora’s prepared defense (I have rent, I have bills, I have a career that disappeared for three years) dissolved before it reached her tongue. Kit’s gaze wasn’t accusatory, which somehow made it worse. It was knowing. As if they’d already catalogued every compromise she’d made, every artistic ambition she’d bartered for security, and found her wanting not for the choices themselves but for pretending they hadn’t cost her something essential.
The illustration Kit had selected (a couple embracing against a sunset-washed coastline, her typography deliberately romantic but not saccharine) had paid two months’ rent. Theodora remembered the brief: accessible, commercial, something that would appeal to the supermarket book display demographic. She’d delivered exactly what was requested, even found small moments of genuine craft in the wave patterns, the way the light caught the woman’s hair.
“I think,” Theodora said carefully, aware that every editor in the room was now watching this exchange with the fixed attention of spectators at a particularly brutal tennis match, “that there’s value in understanding your audience. In meeting readers where they are.”
“Meeting them,” Kit repeated, their tone unchanged, still that devastating politeness. “Or pandering to them?”
The words landed with surgical precision. Theodora felt heat creep up her neck, that particular flush of shame that comes from having your own private doubts articulated by someone else. Because hadn’t she thought exactly that, standing in Waterstones last month, seeing her cover among dozens of identical sunset-and-embrace compositions? Hadn’t she felt that small, bitter contraction in her chest?
“There’s a difference,” she managed, “between accessibility and compromise.”
“Is there?” Kit tilted their head slightly, and Theodora caught something in their expression. Not cruelty, but something almost like recognition. As if Kit knew intimately what it meant to make choices that diminished you. “Because from where I’m sitting, this looks like someone who once had a distinctive voice learning to speak in someone else’s accent. Fluently, I’ll grant you. But at what cost?”
Jules shifted in her seat at the head of the table, opened her mouth as if to intervene, then seemed to think better of it. The silence stretched. Outside, a siren wailed past on Marchmont Street, and Theodora found herself wishing she could follow it anywhere but here.
“Walk me through your color choices here,” Kit said, sliding another portfolio piece across the table. The fantasy novel she’d illustrated last spring, the one with the silver-leafed forest and the figure caught between shadow and moonlight.
Theodora felt a small spark of defensiveness. This one had mattered. “The silver represents liminality,” she began. “The protagonist exists between two worlds, so I wanted the palette to reflect that transitional.”Fantasy readers in that bracket respond to metallic accents. It’s been consistent across market research for three years.” They tapped the figure’s cloak. “The purple undertones: that’s the ‘witchy aesthetic’ trend from social media. Very 2023.”
Each observation was accurate. Unbearably accurate. Theodora had considered those trends, had let them whisper at the edges of her decisions. But she’d also genuinely cared about the liminal space, the moonlight, the story.
“I can hold both things,” she said quietly. “Commercial awareness and artistic intent.”
Kit’s expression flickered. Something almost like sympathy. “Can you? Or do you just tell yourself that?”
The silence stretches. Theodora feels each second accumulate like sediment, burying her. Lillian’s thumb moves across her phone screen, scrolling, scrolling, the diamond catching light with each micro-movement. Dominic has tilted his head back, tracing the acanthus leaves carved into the cornicing as though they contain answers to questions nobody’s asking. His glasses slip down his nose; he doesn’t adjust them.
Jules sits perfectly still, hands folded on the table, her expression so carefully neutral it becomes its own statement. Not hostile. Not supportive. Simply… absent of judgment, which somehow feels worse than either alternative.
No one speaks. No one intervenes.
Theodora understands with crystalline clarity: this is her gauntlet alone. Any rescue would only prove Kit’s point: that she’s fragile, diminished, someone requiring protection rather than someone who belongs at this table.
The illustration is from a children’s book about loss. A fox carrying autumn leaves, each one a memory. Theodora remembers drawing it in the week after the funeral, her hands steadier than her breathing. The colors were braver then: burnt orange bleeding into violet, shadows that didn’t apologize for their darkness.
“Life happened,” Theodora says quietly, meeting Kit’s grey eyes. “The question is whether you’re interested in where I’m going, or just cataloguing where I’ve been.”
The words land with surgical precision, and Theodora feels her throat constrict. Kit’s assessment isn’t wrong. That’s what makes it devastating. She has been playing it safe, choosing rent over risk, commercial viability over the raw honesty that once defined her work. The truth sits between them like a third presence, undeniable and sharp-edged, while the radiator ticks in the corner and someone’s phone buzzes, ignored.
Kit’s words hang in the air like suspended glass, and Theodora feels the weight of every eye in the room. She should say something. Defend her work, perhaps, or acknowledge the criticism with professional grace. But her tongue feels thick, useless, and the silence stretches like taffy while the radiator’s ticking becomes deafening. Jules shifts in her chair at the head of the table, clearly preparing to intervene, to smooth this over with her particular brand of diplomatic efficiency, but Kit raises one hand, barely a gesture, really, just a slight lift of fingers, and Jules subsides.
The power dynamic in that small exchange tells Theodora everything she needs to know about the hierarchy here, about who truly holds authority despite the organizational charts. Kit isn’t just protective of the house’s direction, as Jules will later euphemistically phrase it. Kit is the house’s direction, or believes themselves to be, which amounts to the same thing in practical terms.
Theodora’s portfolio sits open before her, her recent work displayed like evidence in a trial she didn’t realize she was attending. The cover illustration for that romance novel: technically proficient, certainly, but safe, so terribly safe. The fantasy series artwork. Even the literary fiction piece she’d been proud of now looks derivative under Kit’s implicit judgment, a pale echo of the visceral, uncomfortable work she’d produced in her twenties, before life had taught her that passion doesn’t pay rent.
The shame of it burns in her chest, not because Kit is being unfair, but because they’re not.
She forces herself to meet Kit’s grey eyes across the mahogany table, and the contact feels like touching a live wire. There’s no triumph there, no satisfaction in having landed their blow. Instead, she finds something that makes her stomach twist: a kind of exhausted resolve, as if this confrontation is depleting them as much as it’s wounding her. They look like someone performing triage on a battlefield, making brutal calculations about what can be saved and what must be sacrificed.
It’s worse than cruelty. Cruelty she could hate cleanly, could armor herself against. But this, this measured assessment, this sense that Kit is doing what they believe must be done, leaves her nowhere to direct her anger except inward.
The dark circles under those grey eyes suddenly seem less like mere fatigue and more like something deeper, something carved into the architecture of Kit’s face. Their hand rests on the table, fingers splayed against the dark wood, and Theodora notices how carefully controlled the gesture is, as if even this small movement requires conscious management.
“Thank you for your feedback,” Theodora manages, her voice steadier than she feels, and she’s proud of how professional she sounds even as her throat tightens. But the words taste like ash, like every compromise she swore she wouldn’t make again. She recognizes this pattern from years ago: this instinct to make herself smaller, more palatable, to apologize for taking up space in rooms where she’s been invited but not truly welcomed.
Kit inclines their head, a gesture that might be acknowledgment or dismissal, and Theodora watches something flicker across their sharp features, regret, perhaps, or simply fatigue. The moment passes before she can name it, leaving only the formal mask of professionalism between them.
The meeting dissolves with the peculiar choreography of British discomfort. Chairs scraping back with excessive care, murmured pleasantries about next steps and follow-up emails that everyone knows mean nothing. Lillian shoots Theodora a look that promises a debriefing later, her engagement ring catching the light as she gathers her tablet. Dominic collects his books with the air of someone grateful to return to safer, fictional conflicts, already half-absent.
The reflection stares back. A woman who chose art over security, who left and is now returning with a portfolio that suddenly feels like a collection of apologies. Kit’s words echo: “adequate for our current needs.” Not exceptional. Not visionary. Adequate. The word settles in her chest like sediment. She adjusts the portfolio’s weight, straightening her spine with deliberate effort, refusing to let the building’s narrow corridors see her shrink.
Jules’s fingers press into Theodora’s elbow with surprising firmness (not unkind, but insistent) guiding her past the narrow staircase where two junior editors flatten themselves against the wall to let them pass. Theodora catches their exchanged glance, the kind of look that says something happened and we’ll discuss it later. The kitchen materializes ahead, that cramped third-floor space where the fluorescent light buzzes and flickers over a sink full of unwashed mugs bearing lipstick stains and motivational slogans. The door clicks shut with a finality that makes Theodora’s stomach tighten.
The room smells of old coffee grounds and something vaguely citrus. Someone’s abandoned yogurt, perhaps, slowly transforming in the back of the small fridge. Jules releases her elbow, and Theodora feels the phantom pressure of those fingers for a moment longer, a brand of concern or warning she can’t quite parse.
She sets her portfolio against the wall, careful to avoid the damp patch near the skirting board where the building’s ancient plumbing weeps. The portfolio leans at a slight angle, and she resists the urge to adjust it, to fuss with something tangible while Jules’s silence stretches between them. Through the thin wall comes the muffled sound of someone’s phone ringing, unanswered, then stopping.
Jules moves to the counter, her movements precise despite the room’s cluttered geography. Stepping around the recycling bin overflowing with wine bottles from someone’s birthday celebration, reaching past the precarious stack of takeaway menus held down by a chipped teapot. Her suit jacket pulls slightly at the shoulders, and Theodora notices for the first time how much tension Jules carries in her body, how the elegant exterior requires constant maintenance.
The kettle sits in Jules’s hand, cord dangling, waiting to be plugged in. A peace offering, or a prop for difficult conversations.
“Kit can be… intense,” Jules begins, her voice carrying that particular modulation of someone who’s practised this in her head. She fills the kettle though neither of them has suggested tea, the water rushing loud enough to briefly drown out the awkwardness. When she turns, her back remains to Theodora, shoulders squared against the counter as if bracing for impact.
The words emerge in careful succession: Kit’s dedication to the house’s reputation (unimpeachable), the pressure of recent market challenges (everyone’s feeling it), a perfectionism that sometimes reads as hostility (unfortunate but understandable). Each phrase lands with the weight of truth, yet somehow the whole feels lighter than it should, a structure with missing beams.
Jules’s fingers find the countertop, drumming out an irregular rhythm against the laminate, tap-tap, pause, tap-tap-tap, that her composed expression refuses to acknowledge. Her reflection in the darkened window above the sink shows eyes that won’t quite meet Theodora’s, even secondhand.
“They’ve been under tremendous stress lately,” Jules adds, and there it is again: that careful vagueness, those crucial territories left blank on the map she’s offering.
The explanation unfolds in careful layers. But Jules’s voice carries that hollow quality of someone reciting facts while withholding truth, each word precisely weighted yet somehow insubstantial.
Her manicured fingers drum against the countertop, tap-tap, pause, tap-tap-tap, a rhythm that betrays anxiety her composed face won’t acknowledge. The sound fills the small kitchen like a clock counting down to something neither of them will name.
Theodora watches Jules’s reflection in the window above the sink, catching the moment her old friend’s eyes slide away, focusing on the kettle instead, on the steam beginning to curl from its spout, on anything but the question forming in the space between them.
“Just give it time,” Jules says finally, turning to face her with a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. The professional smile, Theodora recognizes, the one Jules uses with difficult authors. When Theodora asks if there’s something else she should know, something that would help her understand Kit’s particular brand of hostility, Jules’s pause stretches too long, her fingers stilling against the counter. She shakes her head. The kettle’s whistle fills the silence between them like a scream neither can acknowledge.
She accepts the deflection because exhaustion has made her pliant, nodding as Jules squeezes her shoulder: reassurance or apology, impossible to distinguish. Descending the narrow staircase, one hand trailing the bannister worn smooth by a century of Fairfax hands, she watches the checkered marble rise to meet her and understands: the gaps in Jules’s explanation contain their own truth. What people don’t say becomes its own language.
Theodora pushes through The Lamb & Flag’s heavy door into a wall of noise. Laughter ricocheting off dark beams, the percussive clink of glasses meeting in toast, the low thrum of Friday evening release vibrating through floorboards that have absorbed decades of similar escapes. The anonymity feels like absolution after Kit’s surgical interrogation, each stranger’s face a blessed irrelevance. The crowd swallows her whole as she navigates toward the bar, her shoulders brushing against theatre-goers still buzzing with interval energy, publishing people she half-recognizes but doesn’t acknowledge, tourists studying the walls’ theatrical posters with scholarly intensity.
The brass fixtures catch the amber light in pools of warmth, and her reflection in the mirror behind the bottles (fractured between gin labels and wine advertisements) looks like someone playing at belonging. She recognizes that woman: the careful posture, the paint still under her fingernails despite scrubbing, the expression hovering between determined and defeated. The version of herself who thought returning to publishing would feel like homecoming rather than trespass.
A gap opens at the bar and she claims it, her forearms against wood worn smooth by countless elbows, countless confidences exchanged in exactly this position. The bartender moves with the efficiency of someone who’s poured a thousand Friday nights into glasses, and she watches his hands, the economy of motion, the practiced pour, while her mind insists on replaying Kit’s questions like a prosecutor’s cross-examination. Tell me about your approach to cover design for literary fiction. Each syllable weighted with skepticism. How do you balance commercial appeal with artistic integrity? The implication clear: you can’t, you won’t, you’re not good enough for this house.
She’s pressing her thumb against the condensation gathering on her glass, watching water bead and slide, when a voice beside her asks “Is this seat taken?” with such easy warmth that she looks up to find Rowan’s smile, effortless as breathing.
“Gin and tonic,” she tells the bartender, though she doesn’t particularly want it. The ritual matters more. The ordering, the waiting, the first bitter sip that marks the transition from workday to evening, from professional to person. She watches his hands move through the familiar choreography: glass, ice, measure, pour, the twist of lime released with a bartender’s practiced efficiency.
Her mind won’t stop replaying the afternoon. Kit’s voice, precise as a scalpel: Tell me about your approach to cover design for literary fiction. Each question calibrated to expose weakness, to reveal the gaps in her experience, the years away from publishing that might as well be decades in an industry that moves at digital speed. How do you balance commercial appeal with artistic integrity? The implication hanging in the air like smoke: you can’t, you won’t, you’re not equipped for this.
She’s pressing her thumb against the glass’s condensation, watching water bead and slide down the curve, when someone beside her asks, “Is this seat taken?”
The warmth in the voice makes her look up. Rowan’s smile is effortless as breathing, and something in her chest unknots slightly.
They talk about The English Patient first, Rowan’s reading it for the third time, they confess, and Theodora mentions the illustrated edition she contributed to in 2015, back when she still believed in permanence. From there the conversation spirals outward: Rowan’s six months in Lisbon where they learned Portuguese from a baker, Theodora’s year in Edinburgh after everything fell apart, the way London contains multitudes but somehow makes you feel singular, unwitnessed. They both know that particular ache of standing in a packed Tube carriage surrounded by people determinedly not seeing each other, the city’s unspoken contract of mutual invisibility. Rowan’s grey eyes hold hers when she speaks, as though her words actually matter, as though she’s someone worth listening to rather than dissecting.
Rowan leans closer to be heard over the pub’s crescendo, their shoulder brushing hers with casual intimacy, and orders another round without asking: the gesture presumptuous yet somehow welcome, as though they’ve already established permissions that don’t exist. Theodora finds herself laughing, actually laughing, for the first time since entering Fairfax & Sons this morning. The day’s sharp edges blur in amber light and the attention of someone who seems genuinely curious about her answers rather than cataloguing weaknesses.
When Rowan suggests Saturday, somewhere quieter, a wine bar in Shoreditch they know, Theodora hears herself agreeing before caution can marshal its familiar arguments. She recognizes this vertigo, this dangerous hope that maybe this time will be different. Yet even as possibility unfurls, some observant part of her registers Rowan’s phone remaining face-down on the bar throughout, their anecdotes rich with Lisbon sunsets and Berlin galleries but curiously unpopulated by names, by anyone who might be waiting.
The night air carries the mineral smell of recent rain and the yeasty warmth from a late-night bakery. Theodora’s boots find rhythm on the cobblestones, her portfolio bag heavy against her hip: heavier now with the weight of what it represents. She can still feel the meeting room’s atmosphere: that particular tension when creative work is being vivisected by someone who knows exactly where to cut.
Kit’s questions had been surgical. Not hostile, precisely: that would have been easier to dismiss. Instead, each inquiry had exposed the gap between her artistic intention and its execution, the places where her vision hadn’t quite translated to the page. “And this color palette. It’s evocative, certainly, but does it serve the narrative or merely your aesthetic preferences?” The other editors had studied their notepads with sudden fascination.
Jules’s intervention afterward had the careful neutrality of someone performing triage. “Kit’s brilliant but exacting. They’ve been under considerable strain.” The explanation that wasn’t quite an explanation, the sympathy that somehow made Theodora feel more exposed rather than less.
Then Rowan, materializing at the bar as if summoned by her need for the evening to pivot toward something easier. Their smile had been uncomplicated, their attention flattering in its focus. They’d asked about her work with genuine curiosity, shared stories about their app development company’s expansion into Copenhagen, made her laugh about a disastrous pitch meeting involving mistranslated Danish idioms. Easy. Effortless.
But now, walking through streets emptying of their theatre crowds, Theodora notices what she’d been too grateful to register in the moment: how Rowan’s stories were populated by cities and projects but rarely by people. How their phone remained face-down throughout. How when she’d mentioned her studio in Stoke Newington, they’d said “I’m all over the place, really” without offering specifics.
She’s already writing stories about all of them. Already casting herself in narratives she hasn’t earned the right to yet.
At Russell Square station she pauses at the entrance, one hand on the railing, looking back toward Bloomsbury’s darkened streets. Somewhere in that Georgian maze, the publishing house sits with its five floors of accumulated history and contemporary crisis. She’s just committed herself to returning there, to inhabiting that space regularly despite Kit’s scalpel-sharp scrutiny.
And Saturday. Rowan’s number is already in her phone, entered while they were still laughing about something: she can’t even remember what now. She realizes she never caught their surname. Rowan something. Rowan who travels constantly, who appeared exactly when she needed someone uncomplicated, who might be exactly that or might be something else entirely.
Both choices require the same thing: showing up. Being present. Allowing herself to be seen rather than remaining safely invisible in her studio, where the only witness to her failures is the north light through the skylight.
The station’s entrance exhales warm metallic air. She descends into it, committing to the journey home, to whatever she’s set in motion.
On the Victoria line heading north, she catches her reflection in the dark window between stations. Paint still under her fingernails, her hair escaping its pins, her expression uncertain. The woman looking back at her could be twenty-six again, making the same choices, following the same magnetic pull toward complications disguised as opportunities. Except then she’d believed in her own resilience as something infinite, renewable, a resource that would never deplete.
Now she knows better. She’s already been tested to breaking. Already survived the aftermath of trusting too easily, wanting too much, mistaking intensity for substance.
The train lurches. Her reflection fragments across the window’s darkness.
She’s doing it anyway.
She opens the message thread with Rowan, types “Saturday sounds good,” then deletes it. Types “Looking forward to it,” deletes that too. The cursor blinks accusingly. Everything sounds either too eager or too guarded, and she realizes this calibration, this careful management of tone to seem interested but not desperate, available but not easy, is itself a warning sign. People who are good for you don’t require this much strategic communication.
She sends: “Saturday works. Where?”
The stairs creak their familiar complaint. By the third landing, her thighs burn. By the fourth, she’s breathing hard, and the metaphor is too obvious to ignore: this ascent toward her small, safe space while simultaneously choosing to descend back into the kind of entanglement that has historically undone her. She’s Penelope unweaving her own tapestry, Orpheus turning around despite knowing better, choosing the beautiful risk over the lonely certainty.
The desk itself is a beautiful anachronism. A mahogany partner’s desk with brass fittings and leather inlay, scarred by decades of editorial pencils and coffee rings that no amount of polish can erase. Theodora runs her fingers along one particularly deep gouge near the corner, wondering what manuscript crisis had caused someone to press down quite that hard.
“My mother used to sketch here,” Jules says, watching her explore the desk’s geography. “When she’d bring me to the office during school holidays. She wasn’t an illustrator. Just doodled in the margins while my father held interminable meetings.” She pauses, adjusting the angle of the desk lamp with the precision of someone recreating a memory. “She said the light here was the best in the building. North-facing, consistent.”
Theodora feels the weight of the statement settle around her shoulders like a mantle she hasn’t agreed to wear. It’s a generous gesture, certainly, the window overlooks the quiet street rather than the brick wall that most of the editorial suite faces, but there’s something deliberate in Jules’s casual tone, as if she’s positioning Theodora within a narrative larger than a simple freelance arrangement.
“It’s perfect,” Theodora says, because it is, and because refusing it would require explanations she doesn’t want to give. “Thank you.”
“The filing cabinet sticks,” Jules adds, already moving toward the door, her heels clicking efficiently against the wooden floor. “Third drawer especially. Don’t force it: there’s a trick with lifting slightly while you pull.” She pauses in the doorway. “Oh, and Theodora? The kettle in the kitchen is temperamental. Lillian knows how to coax it into cooperation. She’s usually in by eight.”
And then she’s gone, leaving Theodora alone with the desk, the light, and the uncomfortable sensation that she’s been given not just a workspace but an inheritance she hasn’t earned.
Lillian becomes her most frequent collaborator, a whirlwind of energy and expensive perfume who treats Theodora’s workspace as an extension of her own territory. She arrives at unpredictable intervals. Sometimes at nine in the morning with coffee and a manuscript still warm from the printer, sometimes at seven in the evening when most of the office has emptied, her heels announcing her approach down the corridor.
Their working sessions develop a rhythm that feels both productive and slightly manic. Lillian spreads mood boards across every available surface, talking rapidly about market positioning and comparative titles whilst Theodora sketches variations, their creative process fueled by increasingly cold takeaway containers and the kind of honest debate that only happens when exhaustion strips away professional politeness.
“More melancholy,” Lillian insists, leaning over Theodora’s shoulder to tap a particular sketch. “The protagonist is grieving, not angry.”
“Grief can look like anger,” Theodora counters, but she’s already reaching for her pencil, adjusting the figure’s posture.
Throughout these sessions, Lillian’s phone buzzes with persistent regularity. Texts from Marcus that she silences without reading, her engagement ring catching the lamplight as she waves away his digital interruptions with practiced efficiency.
Dominic materializes at unpredictable intervals, a ghost in rumpled Oxford cloth. He places volumes on her desk without preamble then vanishes before she can thank him. Other times he lingers, standing just behind her chair with the stillness of someone accustomed to libraries, observing her work with an attention that feels curatorial rather than intrusive.
“The kerning,” he murmurs once, so quietly she almost misses it. “Tighter. Like Baskerville.”
She adjusts, and the entire composition shifts into focus.
His observations arrive like surgical incisions, brief, precise, transformative. He never explains, never elaborates, simply offers these fragments of aesthetic judgment before retreating to whatever scholarly sanctuary he’s constructed against the world’s demands.
Kit arrives with a leather portfolio and spreadsheets color-coded by market segment. They dissect comparable titles with surgical precision, their grey eyes tracking her reactions as carefully as they track sales figures. The conversation operates on two frequencies: one about visual metaphor and commercial viability, another about proximity and permission. Kit never quite smiles, but sometimes their mouth softens almost imperceptibly, as if testing whether warmth might be strategically deployed.
By the third week, her desk has accumulated its own small history. A chipped mug that appeared one morning (Lillian claimed ignorance, but Theodora recognized the pattern from the kitchen), Post-it notes bearing Lillian’s urgent scrawl about deadlines, a leather-bound volume on Georgian typography that Dominic left without comment, her own sketches bleeding across the partition like territorial markers. She’s stopped mentally calculating her last day, stopped preserving the careful neutrality of temporary employment. Somewhere between the second manuscript and the fourth late evening, she’d allowed herself to become implicated in this place, tangled in its relationships and rhythms, vulnerable to its particular species of heartbreak.
The moment stretches and contracts oddly, as though the pub’s noise has been wrapped in cotton wool. Rowan slides into the booth with the fluid economy of movement that Theodora has come to recognize as their signature: nothing wasted, nothing uncertain. The leather jacket exhales expensive softness as their shoulder brushes hers, and she catches the scent of something citrus and cedar, a fragrance that probably costs more than her monthly travel card.
“Sorry I’m late,” Rowan says, though they’re not late because they were never explicitly invited, were they? The ambiguity is characteristic. “Traffic from Shoreditch was murder.”
Theodora feels rather than sees Lillian’s attention sharpen across the table. There’s a particular quality to the silence that follows: not quite awkward, but weighted with assessment. She should introduce Rowan properly, explain their presence, but the words tangle somewhere between her brain and her mouth.
“This is Rowan,” she manages finally, gesturing vaguely. “Rowan, this is, well, everyone from Fairfax, essentially.”
“The famous colleagues.” Rowan’s smile is warm, encompassing, democratic in its distribution. They have this gift for making a room feel like they’ve been part of it for hours rather than seconds. “Theodora’s been telling me about the eighteenth-century project. Sounds fascinating.”
Have I? Theodora thinks, but perhaps she has, in those late-night phone conversations that blur together, Rowan’s voice in her ear while she sketched, the intimacy of shared attention across distance.
Dominic offers a polite nod, already retreating behind his pint. But Lillian leans forward slightly, her engagement ring catching the light as she extends a hand across the cluttered table with its archipelago of empty glasses.
“Lovely to meet you,” Lillian says, her tone professionally pleasant, her eyes conducting some calculation Theodora can’t quite parse. “Any friend of Theodora’s.”
The word friend hangs there, a question disguised as courtesy.
The booth becomes a stage where Theodora performs a version of herself she barely recognizes, witty, relaxed, magnetically drawn to Rowan’s attention while simultaneously aware of her colleagues’ observation. She hears herself telling an anecdote about a disastrous book cover revision, her timing impeccable, and Rowan laughs in exactly the right places, their hand resting on the table’s edge, close enough to suggest intimacy without declaring it.
Lillian’s professional smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes. She’s asking Rowan polite questions about their work, but there’s something forensic in her attention, the way she might assess a manuscript’s commercial viability. Even Dominic seems to register the charged atmosphere before retreating into his usual distraction, his focus narrowing to the beer mat he’s methodically shredding.
When Rowan’s hand finds hers under the table, warm fingers threading through hers with confident familiarity, Theodora doesn’t pull away. The touch feels like a declaration, a claiming. She knows this will become office knowledge by Monday morning, translated through the peculiar alchemy of workplace gossip. Yet she leaves her hand exactly where it is, her thumb tracing small circles against Rowan’s palm, choosing visibility over caution.
The afternoon light shifts across Rowan’s face as they trace the paint stain on her collarbone, and Theodora feels herself becoming a sketch in someone else’s composition: all gesture and suggestion, nothing fixed. They talk about colour theory and commitment in the same breath, Rowan’s philosophy apparently extending to both: appreciate intensity, resist permanence. When they kiss her again it tastes like a beautiful evasion, and she recognizes the pattern even as she leans into it: this person who asks such careful questions about her work will offer nothing equivalent about their own interior landscape. The skylight frames them in crystalline light, and she thinks: this is the moment I should ask the difficult questions. Instead, she pulls them closer.
The expensive ingredients feel like a statement she can’t quite parse. Burrata and San Marzano tomatoes for a meal they’ll eat in her cramped kitchenette. Rowan moves through her space with proprietorial ease, describing Berlin tech conferences and Barcelona product launches while the pasta water boils, and Theodora realizes she’s being offered not a life together but a series of beautiful intervals, each one complete and hermetically sealed from the next.
She watches from the window as Rowan’s figure disappears down Albion Road, phone already pressed to their ear, and the practiced efficiency of their exit suggests a choreography perfected through repetition. The burrata sits half-eaten on the counter, expensive and already weeping. She touches her lips where their goodbye kiss landed, tasting departure.
The house smells of rosemary and roasting chicken, of beeswax polish and old books: the scent of a life carefully curated. Theodora follows Jules through the entrance hall, past a console table holding a ceramic bowl filled with keys and a stack of manuscripts, into a kitchen that manages to be both professionally equipped and genuinely lived-in. An Aga radiates heat. Copper pans hang from a rack. The wine Jules pours is the color of pale straw and tastes expensive.
“I bought this place eight years ago,” Jules says, handing her a glass. “Couldn’t quite bring myself to leave the neighborhood, even when I could afford Hampstead or Primrose Hill. Sentimental, probably.”
“Or sensible,” Theodora offers. “Why leave somewhere you actually belong?”
Jules’s smile carries something complicated. “Exactly what I wondered when I heard you’d come back to London. Whether you were returning to somewhere you belonged, or running from somewhere you didn’t.”
The observation lands with precision, and Theodora takes a longer sip than she’d intended. Through the kitchen window, she can see the garden: small but immaculate, lit by solar lanterns that cast pools of amber light across slate paving. A garden that requires maintenance, attention, the kind of sustained presence she’s never managed.
“Both, probably,” she admits, because Jules has always had a way of extracting honesty.
“I remember your mother’s studio,” Jules says, turning to check something in the oven. “That conservatory absolutely crammed with canvases. You’d come to my house to do homework because yours was too chaotic for concentration.”
“Your mother made us cheese toasties and let us work at the dining table.”
“She always liked you. Said you had focus, even as a child.” Jules closes the oven, straightens. “She’d be pleased to know you’re illustrating again. Properly, I mean. Not just commercial work.”
The distinction stings slightly, though Jules’s tone holds no judgment.
The sitting room feels smaller than the kitchen despite its generous proportions: perhaps because of the books lining every wall, the framed covers of novels Jules has edited, the evidence of a life lived with singular purpose. Theodora settles into a velvet armchair that probably cost more than her monthly rent while Jules takes the sofa opposite, curling her legs beneath her with the unselfconscious ease of someone entirely comfortable in her own space.
“Do you remember when we tried to start that neighborhood newspaper?” Jules asks, and they’re off, trading stories like currency: the elaborate games they’d invented, the corner shop that sold penny sweets, the summer they’d been obsessed with detective novels and spent weeks “investigating” Mrs. Patterson’s allegedly haunted garden shed.
But Theodora notices how Jules’s questions angle subtly forward, how each memory becomes a bridge to present circumstances. “You always drew the masthead,” Jules observes. “Even then, you had that eye for how things should look.”
“And you wrote the editorials. Bossing everyone around even at nine.”
Jules laughs, but her gaze remains measuring. “Some things don’t change. Others do rather dramatically.”
Jules refills their glasses with a Malbec that Theodora suspects costs more than she’d ever spend, and the casual gesture somehow makes what follows feel more calculated. “I was surprised when you left London seven years ago,” Jules says, swirling her wine with studied nonchalance. “It seemed rather sudden. At least to those of us who noticed.”
Theodora feels her spine straighten, a defensive reflex she immediately regrets because Jules will have clocked it, will have catalogued that involuntary response and filed it away. She keeps her expression carefully neutral, takes a measured sip of wine that buys her three seconds to compose an answer.
“Life circumstances,” she manages, aiming for breezy dismissal. “You know how it is.”
“Mm.” Jules’s hum suggests she knows precisely how it is, and that Theodora’s evasion has told her everything she needed confirmed.
Jules sets down her glass with deliberate precision. “I’d heard, publishing’s a small world, that you were involved with someone from one of the established families.” The phrasing is so carefully neutral it becomes its own accusation. “Before you left.”
The air thickens between them. Theodora can feel Jules cataloguing her reaction, measuring the silence that stretches too long to be innocent. The unasked questions multiply: why did you come back, and are you going to do it again, and how much disruption can my publishing house withstand?
Theodora offers something vague about the past being complicated, about people changing. But Jules’s expression, sympathetic surface over watchful depths, signals this conversation isn’t finished, merely postponed. When they shift to discussing the literary fiction project, Kit’s exacting standards, the tight deadline, Theodora understands: the dinner has been reconnaissance disguised as reunion. Jules is mapping the emotional geometry of her publishing house before it fractures.
The meeting room (named after Iris Murdoch, appropriately enough) felt smaller than it had the previous week. Or perhaps Kit’s presence had simply expanded to fill it more completely. They’d arranged the sketches in a precise line across the mahogany table, a tribunal of Theodora’s own making.
“You’re still being too generous,” Kit said, tapping a charcoal study of two figures in doorways. “This suggests eventual reunion. The novel doesn’t promise that.”
Theodora had anticipated this. She slid forward an alternative: the same composition, but with the doorways leading to different rooms entirely, the perspective subtly skewed so reconciliation became geometrically impossible.
Kit went very still. The quality of their attention changed, sharpened, somehow, like a blade finding its proper angle. They studied the sketch for what felt like minutes but was probably thirty seconds, and Theodora found herself cataloguing details she hadn’t consciously registered before: the way Kit’s shirt collar sat slightly loose against their neck, the prominence of the tendons in their hands, the shadows beneath their cheekbones that makeup couldn’t quite disguise.
“Where did you find this?” Kit asked finally, voice lower than before.
“In the manuscript. Chapter seventeen. The protagonist realizes. Kit’s fingers hovered above the sketch without quite touching it.”I edited the bloody thing. I meant where did you find this understanding?”
The question felt dangerous, weighted with implications Theodora couldn’t fully parse. “I read closely,” she said carefully. “It’s what you’re paying me for.”
Kit’s grey eyes lifted to meet hers, and for a moment the professional distance collapsed entirely. What Theodora saw there wasn’t respect or reassessment: it was recognition, raw and unwilling, as if she’d accidentally revealed she spoke a language Kit had thought was theirs alone.
Then Kit blinked, and the moment sealed over. “Use this direction,” they said crisply, gathering the sketches. “I’ll need three more variations by Friday.”
By the third consultation, Theodora arrived with revised concepts that had kept her awake until three in the morning. Darker tones, negative space that breathed with absence rather than presence, compositions that refused comfort.
She arranged them silently, aware of Kit’s gaze tracking each placement.
“Better,” Kit said. A single word, but delivered with such concentrated intensity that it landed like a paragraph of praise. They leaned forward to examine the charcoal work more closely, and Theodora saw it: the tremor in Kit’s right hand, barely perceptible, before they pressed it flat against the mahogany surface with deliberate force.
Their eyes met. Kit had caught her noticing.
The transformation was instantaneous. Jaw tightening, shoulders squaring, the professional mask slamming back into place with such violence it was almost audible. “These proportions need adjustment,” Kit said, voice stripped of everything except editorial precision. “The negative space overwhelms. Reduce it by fifteen percent.”
Theodora nodded, gathering her sketches, understanding she’d witnessed something she wasn’t meant to see. The tremor, the concealment, the fury at being observed: all of it filed away in the space where intuition lived, waiting to mean something.
The fourth meeting runs long into evening, the publishing house emptying around them as they debate whether the cover should feature a door or a window as its central metaphor. Kit argues for the door with an urgency that seems disproportionate to the question, their voice growing rougher as they insist that doors can close permanently while windows only offer the illusion of barrier.
“Windows suggest looking,” Theodora counters, sketching as she speaks. “Doors suggest choosing.”
“Exactly.” Kit’s palm strikes the desk. “And some choices can’t be unmade.”
The words hang between them, weighted with something beyond editorial discussion. Theodora’s pencil stills. They’re not really talking about the book anymore, though neither acknowledges the shift. Outside, streetlamps flicker on, transforming the office windows into mirrors that reflect only themselves.
Week five brings Kit’s first unqualified praise (“This captures it exactly”) said quietly over Theodora’s rendering of two figures in separate rooms of the same house, visible through different windows but unable to see each other. When Theodora looks up, Kit is standing rather than sitting, one hand braced against the desk in a way that suggests the movement cost something. Their blazer hangs differently now, loose at the shoulders, and Theodora can see the sharp architecture of collarbones that weren’t so prominent a month ago. Kit notices her noticing, and something shutters behind their eyes.
During their sixth consultation, Kit arrives ten minutes late and offers no excuse beyond a clipped apology. They lower themselves into the chair with the deliberate precision of someone negotiating with their own body, and throughout the meeting their attention fractures in ways they immediately repair, critiques still incisive but punctuated by pauses where breath becomes a conscious transaction. When they finally stand, Theodora watches them calculate the physics of rising, that fractional hesitation before commitment that speaks of pain measured against pride.
The spreadsheet begins as an accident: color swatches for the manuscript’s chapter headings arranged in columns that happen to correspond with dates. But once Theodora notices the pattern, she can’t unsee it. Tuesday evenings when Rowan claims late meetings. Thursday afternoons when they’re supposedly traveling. The careful three-day intervals between visits, as if scheduled around something else entirely.
She adds another column, this one disguised as notes on typography: mentioned Barcelona flat but refused invitation to visit. Changed subject when I asked about childhood. Phone rang at 2am. They took it to the bathroom. The evidence accumulates in her careful handwriting, each entry a small betrayal of her own willingness to be deceived.
Three months. Ninety-four days, if she’s counting, which apparently she is. She knows Rowan drinks Lagavulin neat, takes coffee black with one sugar, sleeps on their left side, has a scar on their right shoulder from a cycling accident in Amsterdam. She knows the exact timbre of their laugh when genuinely amused versus socially engaged. She knows how they taste at three in the morning.
What she doesn’t know: their address. Their friends’ names. Whether they have siblings. Where they were last Christmas. The name of their company, beyond the vague “tech startup” that could mean anything or nothing.
The intimacy has been architectural, she realizes. Constructed specifically to exist within the boundaries of her attic flat, where the skylight frames them in isolation and questions dissolve into the particular vocabulary of touch. She’s been complicit in this, hasn’t she? Accepting the carefully portioned affection, never pushing past the charming deflections, mistaking intensity for honesty.
Theodora closes the sketchbook, the color studies now impossible to see as anything but what they are: a ledger of her own willful blindness, documented in Pantone references and careful dates.
At the publishing house, she begins sketching people between meetings. Not the polished illustrations she’s paid for, but quick observational studies in the margins of her notebook. Kit’s hand trembling almost imperceptibly as they sign off on proofs, the tremor lasting just long enough to smudge ink across a signature. Dominic’s gaze sliding past family portraits in the hallway as if they depict strangers, his shoulders hunching slightly whenever someone mentions his grandfather’s legacy. Jules’s smile tightening when anyone mentions long-term planning, her fingers drumming against her desk in patterns that suggest calculations she won’t voice aloud.
Theodora realizes she’s documenting a system under stress, each person performing their role whilst some essential structure beneath them shifts and cracks. It’s like watching a building develop hairline fractures. Invisible until you know where to look, then suddenly everywhere. The publishing house itself seems to hold its breath, waiting for something to break. She’s seen this before, in her own life: the moment just before everything collapses, when everyone’s still pretending the foundations are sound.
The manuscript lay between them like contested territory. Kit’s fingers pressed white against the desk edge as Theodora explained her concept. A cover that suggested vulnerability rather than strength, uncertainty rather than resolution.
“You’re making it too ambiguous,” Kit said, voice tight. “Readers need clarity.”
“Readers need honesty.” Theodora didn’t look away. “This story doesn’t resolve neatly. Why should the cover promise something the book won’t deliver?”
The silence stretched. Kit’s jaw worked, and Theodora watched them wrestle with something larger than design philosophy. When Kit finally nodded, the gesture looked like conceding ground in a war neither had declared.
“Fine. Your way.” They gathered the proofs with hands that shook. “But if it fails,”
“It won’t.”
Kit’s smile held no warmth. “Confidence. How refreshing.”
Lillian’s visits multiplied. Font queries she could resolve herself, opinions on covers beyond Theodora’s remit. Being studied, Theodora recognized, assessed as some road not traveled. During one such interruption, Lillian’s finger traced a sketch: a woman departing a beautiful burning house. “I can’t decide if that’s courage or simply another form of flight.” Her voice barely carried. Theodora couldn’t determine which of them the observation truly concerned.
The text arrived at six and Theodora walked without destination until the Lamb & Flag’s amber glow stopped her. Through frosted glass: Rowan’s leather jacket, unmistakable. Their laugh, the one reserved for her. Head bent toward someone else in that corner booth, the Fairfax booth, intimate as conspiracy. She didn’t enter. Didn’t need to. Just kept walking while understanding crystallized: she’d chosen guaranteed departure again, complicity disguised as romance.
The overhead lights had that institutional quality that made everything look slightly unreal, slightly autopsy-bright. Theodora’s hands were still, finally, resting on either side of the sketches she’d arranged in chronological order across the work table. Twelve variations. She’d counted them twice to be certain.
The first showed the figure mid-step, weight forward. By the fourth, the weight had shifted back. The eighth showed someone who’d forgotten which direction they’d been heading. The twelfth, drawn perhaps an hour ago, though time had become unreliable, showed a figure so perfectly balanced between forward and back that they’d achieved a kind of terrible equilibrium. Paralysis masquerading as consideration.
Her hands had known before her mind caught up. They always did. That was the problem with being an illustrator. Your subconscious leaked onto the page whether you wanted it to or not.
Outside, London performed its evening commute with characteristic indifference. Red tail lights, white headlights, the occasional siren. People going home to people who expected them. Or not going home, choosing pubs and diversions, engineering their own absences.
She’d done it again. Chosen someone whose exits were built into their arrival. Rowan with their European markets and their careful vagueness about next month, next year. Their laugh in the Lamb & Flag, bent toward someone else with that same quality of focused attention they’d given her. As if intimacy were a performance they’d perfected through repetition.
Seven years ago it had been someone else, but the pattern was identical. The thrill of being chosen by someone who couldn’t quite choose her completely. The safety of inevitable departure. No risk of being known too thoroughly, of having someone stay long enough to discover the ways she was ordinary, disappointing, insufficient.
Her phone sat face-down beside the sketches. No messages. That told her everything.
The threshold figure stared up from twelve different angles, going nowhere.
The sound of the kitchen door opening made Theodora hastily shuffle the sketches into a pile, but her hands were clumsy with fatigue. Several slipped to the floor.
“Don’t.” Lillian stood in the doorway, holding two coffee mugs with the particular grip of someone who’d forgotten they were props. She looked at the scattered drawings, at Theodora’s face, and something shifted in her expression: the professional mask sliding sideways. “I have wine in my desk drawer. The good kind, not the book launch leftovers.”
She disappeared before Theodora could refuse, returning with a bottle of Sancerre and a corkscrew that suggested this wasn’t improvisation. The overhead lights made them both look slightly ill, slightly desperate.
“We both need to stop performing competence for a minute,” Lillian said, pouring wine into the coffee mugs with the careful attention of someone rationing hope. She didn’t ask about the drawings. She didn’t offer platitudes.
She simply sat down across from Theodora and pushed one mug forward, and the gesture contained more understanding than a dozen careful conversations.
They sit on opposite sides of Theodora’s work table with mismatched mugs filled with Sancerre, and Lillian speaks in fragments: about Marcus booking a two-week honeymoon to Bali without asking if she even likes beaches (she doesn’t; she burns), about sleeping on the office sofa while texting him elaborate lies about deadlines, about how her mother keeps asking why she seems so unenthusiastic about her own wedding. Theodora watches this polished woman crack open like a geode, revealing the raw uncertainty inside, and recognizes the inverse of her own pattern: Lillian trapped by commitment she accepted without wanting, Theodora fleeing before commitment can trap her. Two women, opposite trajectories, identical fear.
“You left something behind, didn’t you?” Lillian asks, refilling both mugs with unsteady hands, her diamond ring catching the fluorescent light in sharp, accusatory refractions. Theodora finds herself describing not Rowan but the person before: the relationship she fled seven years ago when it threatened to become real, become permanent, become something she might fail at spectacularly. Lillian listens with the focused attention of someone hearing her own future narrated in a minor key, then says with devastating gentleness, “And now you’ve come back to the same city, the same industry, the same bloody patterns, hoping what? That you’ve changed enough?” She pauses, her perfectly manicured finger tracing the rim of her mug. “Or that you can prove you were right to run?”
They sit in silence after that, the wine passing between them without pretense of propriety, and Theodora watches Lillian’s restless fingers. Spinning the engagement ring clockwise, then counter, finally covering it entirely as though concealing evidence. Through the window, London performs its nightly metamorphosis: office lights extinguishing in waves, street lamps illuminating emptiness, the city exhaling its workforce. Near midnight, Lillian rises unsteadily, pauses at the threshold. “Whatever you’re avoiding deciding about whoever. At least you’re deciding, aren’t you? Not just… drifting toward some pre-determined ending.” Her voice catches. “That counts for something.” Theodora can’t determine whether she’s receiving advice or witnessing confession, whether Lillian seeks validation or absolution. Perhaps both. Perhaps neither matters.
Theodora’s fingers found the edge of the mahogany table, grounding herself against the vertigo of seeing her own words, I can’t do this anymore, I’m sorry, I need space to figure out who I am, rendered in Times New Roman, stripped of the handwritten urgency they’d carried when she’d sent them at three in the morning from a hotel in Edinburgh. The folder contained perhaps twenty pages, meticulously organized with plastic dividers separating months, and she recognized the obsessive care of someone who had needed to understand what had broken.
“They printed these out,” Kit continued, their voice carrying that particular flatness that comes from discussing painful facts clinically, “and kept them in a box under their bed for two years. I found them when I helped them move flats.” A pause, weighted with something Theodora couldn’t quite identify. “Do you know what it does to someone, reading their own abandonment on repeat?”
The word abandonment landed like a slap, and Theodora wanted to protest that it hadn’t been abandonment, it had been self-preservation, she’d been drowning in the intensity of it all, but Kit’s grey eyes were waiting for exactly that defense, ready to dismantle it with the precision of someone who had spent years constructing arguments against her.
“I’m not here to relitigate the past,” Theodora said carefully, though her voice emerged less steady than she’d intended. “I’m here to work.”
“Work.” Kit’s laugh was bitter, brief. “You think Jules hired you for your portfolio? She hired you because she’s sentimental about childhood friendships and doesn’t understand that some people are fundamentally destabilizing.” They leaned forward, and Theodora caught the slight wince again, quickly suppressed. “My sibling has finally built something stable. A life that doesn’t revolve around chaos. And then you walk back in, paint-stained and charming, like seven years of silence was just an intermission.”
The folder lay between them like evidence at trial. Kit’s fingers rested on its edge with the careful placement of someone rationing their strength. Theodora’s gaze caught on those fingers, then lifted to Kit’s face, where the grey eyes held something beyond anger: a kind of desperate calculation.
“My sibling kept everything,” Kit said, their voice carrying the particular coldness of someone who has watched a loved one suffer and catalogued every detail of who caused it. “Even after you disappeared.”
The word disappeared hung in the cold air of the Tennyson room. Not left. Not moved on. Disappeared, as though Theodora had been an apparition that simply dissolved.
Kit opened the folder with deliberate slowness, revealing printed emails arranged chronologically. Theodora recognized her own words before she could read them. The shape of her sentences, the particular way she’d signed off. Seven years of correspondence, or rather, seven years ending in her final message, preserved like specimens under glass.
“This isn’t just protective fury,” Theodora realized, watching Kit’s controlled movements. This was the concentrated rage of someone who knows their time to protect is running out.
“You don’t understand what your leaving did.” Kit leaned forward, and the movement seemed to compress the air between them, making the room feel smaller, more airless. “The months of calls I fielded at two in the morning. The work they couldn’t focus on. Manuscripts returned unread, deadlines missed. The relationships they sabotaged afterward because you’d taught them that caring deeply meant inevitable abandonment.”
Their hands found the table’s edge, knuckles blanching white against the dark wood. Then, abruptly, they released their grip. One palm pressed against their ribs. Just for a heartbeat, a gesture so swift Theodora nearly missed it. Pain flickered across Kit’s features before the professional mask reasserted itself.
She understood then, with a clarity that felt like cold water: Kit was fighting two battles simultaneously. Against her presence, yes. But also against their own body’s quiet, relentless betrayal.
Theodora began to explain, twenty-eight, drowning, lacking the language for what she needed, but Kit’s hand sliced through the air between them.
“I don’t care about your reasons. I care about patterns.” Their grey eyes held hers with surgical precision. “You’re someone who runs when things get difficult.”
The accusation landed with devastating accuracy. Wasn’t she doing exactly that with Rowan? Accepting surface charm, not questioning the gaps, choosing comfortable ignorance over dangerous truth?
Kit stands abruptly, the meeting clearly over, but at the door they pause. “Jules thinks you’ve changed. That you’re more grounded now.” Their hand grips the doorframe. “I hope she’s right, because if you hurt my sibling again, if you destabilize what we’ve carefully rebuilt, I will make sure you never work in London publishing again. The specificity of that timeline, six months, hangs in the air like a confession Kit didn’t mean to make. Theodora watches them walk away with that deliberate precision she now recognizes as someone rationing their remaining strength.
That evening, Rowan appears at Theodora’s studio unannounced with Thai takeaway and a bottle of Sancerre, their leather jacket still cold from the November air. The scent of basil and lemongrass fills the small space as they set the bags on her work table, nudging aside sketches and color swatches with the easy familiarity of someone who’s been here before, though never often enough for Theodora to grow accustomed to their presence.
“Rough day?” Rowan asks, reading something in her face, and before she can answer they’re crossing the distance between them, hands finding her waist with that particular certainty that makes her breath catch.
The tension from Kit’s veiled threat begins to dissolve the moment Rowan’s mouth finds her neck, urgent and insistent. The food sits forgotten on the counter, the wine unopened, as they move toward the bed with the desperate intensity of people trying to outrun their separate anxieties. Theodora doesn’t think about grey eyes burning with protective fury, about trembling hands gripping doorframes, about timelines that sound like confessions. She exists only in sensation. In the weight of Rowan’s body, the catch of breath, the way their hands know exactly where to touch her.
For twenty minutes she is gloriously, completely present. The skylight frames Rowan’s face in darkness punctuated by distant streetlight, turning them into something almost abstract. All shadow and geometry and the occasional flash of teeth when they smile down at her. There’s an abandon in how they move together, a mutual forgetting that feels like permission. Theodora arches into it, into them, letting everything else fall away: the publishing house, the past, the careful architecture of professional distance she’s been maintaining. Here, under the slanted ceiling of her attic sanctuary, none of it matters.
Afterward, they lie tangled in her narrow bed, the sheets twisted around their legs, and Rowan’s fingers trace idle patterns on her shoulder, circles, figure-eights, abstract geometries that might mean nothing. Theodora feels the particular vulnerability that follows intimacy, that brief window when confession seems possible, even safe. She almost tells them about Kit’s threat, about the sibling whose name she doesn’t speak, about the past she’s trying to navigate without a map.
But before she can form the words, Rowan’s phone buzzes on the nightstand.
They reach for it with an automatic gesture that punctures the moment entirely, their face suddenly illuminated by the screen’s cold blue glow. Theodora watches their expression shift (a subtle tightening around the eyes, a slight frown) as they read whatever message has arrived. When it buzzes again two minutes later, Rowan’s thumb moves quickly across the screen. Then a third time.
The intimacy evaporates like steam. Theodora feels it go, feels the distance returning like fog rolling in from the Thames, obscuring everything that had seemed clear moments before.
“How was your week?” Theodora asks, aiming for lightness but hearing the question land with more weight than intended.
Rowan sets the phone face-down but keeps one hand near it, a tell she’s beginning to recognize. “Berlin, mostly. Tedious meetings about the app’s German market expansion.” They stretch, the movement drawing her eye deliberately. “Then some client dinners in Amsterdam that ran late. You know how it is. Everyone wants to network over wine until two in the morning.”
The details sound plausible, exactly what a successful tech entrepreneur would say. But Theodora realizes with uncomfortable clarity that she doesn’t actually know the name of Rowan’s company. Has never seen their office. Has only the barest sketch of a life that exists beyond these four walls.
She tries again, asking what exactly the app does, whether the expansion excites them. Rowan’s answers feel simultaneously specific and evasive: marketplace optimization, connecting European vendors, technical infrastructure that’s “honestly quite boring.” Then they’re kissing her again, hands sliding beneath the duvet, redirecting her attention with practiced ease. Theodora recognizes the substitution, physical intimacy offered instead of emotional transparency, even as she allows herself to be distracted, that small internal voice carefully noting the deflection for later examination.
By midnight Rowan is dressed and apologetic, citing an early Copenhagen flight, “Investor breakfast, unfortunately”, and the kiss at her door carries genuine warmth that makes the departure feel reasonable rather than evasive. From her window she watches them disappear down Albion Road, phone already pressed to ear. Later, in sheets smelling of sex and expensive cologne, she mentally reviews the evening and realizes she’s collected almost nothing concrete: only the same vague European geography and the growing certainty that she’s been too intoxicated by physical connection to ask questions that matter.
The pattern establishes itself with metronomic precision. Thursday evenings Rowan arrives with wine and that easy smile that makes her studio feel less like a cramped attic and more like a chosen sanctuary. They stay until the small hours, their conversations ranging from publishing gossip to European tech markets to the particular quality of light in her skylight at two a.m. Then departure before dawn, always with kisses that feel genuine and explanations that slide past scrutiny in the moment. “Stockholm on Monday, back Wednesday.” “Brussels for the week, but I’ll call.”
Theodora finds herself memorizing the rhythm of it, her body anticipating Thursday like a fixed point in an otherwise chaotic week. She plans around it without quite admitting she’s planning around it: declining Lillian’s Friday morning coffee invitations because she’ll be exhausted, keeping her Thursday evenings conspicuously free in her diary. And she hates how quickly she’s become complicit in accepting the boundaries Rowan sets without negotiation, how she’s learned not to suggest weekends or ask about meeting their friends. The questions form in her mind during their conversations, Do you want to go to that exhibition on Saturday? Could I meet you for dinner in Brussels?. But dissolve before reaching her lips, replaced by safer topics, easier intimacies.
It’s the same accommodation she made seven years ago, she realizes one morning while washing Rowan’s coffee cup. The same careful editing of her own needs to fit someone else’s availability. The same performance of being low-maintenance, undemanding, grateful for whatever’s offered. She sets the cup down harder than necessary, the porcelain ringing against the draining board like a small alarm.
She begins checking Rowan’s Instagram during lunch breaks, her phone tilted away from passing colleagues as though the surveillance itself is incriminating. The feed scrolls back through months of carefully curated images, architectural details from Copenhagen, a cappuccino in Milan, that sunset over Barcelona captioned “new beginnings”, before stopping abruptly six weeks ago, right around when they’d met at Jules’s book launch. The silence since feels deliberate, a digital curtain drawn precisely when their relationship began.
LinkedIn offers the professional veneer: the app development company with its sleek logo, impressive credentials, a headshot where Rowan’s smile is more corporate than the one she knows. But no personal details bleed through, no tagged photos from conferences, no colleagues commenting on posts. The European itinerary they describe so casually (Stockholm, Brussels, Amsterdam) leaves no trace in the algorithmic record of modern life.
Theodora closes her phone with the particular shame of someone who’s found exactly what they were looking for: absence as evidence, silence as answer. She already knows, has known for weeks perhaps. She’s simply been choosing the comfort of plausible deniability over the confrontation that would shatter it.
The Thursday absence stretches into Friday silence. Theodora works on the manuscript illustrations with mechanical precision, her phone face-up beside her palette, the screen darkening and brightening with her compulsive checking. She tells herself there are a thousand reasonable explanations even as her imagination conjures betrayals in increasingly vivid detail: another woman, another life, another version of Rowan who exists in the spaces between their carefully scheduled encounters.
The text arrives at eleven-seventeen: So sorry, emergency in Amsterdam, explain when I see you.
She types What happened? Deletes it. Types Are you alright? Deletes that too. Finally settles on Hope everything’s okay. The careful neutrality of someone performing understanding, terrified of seeming demanding or difficult, already complicit in her own deception.
The moment arrives and passes. Rowan’s breath is warm against her collarbone, their fingers drawing constellations she wants to believe mean something. The question forms itself perfectly in her mind (What aren’t you telling me?) but when they murmur “Missed you” into her hair, she makes the choice she’s been making for weeks: she kisses them back, accepting tenderness as currency for truth, already knowing the exchange rate will bankrupt her.
The skylight frames a rectangle of London night. Sodium-orange clouds, the suggestion of stars. She counts Rowan’s departures like a miser counting losses: Stockholm (three days), Brussels (weekend), now Berlin. The geography of absence maps itself across her ceiling. She knows what she’s doing, this careful not-asking, this studied incuriosity. It’s a skill she’s perfected before, this particular cowardice that dresses itself as patience, as being understanding, as not wanting to seem needy.
The silence after the drawer closes feels weighted, expectant. Theodora shifts in her chair, aware that something is required of her. But her phone sits face-up on the manuscript beside her, dark and silent. Rowan hasn’t texted since landing in Berlin six hours ago.
“You think I’m being dramatic,” Lillian says, not quite a question.
“I think you’re being honest.” Theodora traces the edge of a page proof with her paint-stained finger. “Which is harder.”
Lillian’s expression shifts, relief, maybe, or recognition. “When you left before, the relationship you walked away from, was it like this? This feeling that you’re disappearing into someone else’s idea of who you should be?”
The question lands with uncomfortable precision. Theodora wants to say yes, to offer her past as a map for Lillian’s present. But the truth is more complicated, more compromised. She’d left because she’d been too much herself, too volatile, too demanding of emotional honesty. She’d wanted everything or nothing. No middle ground, no patience for the slow work of building something sustainable.
And now? Now she’s become the opposite. The understanding one. The one who doesn’t ask where Rowan goes or who they’re with. The one who accepts three-day disappearances as the price of admission to something that feels like intimacy but might just be availability.
“I left because I couldn’t bend,” Theodora says finally. “And now I’m with someone who requires me to be endlessly flexible.” She looks at Lillian properly. “I’m not sure which is worse. Being erased or erasing yourself.”
Lillian nods slowly, and Theodora realizes they’re both waiting: for texts, for clarity, for permission to want something different than what they’ve been offered. Two women in an empty office, practicing honesty about everything except their own situations.
The ring sits between them on the desk like evidence at trial, its diamond refracting the fluorescent light into accusatory fragments across manuscript pages. Lillian picks it up, slides it back onto her finger, removes it again: a ritual of indecision that makes Theodora’s chest tighten with recognition. She’s performed similar ceremonies with her phone, checking for messages from Rowan, telling herself she won’t check again, checking anyway.
“It’s a beautiful ring,” Theodora offers, and the words taste like ash, like every other time she’s chosen aesthetics over honesty, surface over substance.
Lillian’s laugh is sharp enough to cut. “So is a gilded cage.” She drops the ring into her desk drawer with a decisive click that echoes through the empty office. The sound feels momentous, theatrical. Theodora wonders if this is rehearsal or revolution, whether she’s witnessing an actual decision or just another performance of doubt that will reset by morning when Lillian arrives perfectly composed, the ring back in place, the moment of clarity dismissed as late-night exhaustion.
The drawer stays closed. For now.
When Lillian asks about her past. That you had to leave?“, Theodora feels the question like a fishhook, pulling up memories she’s been trying to keep submerged. The relationship that ended seven years ago surfaces: how she’d known for months before she finally left, how the knowing and the leaving were separated by an ocean of justifications and false starts.
“I knew long before I admitted I knew,” she says carefully, aware she’s describing both past and present, that the words apply equally to that old relationship and to whatever she’s doing with Rowan. His convenient absences, her convenient blindness.
Lillian nods, hungry for this permission, and Theodora feels the weight of becoming someone’s catalyst, their justification for upheaval. She’s not qualified for this role. She’s barely qualified for her own life.
The silence stretches, punctuated only by Lillian’s pen scratching against contract margins and the distant rumble of night buses on Church Street. Theodora’s hand moves across paper (rough sketches of a cover for a debut novel about inheritance and loss) while her mind catalogues her own evasions. Rowan’s text glows on her phone screen, unanswered. Prague, supposedly. She hasn’t asked which hotel, hasn’t requested proof of existence beyond these carefully timed messages. The parallel deceits create a complicity between them, unspoken but understood.
“Are you happy?” The question arrives stripped of preamble, Lillian’s gaze suddenly focused despite the hour’s lateness, and Theodora feels the exposure like cold air on skin. Her carefully constructed narrative about creative renewal and second chances revealed as precisely what it is: construction.
Her mouth shapes something reassuring about fulfillment and fresh starts, but the words calcify before reaching her tongue. She pivots instead toward manuscript deadlines, watches hope drain from Lillian’s face, replaced by something harder, more knowing. The disappointment settles between them like sediment. They’ve just demonstrated their mutual commitment to performance over truth, and the recognition creates distance even as they remain side by side.
The manuscript pages between them have become artifacts of their shared performance, each word on the page more honest than anything they’re saying aloud. Theodora’s deflection reverberates through her skull with the particular shame of recognizing yourself mid-betrayal. Not of Lillian, but of some version of herself she’d imagined becoming when she returned to London. The woman who would be brave this time. The woman who wouldn’t flinch.
Lillian’s fingers trace the contract’s edge with mechanical precision, and the diamond catches the fluorescent light in sharp, accusatory flashes. Each glint seems to mark time: the months until a wedding, the hours until another deadline, the minutes of this silence they’re both allowing to calcify into something permanent. They’ve just established the terms of their friendship without speaking them. Mutual recognition of cowardice, dressed up as professional focus and appropriate boundaries.
The building’s nighttime sounds fill the space their honesty should occupy: heating pipes clicking their metallic conversation, distant traffic humming its indifferent song, the particular quality of loneliness that belongs exclusively to workspaces after hours. When everyone else has departed for lives they may or may not want, for homes that might be sanctuaries or just different stages for the same performances.
Theodora finds herself cataloguing these sounds with the same attention she’d give to visual reference material, as if she might later need to recreate this exact texture of avoidance. The fluorescent lights buzz at a frequency just below conscious hearing but present enough to create low-grade anxiety. Her own breathing sounds too loud in her ears. Lillian shifts in her chair, the leather creaking, and the small sound feels momentous. A possible opening, a potential return to the question still hanging between them like smoke.
But neither of them reaches for it.
Lillian breaks the silence with something about needing to review marketing budgets, her voice professionally bright but her shoulders curved inward, protective. The transformation is so practiced it’s nearly seamless, nearly, except Theodora has spent years studying the gap between surface and substrate, the way bodies betray what voices conceal.
Theodora nods and pretends to study a cover design, but she’s actually watching her friend’s reflection in the darkened window. The way Lillian keeps glancing at her phone, then away, as if expecting a message she dreads receiving. The screen illuminates her face in brief, cold flashes. Each time, her expression shifts through something raw before settling back into professional neutrality.
It’s the same gesture Theodora makes when Rowan goes silent for days, and the parallel is so obvious it feels like being handed a mirror she didn’t ask for. They’re both waiting for people who keep them waiting, both calling it love when it might just be the familiar ache of uncertainty. The addiction to intermittent reinforcement, dressed up in romantic language. Theodora knows this. Has known it. Continues anyway, because knowing and changing remain stubbornly separate countries.
The work session fractures around midnight, exhaustion eroding the careful architecture they’ve both maintained. Lillian’s admission arrives quietly. She’s been sleeping in the guest room for three weeks, telling Marcus it’s wedding stress, which isn’t entirely false. Theodora hears herself confessing that Rowan never stays until morning, always has an early meeting, a flight to catch, some urgent matter that requires departure before dawn breaks and questions might form.
They don’t offer solutions. That would require a certainty neither possesses, a map for territory they’re still pretending not to recognize. But there’s something almost companionable in their mutual bewilderment, two women who’ve constructed impressive exteriors while the foundations remain deliberately unexamined.
When Lillian finally leaves, she pauses at the door. “We should do this again.”
They both understand she means the work, not the honesty.
Theodora’s fingers tighten around the notepad: columns of numbers that dissolve into question marks, wedding venues crossed out with increasing violence. The evidence of Lillian’s unraveling, left like breadcrumbs. She sets it down carefully, aware of Jules watching her with that mixture of concern and calculation that makes Theodora feel simultaneously cared for and managed. “We’re just working,” she says, hearing how defensive it sounds.
Jules’s hand moves to Kit’s elbow, a gesture so practiced it speaks of previous interventions, and her voice takes on that editorial smoothness she uses for difficult authors. “No one’s suggesting you have ulterior motives, Theodora. We’re simply concerned about… alignments. Vulnerable people sometimes reinforce each other’s worst instincts.” The ‘we’ hangs in the air like an indictment, a coalition Theodora hadn’t realized had formed against her.
Theodora feels the accusation like a physical blow, but she forces herself to hold Kit’s gaze, to not look away from those grey eyes that burn with something more complicated than simple antagonism. There’s fear there, she realizes. Fear wrapped in fury, control masking desperation.
“That’s not fair,” she says quietly, though even as the words leave her mouth she’s wondering if there’s truth in them. Has she been seeking out Lillian’s friendship because she recognizes something of her own past uncertainty in the other woman? “People aren’t marks. They’re just… people. Trying to figure things out.”
“How philosophical.” Kit’s laugh is sharp enough to cut. “Meanwhile, Lillian’s wedding is in four months, she’s barely sleeping, and yesterday I found her crying in the archive because she’d realized she couldn’t remember the last time Marcus asked her about her actual work rather than how it looked on their joint social media.” They push off from the counter, standing unsupported for a moment before taking a careful step forward. “That’s what your listening without an agenda has accomplished.”
The kitchen feels smaller suddenly, the afternoon light slanting through the window too bright, too exposing. Theodora can smell the coffee going cold in her cup, the faint scent of Kit’s expensive cologne, something medicinal underneath it that makes her stomach clench with unwanted sympathy.
“So what would you prefer?” Theodora asks, hearing her voice go cool, defensive. “That she keep pretending everything’s fine until she’s standing at the altar? That she marry someone who treats her like a trophy because it’s tidier than admitting she made a mistake?”
Kit’s smile is terrible: knowing and sad and absolutely ruthless. “I’d prefer you remember that not everyone gets the luxury of starting over. Some of us have to live with our choices.”
“Without an agenda,” Kit repeats, and their voice has gone quiet in a way that’s somehow worse than shouting. They’re standing very still now, conserving energy, and Theodora can see the calculation behind it. How much this confrontation is costing them physically, how they’re rationing their strength like currency they can’t afford to waste. “That’s what you tell yourself, isn’t it? That you’re just… available. Just listening. No ulterior motives.”
The kitchen’s fluorescent light flickers, casting shadows that make Kit’s face look gaunt, older than their thirty-two years. “But here’s what I see: someone who walked back into this building after years away and immediately started collecting confidences like they’re research.” They pause, and something shifts in their expression: not quite vulnerability, but close. “Lillian’s brilliant and she’s drowning and she’s exactly the kind of person who’d mistake your attention for wisdom. You’re teaching her that doubt is the same as clarity. That blowing everything up is brave rather than just… destructive.”
The accusation lands differently this time, weighted with something that sounds almost like experience.
Heat floods Theodora’s chest: the defensive anger of someone confronted with an uncomfortable truth she’s been avoiding. “That’s not fair,” she manages, but even as the words leave her mouth, she’s thinking of those late-night conversations with Lillian, the way they’ve circled their doubts like moths drawn to flame, validating each other’s uncertainties with the particular intimacy of shared discontent.
“Maybe I’m just being a friend. Maybe that’s something you don’t understand.”
It’s a low blow and she knows it. Weaponizing Kit’s isolation, their protective fury that keeps everyone at arm’s length. But their characterization of her as some chaos agent, a destabilizing force that gives others permission to want different things, has struck a nerve she didn’t realize was quite so exposed.
She watches them absorb the hit, sees something flicker across their face: not anger, but something more complex. Almost like recognition.
“Friendship,” Kit says softly, and there’s a weariness in their voice that makes them sound older than their thirty-two years, “is that what you call it when you give someone permission to dismantle their life?” They push off from the counter with visible effort, standing unsupported. Theodora watches them hold themselves rigid, every movement calibrated. “When you make running away look like courage instead of cowardice? Some of us don’t have the luxury of starting over every time things get difficult.” The emphasis on difficult carries weight that transcends Lillian entirely.
The footsteps grow louder (Dominic’s distinctive shuffle, probably seeking refuge with a book) and Kit’s transformation is instant, absolute. The vulnerability vanishes behind editorial composure, though their knuckles whiten against the doorframe. “Consider it friendly advice,” they say, each word precisely placed. “Some foundations, once cracked, can’t be repaired.”
They’re gone before Theodora can articulate her defense, leaving her alone with afternoon light and the uncomfortable suspicion that Kit isn’t wrong. That she does carry disruption like others carry umbrellas, unfurling it wherever stability threatens to calcify into stagnation.
Theodora’s mind races through calculations she’d never imagined making. The studio flat’s rent. The materials she’d already purchased for the migration novel. The fragile momentum she’d been building, project by project, toward something resembling stability. Around the table, she can feel the same arithmetic happening in other minds, Lillian’s wedding expenses, someone’s mortgage, another’s childcare costs. Kit’s spreadsheet reduces them all to line items, overhead percentages, cost-benefit analyses.
“The freelance model offers flexibility,” Kit continues, and there’s something almost hypnotic in their delivery, as if they’ve rehearsed this. “We maintain access to talent without the burden of permanent obligations.”
Burden. The word sits wrong in Theodora’s chest. She thinks of the debut novelist, probably checking her email right now, unaware her book has just been sacrificed to a balance sheet.
Jules’s expression is unreadable, but Theodora catches the micro-hesitation before she speaks. “Kit, this is: these are significant structural changes. We need time to consider. Kit’s interruption is sharp, sharper than the professional moment warrants. They lean forward slightly, and Theodora sees it clearly now: the way they’re using the table for support, the careful distribution of weight, the tension in their jaw that speaks of pain being actively managed.”The distributor payment won’t arrive for another six weeks at minimum. We have payroll in two. These aren’t proposals. They’re triage.”
The word choice strikes Theodora as odd, medical rather than financial. Kit’s grey eyes sweep the room with an intensity that feels almost frantic beneath its controlled surface, and she realizes with sudden clarity that she’s watching someone trying to solve an equation where time itself is the variable they can’t control.
Kit rises with the careful deliberation of someone rationing energy, distributing printed financial projections that somehow already exist. As if they’d war-gamed this crisis weeks ago, perhaps lying awake at 3 AM with spreadsheets and worst-case scenarios. Their proposal unfolds with clinical precision: eliminate the in-house art department entirely, restructure all illustration work through freelance contracts. No benefits, no overhead, no permanent obligations.
The numbers are compelling in that terrible way that makes cruelty look like pragmatism. Theodora’s stomach drops as she watches her position dissolve in real-time, colleague transmuting into contractor, insider becoming expendable resource. Around the table, she feels the collective held breath of people calculating their own proximity to the axe.
Kit’s voice remains steady, almost soothing in its professional detachment, but their left hand grips the table’s edge with such force their knuckles go bone-white. Theodora notices the tremor running through their fingers: subtle but unmistakable, a physical betrayal their voice refuses to acknowledge. That tremor wasn’t there last month. She’s certain of it.
Jules opens her mouth, and Theodora watches the calculation happen in real time. Financial survival weighed against a century of treating artists as essential rather than expendable. The silence stretches. Kit’s jaw tightens.
“We don’t have time for sentimentality.” The words come out clipped, almost harsh, but it’s the emphasis that catches Theodora’s attention. Time. Not money, not strategy: time. As if they’re working against a clock no one else can hear.
Kit shifts their weight, a minute adjustment that somehow suggests standing requires conscious effort. Their breath catches after speaking, barely perceptible unless you’re watching for it.
Theodora is watching. And suddenly she understands: this isn’t about protecting the business. It’s about finishing something before an invisible deadline expires.
Dominic finally speaks, his voice quiet but cutting through the tension like a blade through silk: “My great-grandfather didn’t build this house by treating artists as disposable.”
Kit’s expression hardens, something dangerous flickering behind their eyes, and for a moment Theodora thinks they might actually shout. Might finally lose the composure they’ve wielded like armor. But instead they laugh, a short, bitter sound that has no humor in it.
“Your great-grandfather also isn’t here to see what happens when idealism meets insolvency,” Kit says, each word precise as a scalpel. They lean forward slightly, and Theodora notices how carefully they control the movement, as if their body might betray them. “But then, neither will you be, will you, Dominic? You’ve made that abundantly clear.”
The accusation lands like a physical blow. The room seems to contract around it.
Dominic looks stricken, color draining from his face. Jules closes her eyes briefly, her hand coming up to pinch the bridge of her nose. A gesture of someone caught between impossible loyalties. Lillian stares at her phone as if it might offer escape.
And Theodora understands, with the clarity of someone watching from the margins, that she’s witnessing a family fracturing in real time. Not cleanly, not dramatically, but in the slow, terrible way that things break under sustained pressure: hairline cracks spreading until the whole structure becomes unsound.
The meeting fractures rather than concludes, Jules murmuring about reviewing options while everyone escapes. Theodora pretends to organize her sketches, watching Kit through her lashes. They sit motionless, eyes shut, breathing with deliberate control. When they finally rise, the movement is studied, protective. One palm pressed to their ribs. Their gaze finds hers across the emptied room: not hostile, but stripped bare. Exhausted. Afraid. Then the composure slams back into place and they’re gone, leaving Theodora with slanting light and the sickening knowledge that everyone here is hemorrhaging something vital.
The studio’s transformation happens gradually, then all at once. By Tuesday evening, Theodora has cleared the center table entirely, creating three distinct zones: historical fiction against the north wall (all sepia tones and period typography), psychological thriller by the window (stark geometries, unsettling negative space), literary debut on the makeshift desk she’s constructed from a door and two filing cabinets (something softer, more vulnerable, though her hand keeps wanting to make it harder than it needs to be).
She works in rotations: two hours on each before her brain starts confusing their visual languages. The historical needs delicacy, fine pen work that makes her shoulders ache. The thriller demands bold decisions, knife-cuts of composition. The debut requires emotional honesty she’s currently rationing.
At three in the morning, she stands in the center of her flat, turning slowly, surveying the organized chaos. Reference images cluster like evidence boards: Victorian street scenes, anatomical drawings of hands, photographs of empty rooms that somehow suggest violence. Her phone sits face-down on the windowsill, silent for six hours now. She’s trained herself not to check it.
The hunger arrives as lightheadedness first, then a hollow ache she’s become practiced at ignoring. There’s bread somewhere. Peanut butter, possibly. She makes tea instead, standing at the kitchenette while the kettle screams, staring at nothing.
When the landlord’s knock comes. Apologetic but firm, Mr. Kowalski who’s always been kind. She answers with her professional smile, the one that costs nothing because it means nothing. “Friday,” she promises, already calculating: if she finishes the thriller by Wednesday, invoices immediately, marks it urgent… “Absolutely Friday.”
The romance commission arrives via email at dawn: tight deadline, decent pay, cover copy about second chances and choosing yourself. She accepts before reading the full brief, then sits very still, looking at the words second chances until they stop meaning anything at all.
Lillian’s key scrapes in the lock, Theodora gave her a spare months ago, back when her life had room for spontaneity. “Christ, Thea.” The coffee arrives first, then Lillian herself, navigating the obstacle course of drying canvases. “When did you last eat something that wasn’t toast?”
The laugh escapes before Theodora can shape it into something convincing. Too high, too sharp, like glass breaking in another room. “I had… there was soup. Thursday, maybe?”
“It’s Saturday.”
“Then I’ve been very focused.” She’s already moving, gesturing toward the thriller mock-ups, talking too fast about negative space and the male gaze and how the publisher wants commercial but she’s giving them commercial-with-subtext. Her hands won’t settle, adjusting corners that don’t need adjusting, smoothing paper already smooth.
Lillian sets down the pastries with deliberate care. “I haven’t seen Rowan at any events lately. You two still,”
“We’re both busy.” The words arrive pre-formed, defensive. “It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
The repetition hangs between them, obvious as a bruise. Lillian’s expression shifts into something careful, something that looks like pity, and Theodora turns back to her work before she has to name it.
Rowan’s texts chart their own slow dissolution. “Miss you” softens to “Hope you’re well,” then fades to “Let me know when you have time”. Each iteration more careful, more distant. Theodora reads them compulsively, thumb hovering over the keyboard whilst her mind cycles through responses she never sends. She’s protecting herself, she insists, from disappointment she can already taste. But at half-past two, phone glowing in the darkness, another possibility surfaces: perhaps she’s administering punishment for transgressions not yet named, for the evasiveness she’d sensed but lacked courage to challenge directly.
The thought makes her work more ferociously. She pushes through until her right hand seizes, fingers locked around the brush, forcing her to ice the cramping muscles whilst resenting every still minute.
The physical toll manifests in small failures: a jar of ink upended across her best sketch, spreading like accusation; a deadline she has to renegotiate with humiliating apologies; an illustration that refuses resolution no matter how many iterations she attempts. At three in the morning, Theodora finds herself crying over the ruined work, not from its loss but because exhaustion has finally breached her defences. She texts Rowan: “Can we talk?” Then watches the screen for an hour, the “read” receipt appearing instantly whilst the typing indicator never materializes. She deletes the entire thread at dawn.
Jules studies her with the particular attention of someone who’s known you since you had braces and catastrophic fringes. “Theo.” The childhood nickname lands like a hand on her shoulder. “I’ve seen you do this before. The summer your mum was ill, you painted that entire series in six weeks. Beautiful work. You were also barely sleeping or eating.”
Theodora’s fingers tighten on the portfolio. “That was different.”
“Was it?”
Theodora finds herself doing it too, though she hates the surveillance quality of it. She notices when Kit grips the edge of the conference table during the Monday meeting, knuckles whitening for just a moment before releasing. She registers the way they’ve started wearing their shirts untucked, the way they’ve switched from their usual espresso to peppermint tea, the way they pause fractionally before sitting down, as if their body requires negotiation.
It’s the pauses that disturb her most. Kit has always moved with decisive efficiency, someone who treats physical space like a problem to be solved through optimal routing. Now there’s hesitation, a split-second recalibration before each movement, and Theodora recognizes it because she’s seen it before. Her mother, near the end, performing the same calculations about whether crossing the room was worth the cost.
She’s sketching in the third-floor kitchen when Dominic appears, looking more disheveled than usual, his glasses slightly askew. He doesn’t speak, just fills the kettle and stares at it as if he’s forgotten what comes next.
“You’ve noticed,” Theodora says. Not a question.
His hand stills on the kettle. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Dominic.”
He turns, and his face has the peculiar transparency of someone too exhausted to maintain pretense. “I’m leaving in six weeks. Whatever’s happening.”It’s not my responsibility to fix things I’ll no longer be part of.”
The kettle begins to boil, filling the silence between them. Theodora thinks about all the ways people abandon each other, how sometimes the cruelest thing is simply stepping back and calling it self-preservation. She wants to argue with him, but she’s been working seventy-hour weeks specifically to avoid thinking about Rowan’s last three cancelled plans, so perhaps she’s not positioned to judge anyone’s strategic retreat.
The rumors metastasize in the third-floor kitchen during lunch breaks, spreading through the building’s thin walls and narrow staircases like damp through plaster. Kit’s blazers hang differently now: no longer tailored close but loose across shoulders that seem to have narrowed. Someone claims they saw them gripping the sink in the second-floor bathroom, face grey, breathing carefully. The theories proliferate: eating disorder, drug problem, the stress of keeping a dying publishing house alive through sheer force of will.
Lillian shuts it down with uncharacteristic sharpness when she overhears two editorial assistants speculating. “We’re not doing this,” she says, her voice carrying the authority of someone who’s had enough. But Theodora notices how it doesn’t stop, just goes underground. Everyone’s eyes follow Kit now, performing surveillance disguised as concern. They track movements, count absences, note the switch from coffee to herbal tea, the way Kit has started taking the stairs more slowly, one hand trailing the bannister.
It’s grotesque, this collective diagnosis-by-observation, and Theodora hates that she’s participating in it even as she finds herself unable to look away.
The basement becomes Dominic’s refuge, a deliberate descent away from Kit’s careful breathing and Jules’s manufactured cheerfulness. Theodora finds him there on a Thursday afternoon, surrounded by correspondence from 1923. Letters discussing print runs and paper quality, concerns utterly divorced from mortality.
“I’m leaving,” he says, not looking up from a ledger. “Cambridge. Fellowship. September.”
The confession lands between them like something dropped. Theodora understands immediately: he’s choosing the clean ending of departure over the messy witnessing of whatever’s happening upstairs. She should judge him for it. Instead, she envies him.
“That’s good,” she says, meaning it. “You’ll be brilliant there.”
Dominic finally meets her eyes, and his relief at not being condemned is almost painful to witness.
Jules begins inventing pretexts (contract clauses requiring clarification, budget lines needing second opinions) but Kit counters each approach with documents so meticulously prepared they preclude conversation. Market analyses arrive unprompted, financial models proliferate, strategic memos multiply across Jules’s desk like defensive fortifications built from competence itself. After the third deflection, Jules abandons the campaign. Theodora watches her withdraw into her office wearing an expression of defeat so unfamiliar it frightens her more than Kit’s careful movements ever could.
Working late to meet a deadline she’s set artificially early (a habit born of anxiety rather than necessity) Theodora passes Kit’s office at half-past eight. Through the half-open door she sees a tableau that stops her mid-step: Kit motionless at their desk, head bowed, one hand pressed flat against their side, the other gripping the desk edge with enough force that their knuckles have gone white. They’re not working just sitting in the pool of lamplight, breathing with the careful deliberation of someone negotiating with pain. Theodora understands instantly that she’s witnessing something private, something Kit would never willingly show, and she moves past silently, her footsteps suddenly conscious of every creak in the old floorboards, carrying the image with her like a weight she doesn’t know what to do with.
The email sits in her inbox like a small detonation, its timestamp (11:[^47] PM) suggesting Dominic composed it in the same insomniac hours that find her still working. Theodora reads it once quickly, then again more slowly, then a third time with the analytical attention she usually reserves for visual composition, parsing the careful architecture of his retreat.
He’s constructed the departure as intellectual imperative: the fellowship’s prestige, the rare opportunity to work with the Burney Collection, his obligation to scholarship that has languished too long in service to family duty. The prose is elegant, apologetic, utterly final. But beneath the scholarly language, Theodora hears something else: the particular desperation of someone who has mistaken escape for solution, who believes that by changing locations he might outrun the grief that’s been following him since his partner left.
She doesn’t forward it. Doesn’t reach for her phone to text Jules or Lillian. Simply sits in the pool of lamplight from her desk lamp, surrounded by half-finished sketches for a cover that suddenly feels irrelevant, and watches the email’s implications unfold like dominoes in her mind.
The publishing house has been operating on the fiction that Dominic would eventually step into his inheritance, that his current academic sabbatical was temporary, that the Fairfax family would continue shepherding the house they founded in 1897. This email doesn’t just decline a position: it collapses a future everyone has been building around.
She wonders if Kit has seen it yet. If they’re awake in their own office, calculating what this means for whatever plans they’ve been constructing with that fierce, private intensity. If they’re alone with the knowledge that the ground has shifted beneath strategies that depended on structures that no longer exist.
The skylight above her shows only darkness and the reflected glow of her own lamp. Outside, London continues, indifferent to small institutional apocalypses.
By morning, the email has metastasized into institutional crisis. Jules calls an emergency meeting in the Austen room, and Theodora arrives to find the space already thick with tension: people arranged around the mahogany table like chess pieces uncertain of their next move. Jules stands at the head, her usual composure visibly strained, a muscle jumping in her jaw as she waits for everyone to settle.
The assembled staff perform collective shock with varying degrees of conviction. Theodora watches faces she’s learned to read over recent weeks: surprise that isn’t quite surprise, concern that’s been rehearsed in private conversations, the peculiar relief of having unspoken fears finally named.
Kit arrives last, moving with that careful precision Theodora now recognizes as pain management: each step measured, weight distributed deliberately. They sit with perfect posture while Jules outlines the succession implications, her words clinical but her hands restless. The board will likely push for external management. The family’s 125-year stewardship may end. Everything is suddenly negotiable.
Theodora watches Kit’s face remain impassive through Jules’s recitation of institutional apocalypse. Only their hands betray them: fingers pressed flat against the table’s polished surface, trembling almost imperceptibly, as though holding something together through sheer force of will.
In the kitchen afterward, the staff fractures into anxious clusters. Theodora watches people she’s worked alongside for weeks suddenly become strangers calculating exit strategies: some already composing mental CVs, others whispering about redundancy packages, everyone performing variations of controlled panic.
Lillian materializes beside her at the window, both clutching cooling tea neither remembers making. The courtyard below is grey, pigeons pecking at nothing.
“We’re all just pretending, aren’t we?” Lillian’s voice is barely audible. “That everything’s fine, that we’re not watching something end.”
Theodora understands they’re discussing more than Dominic’s departure. Lillian’s flawless exterior. Theodora’s cautious optimism about Rowan. Kit’s iron composure. All of them constructing elaborate fictions on foundations currently liquefying beneath their feet.
That afternoon, Theodora passes Kit’s office and finds them gripping the desk edge, phone pressed to their ear with white-knuckled intensity. Their voice carries (low, urgent, fraying at the edges: “) need to accelerate the timeline,” and “, before the board meeting protect what we can while we still,”
The conversation has the quality of someone trying to control outcomes from a position of diminishing power, each word a small act of will against entropy.
When Kit notices Theodora in the doorway, their expression shifts through irritation to something more complex (almost pleading, almost vulnerable) before resettling into professional neutrality with visible effort. They end the call abruptly, and Theodora understands she’s been cast as either obstacle or unwitting player in machinations she can’t fully see, a piece on a board whose rules keep changing.
By evening, Theodora sits alone in her studio with Dominic’s email still open on her laptop, the cursor blinking in an unsent reply she can’t figure how to write. She wants to ask if he’s running toward something or away from everything, if his fellowship is genuine calling or elaborate escape, if he understands that his absence creates vacuums others will fill in ways he might not intend. But the questions feel too intimate for their careful acquaintance, too revealing of her own pattern-recognition: this instinct for identifying retreat disguised as purpose. Instead she closes the laptop, the click final as a door shutting.
The manuscript sits before her like evidence in a trial she’s prosecuting against herself. Theodora positions her desk lamp to cast harsh light across the pages, the kind of illumination that reveals every flaw in a drawing, every hesitation in a line. She reads the synopsis again, forcing herself to absorb details she’d skimmed earlier: the love interest who maintains three different flats across Europe, who speaks vaguely about “business commitments,” whose charm functions as both invitation and barrier.
Her fingers reach for charcoal rather than pencil. She needs something that smudges, that leaves marks. The first sketch emerges quickly: a figure in three-quarter profile, shoulders angled toward the viewer but feet positioned for departure. She knows this posture intimately, has memorized it across dozens of goodbyes that always felt temporary, provisional, subject to revision. The character in the manuscript travels constantly for work. Rowan travels constantly for work. The character maintains careful ambiguity about their living situation. Rowan has never, in eight months, invited her to their flat.
She flips to a fresh page, her hand moving with the peculiar clarity that comes from channeling emotional turbulence into technical precision. This sketch is more detailed: the way someone holds their phone when a call comes through they can’t answer in present company, the micro-expression that flickers across a face when asked about weekend plans, the specific geometry of evasion. She’s drawing Rowan’s body language from memory, cataloging every gesture she’d previously interpreted as mysterious rather than dishonest.
The manuscript’s protagonist, she reads, has “complicated reasons for avoiding commitment that will be revealed in a third-act confession.” Theodora sets down her charcoal, her fingers now blackened, and stares at her sketches. She’s illustrating a romantic comedy. She’s living a tragedy. The genre confusion would be funny if her hands weren’t shaking.
She arrives at seven with a bottle of Malbec she can’t afford and observational skills she wishes she could silence. The flat is in Clerkenwell, a converted warehouse with exposed brick and floor-to-ceiling windows. Rowan kisses her at the door, their usual warmth present but their body angled slightly away, shepherding her toward the kitchen rather than letting her wander.
Theodora catalogs details with the same attention she’d give a manuscript illustration: the single set of keys on the hook, the absence of photographs except generic art prints, the way certain kitchen drawers have childproof locks though Rowan has mentioned no children, the mail on the counter all addressed to a business entity rather than a name. She opens the wine while Rowan cooks, her eyes mapping the negative space. What’s missing speaks louder than what’s present.
“You’ve never shown me your place before,” she says, keeping her voice light, conversational, though her pulse hammers against her throat.
Rowan’s knife pauses mid-chop. “Haven’t I? I suppose I’m always at yours. More character.”
The lie sits between them like a third person at dinner.
She sends the text before she can reconsider: “Let’s do your place instead? I’ll bring wine.” The typing indicator appears immediately, then vanishes. Reappears. Vanishes again. Theodora watches those three pulsing dots like they’re Morse code spelling out the truth she’s been avoiding. Forty-five seconds, she counts them, before “Sure, sounds great” materializes with studied casualness that arrives several beats too late.
She knows that pause. She’s seen it in editorial meetings when someone’s caught without having read the manuscript, in her own mirror when her mother asks if she’s happy. That hesitation contained an entire internal scramble: what needs hiding, what story needs aligning, whether refusing would confirm more than allowing. The delay itself is confession.
The flat smells wrong: too neutral, like a hotel room between guests. Theodora catalogues absences: no jumble of keys by the door, no accumulated mail, no photographs marking time or relationships. The bookshelves hold only recent spines, their pages uncreased. In the bedroom glimpsed through the doorway, one bedside table where couples accumulate pairs. Kitchen drawers yield takeaway menus, batteries, nothing intimate. She’s standing in a stage set, beautifully dressed but fundamentally hollow.
While Rowan’s voice drifts through the bedroom door, speaking to someone with an ease they’ve never quite achieved with her, Theodora finds herself at the desk, drawn by the gravitational pull of half-visible truths. The folder lies open like a confession. Her eyes, trained to extract meaning from fragments and shadows, parse the header before conscious thought intervenes: Certificate of Marriage. Five years ago. Two names, neither hers. The hollowing arrives first, chest cavity suddenly vast and empty, then the ringing in her ears, then Jules’s name flashing insistently across her phone screen, messages accumulating like aftershocks.
The document remains where she placed it, centered on Rowan’s desk with the deliberate precision of someone arranging evidence. Theodora’s hands, those reliable instruments that have steadied through countless deadlines, that have rendered beauty from blank pages, betray her now, fingers curling and uncurling against her palms as if trying to remember their purpose. She’s photographed it. The act feels both necessary and absurd, as though documentation might transform betrayal into something manageable, something that can be filed and processed rather than felt.
The singing continues, muffled by water and distance. Something from the eighties, cheerful and tuneless. Rowan has always been unselfconscious in private moments, or what Theodora had believed were private moments. Now she wonders what privacy means to someone who maintains such careful compartments. Five years married. Five years of a legal bond they’ve never mentioned while discussing futures with studied vagueness, while allowing Theodora to interpret silences as potential rather than foreclosure.
She should leave. The thought arrives with crystalline clarity, but her body remains stubbornly rooted. Her eyes trace the room’s careful curation: the mid-century furniture that suggests taste without revealing preference, the art that’s expensive but impersonal, the books arranged by color rather than content. A showroom. She’s been sleeping in a showroom, mistaking aesthetic for authenticity.
The water cuts off. Theodora hears the shower door slide open, the rustle of towel against skin. Thirty seconds, perhaps less, before Rowan emerges and she’ll have to decide what to do with her face, her voice, her knowledge. Whether to perform ignorance or detonate truth. Whether she has the right to rage when she’s been so determined not to ask the questions that might have produced uncomfortable answers.
Her phone begins its violent dance across the glass, and the decision is made for her.
Her phone erupts. Not a single call but a cascade of them, Jules’s name flashing repeatedly, then Lillian’s, then numbers she doesn’t recognize, the vibrations making the device skitter across Rowan’s glass coffee table like something trying to escape. Theodora watches it buzz and spin, her body refusing commands, her mind cataloging irrelevant details: the way afternoon light fractures through Rowan’s expensive whiskey collection, the faint smell of bergamot from their pretentious hand soap, the fact that she’s never seen a single personal photograph in this flat, not one.
The messages preview on her screen (“Kit collapsed,” “ambulance,” “hospital,” “come now”) and she understands that catastrophe has perfect timing, that it always arrives in multiples, that the universe has a dramatist’s sense of structure.
She picks up the phone. Jules’s voice comes through fractured, professional veneer cracking around the edges. Kit. Editorial meeting. Couldn’t stand. The ambulance took twenty minutes. Theodora should come. Everyone’s asking for her.
Everyone except the person currently emerging from the shower, humming, oblivious to the fact that their carefully constructed world is about to intersect with hers in the worst possible way.
The bathroom door opens and Rowan emerges wreathed in steam, expensive loungewear clinging to damp skin, toweling their hair with the unselfconscious ease of someone who’s never questioned their welcome anywhere. Their mouth opens around what would have been some charming observation about the afternoon they’d planned, wine, perhaps, or that gallery opening in Shoreditch, but the words die when they see her face, see the certificate in her trembling hand, see the way she’s standing not like someone who belongs here but like someone cataloging exits.
Their expression performs a rapid sequence: surprise, calculation, resignation, something that might be genuine regret. Theodora watches them decide in real-time which story might still salvage this, which version of themselves to deploy.
“It’s not what you think,” Rowan starts, and Theodora laughs, actually laughs, because it’s such a perfect cliché, the exact line she’s illustrated a hundred times in manuscripts, the hero’s mouth open in desperate explanation while the heroine’s world fractures. Her phone buzzes against her thigh like a trapped insect. She ignores it, watching Rowan’s face cycle through expressions like someone shuffling cards, looking for the right play.
“You’re married,” she says, her voice surprisingly steady, surprisingly cold, as if someone else is speaking through her mouth. The certificate trembles in her hand, expensive paper stock, embossed seal, all those official marks that transform a private lie into documented fact.
Her phone erupts again, insistent, and this time she looks. Jules’s messages scroll past in urgent fragments: collapsed, ambulance, critical condition, asking for you. Kit. Kit is dying right now, might already be dead, while she stands in this architect-designed flat confronting a different kind of ending. The two catastrophes overlay each other like transparencies, and she realizes she’s been living in a carefully constructed fiction on every front.
The space between them calculates itself in her body: three steps to the door, two meters of polished concrete, the width of five years of careful deception. Her fingers still grip the certificate, that expensive paper stock with its embossed seal transforming private betrayal into legal fact. “Don’t,” she says when Rowan moves, and something in her voice, not anger, something colder, the absolute zero of trust finally spent, stops them mid-reach.
The silence stretches between them like a physical thing, elastic and dangerous. Theodora watches Rowan’s face cycle through expressions before settling on a carefully calibrated openness that she recognizes, suddenly, as a performance she’s been watching for months without seeing it clearly.
“Theo,” they say, and their voice has that particular quality of intimate concern, the one that has always made her feel seen, understood. Now it sounds like a technique. “Let me explain.”
“Explain.” She hears her own voice as if from a distance, flat and strange. “Yes, do explain how you’ve been married for five years while taking me to bed and talking about. They take a step toward her and she moves back instinctively, the marriage certificate crinkling in her grip.”It’s not what you think,” Rowan says, and she almost laughs at the cliché of it, except nothing about this feels remotely funny. “It’s a legal arrangement, it was supposed to be temporary, just for the visa situation, but then things got complicated with immigration law and. The word comes out sharper than she intended, cutting through their explanation.”Just stop.”
Rowan stops, their hands half-raised in a gesture of appeal, and for a moment they look genuinely lost, the charm stripped away to reveal something younger and more frightened beneath. It should make her feel something, sympathy, perhaps, or vindication, but she feels only a vast, echoing emptiness where her carefully rebuilt confidence used to be.
“How long were you planning to wait?” she asks quietly. “Before telling me?”
She doesn’t interrupt. She stands there, the marriage certificate still in her hand, and watches Rowan construct their defense with the same fluid eloquence they bring to everything. The words wash over her, green card, technicality, meant to tell you, waiting for the right moment, and she notices how their body language mirrors hers, how they modulate their tone to match her silence, how even now they’re reading her and adjusting accordingly.
“It’s not a real marriage,” Rowan says finally, and something in her chest cracks at the phrase. “We haven’t even spoken in two years. It’s just paper.”
Just paper. Like the contracts she signs for illustration work, like the lease on her flat, like every legal document that shapes the architecture of a life. She thinks of all the times Rowan mentioned being “complicated about commitment,” how she’d found it endearing, a vulnerability they trusted her enough to share. What a convenient cover story for being unavailable.
“Theo, let me explain,” Rowan says, moving toward her with hands raised in a gesture of openness that now reads as performance. She steps back, maintaining distance, watching them recalibrate. They launch into explanation: the friend who needed immigration help, the marriage that was supposed to be simple paperwork, the divorce lawyer who disappeared with their retainer, the legal complications spanning two countries. Their voice carries the same warm reasonableness they use when discussing wine or recommending restaurants, as if this betrayal is merely another fascinating anecdote. She notices how they’re framing it: things that happened to them, circumstances beyond control, rather than choices they made. How they’re positioning her as someone who will understand, who is sophisticated enough to see past convention. She’s watched them charm editors and investors with this exact technique: acknowledge the problem, contextualize it, make the listener complicit in forgiveness.
“It’s not a real marriage,” Rowan insists, their voice taking on that persuasive warmth she’s heard them use with difficult clients. Something in Theodora fractures at the phrase. The casual erasure of legal reality, the implication that she’s being unreasonable about a mere technicality. “We haven’t lived together in years, it’s just paperwork, I was going to tell you once it was resolved.” But she hears the architecture of omission: they decided what she deserved to know, let her invest in someone fundamentally unavailable, built intimacy on calculated silence.
She watches their mouth form explanations (it didn’t seem relevant, I was protecting you from unnecessary complexity, I thought I’d have it resolved before we got serious) and realizes she’s been here before, just with different words. The same pattern: someone deciding what truths she could handle, rationing reality like she was too fragile for the whole of it.
The legal documents had been ordinary. A folder left open on their dining table, visible while Rowan made coffee in that easy, unselfconscious way they had. Theodora’s eye had caught her own name in a text message preview on the screen beside it: Does Theodora know you’re still married? The question from an unknown number, stark and unambiguous.
She’d asked directly, watching their face perform surprise, then calculation, then a kind of resigned defeat that suggested they’d been waiting for this moment. The coffee forgotten, cooling in expensive ceramic mugs.
Now Rowan moves between justification and apology with the fluidity of someone accustomed to narrative control. They explain the Brazilian developer. How it was supposed to be clean, a business arrangement with legal parameters. How neither of them anticipated the tax implications, the asset disputes, the way simple things become complex when lawyers get involved.
“It wasn’t real,” Rowan says, and Theodora thinks of every dinner they’d shared, every morning she’d woken in their bed, every time she’d felt chosen. All of it real to her, all of it constructed on a foundation of selective truth.
They reach for her hand and she lets them take it, watching their thumb trace circles on her wrist. A gesture that once felt intimate, now feels like technique. “I thought I was protecting you from unnecessary stress. The divorce was always just around the corner, and then we could start fresh, properly.”
“Properly,” Theodora repeats, the word strange in her mouth. As if relationships could be drafted and redrafted, as if honesty were a luxury reserved for final versions rather than a foundation. She thinks of Kit’s accusation weeks ago: You have a pattern of choosing people who aren’t quite available. She’d dismissed it as cruelty. Now it feels like diagnosis.
“I was going to tell you.” Rowan’s voice carries the particular timbre of truth arriving too late to matter. “Next month. After the final papers were signed.”
Theodora watches their hands gesture through explanations: the timing never quite right, the relationship too new to burden with complications, then too precious to risk with revelations. Each week they’d told themselves soon, except soon stretched into months, and months into a architecture of omission so elaborate it required its own maintenance.
“Which part was real?” she asks, and hears her voice come out steadier than she’d expected. “The spontaneous weekend in Brighton? The way you remembered I take my coffee? Or was it all just,” She stops, unable to finish, because naming it makes it solid.
Rowan’s face crumples with what might be genuine anguish or might be the fear of losing something valuable. She can’t tell anymore. Perhaps she never could. They’d shown her exactly what she wanted to see, and she’d been so eager to believe in surfaces, in charm, in the fantasy of being chosen by someone who moved through the world so lightly.
She reaches for her coat before remembering she’d draped it over Rowan’s chair when she arrived. When the world was different, when she’d come here flushed with the possibility of deepening what they had. The coat stays. A casualty. A marker of before. Her body makes the decision her mind is still processing, carrying her toward the door while Rowan calls her name with raw desperation that might be genuine, might be performance, might be both simultaneously. She’s already down the stairs, her hand sliding along the bannister she’d touched ascending with such different expectations. Already on the street. Already choosing herself even as every instinct screams to turn back, to accept whatever explanation would let her keep the beautiful illusion a little longer.
The phone’s weight in her palm feels impossible, the screen blurred by rain and her own unfocused vision. She stares at the cascade of notifications: each timestamp a small violence, marking minutes when her world was ending while another crisis was unfolding elsewhere. Her thumb hovers over Lillian’s name, then Jules’s, unable to choose which disaster to acknowledge first, which version of herself to assemble from these scattered pieces.
The messages resolve into meaning slowly, her brain still half-occupied with Rowan’s face as they’d reached for her. Kit collapsed. Ambulance. UCH emergency. The words refuse to cohere at first, sliding past the louder drama of her own humiliation. Then they snap into focus with physical force: her heartbreak doesn’t vanish but suddenly contracts, making room for alarm, for the sickening guilt of having resented Kit without knowing. She’s still drenched, still shaking, still carrying betrayal like a stone in her chest, but her feet are already turning toward the tube station.
Jules’s hands move as she talks, unusual for her. “They’ve been dying,” she says, and the present perfect tense lands with peculiar weight. “For months. Stage four pancreatic cancer. Six months into what the doctors gave them: twelve months, maybe eighteen if they were lucky.” Her voice catches on ‘lucky,’ the word’s inadequacy suddenly visible.
Theodora feels the hospital floor tilt slightly. All those meetings where Kit had been so cutting, so precise in their cruelty toward her: she’d interpreted it as simple antagonism, protection of a sibling from a woman who’d caused pain before. She hadn’t seen the desperation underneath, the fury of someone watching their time compress while trying to control outcomes they wouldn’t survive to see.
“The sibling is furious with us,” Jules continues, her professional mask slipping further. “Says we should have noticed. The weight loss, the pain they were clearly managing, the way they’d disappear for hours. Apparently for treatment.” She laughs, a sound without humor. “We thought they were just being Kit. Difficult. Exacting.”
Behind Jules, Dominic lifts his head. His glasses are slightly askew and his eyes are red-rimmed. He looks at Theodora with something that might be accusation or might be shared guilt. She can’t tell. Perhaps he’s thinking the same thing she is: that they’ve all been so absorbed in their own dramas, their romantic complications and career anxieties and inheritance crises, that they missed someone actively dying among them.
Lillian ends her call and approaches, her usual polish completely destroyed. “Marcus doesn’t understand why I’m here,” she says to no one in particular. “Why I’m upset about a colleague.” The way she says ‘colleague’ suggests she’s only now realizing Kit was more than that. That the publishing house has made them all into something closer and more complicated than professional acquaintances.
Jules sees her first and something shifts in her expression, relief, certainly, but also a flicker of calculation, the recognition that Theodora’s presence here, now, tangles an already impossible situation. She crosses the waiting room in four strides, her sleek bob slightly disheveled, and the professional mask she’s worn for fifteen years cracks visibly at the edges.
“They collapsed,” Jules says, her voice aiming for calm but fracturing on the consonants. “Mid-sentence. We were discussing the spring list and Kit just: stopped. Crumpled.” Her hands move again, describing a fall. “Dominic caught them before they hit the conference table corner. I held their head and felt.”They weighed nothing. The tailoring hid it. All those beautiful suits.”
The details emerge in fragments: the 999 call, someone’s shaking hands on the phone, Kit’s shallow breathing. “Eight minutes,” Jules says, tapping her watch face. “The ambulance took eight minutes.” The paramedics asked questions (medications, conditions, history) that no one could answer. They’d worked alongside Kit for months, years, and knew nothing that mattered.
“The hospital needed an emergency contact,” Jules continues. “That’s when the sibling came.”
The sibling, younger, softer-featured, perhaps twenty-eight, stands near the corridor to the treatment rooms, arms wrapped tight across their chest. Theodora watches Lillian approach with careful, tentative questions, her engagement ring catching the fluorescent light as her hands flutter nervously.
The sibling’s voice carries across the waiting room, not shouting but pitched high with exhaustion: “Stage four pancreatic cancer. Diagnosed six months ago. Twelve-month prognosis if they’re lucky, which they won’t be because they refuse to stop working, won’t rest, won’t let anyone help.”
Each fact lands like a stone into still water. Ripples of comprehension spread across faces: people who’ve worked with Kit, fought with Kit, resented Kit’s sharpness. Lillian staggers backward, sits down hard. Dominic looks up, his expression performing complicated mathematics, recalculating months of interactions. Jules closes her eyes. When she opens them, Theodora sees recognition there: patterns suddenly making terrible sense.
Theodora sits without remembering choosing to, her coat pooling water onto linoleum. The information reorganizes six months of encounters: Kit’s first assessment of her work. Not judgment but the complicated grief of witnessing futures. The legal maneuvering, territorial sharpness. A dying person arranging pieces they won’t remain to guard. She’d read cruelty through her own insecurities, missing desperation entirely. Nausea rises, compounded by Rowan’s revelation, by shock’s accumulating weight.
A doctor emerges, young, exhausted, wearing scrubs printed with cartoon penguins that seem obscene against mortality, and asks for family. Kit’s sibling disappears through double doors with a backward glance that says both this is private and I’m drowning. The rest remain in liminal fluorescence. Jules watches Theodora with an expression between assessment and question: weapon or grace? Dominic feeds coins into the vending machine with trembling hands. Lillian checks her phone. Productivity as shield against feeling. They’re all performing normalcy while the ground liquefies.
The revelation sits in her chest like swallowed glass. Theodora stares at the vending machine where Dominic is still feeding coins (he’s bought three packets of crisps now, methodically, as though the transaction itself is what matters) and understands with sudden, nauseating clarity that she’s been doing the same thing. Different currency, same compulsion. Buying time. Buying distance. Buying the illusion of forward motion.
She’d thought returning to London was brave. Thought accepting Jules’s commission was proof she’d evolved beyond the woman who’d fled eight years ago, paint-stained and heartbroken, convinced that geography could cauterize grief. But she’d simply found new ways to avoid looking directly at herself. New studio, same evasions. She’d been so careful about the lighting in her flat, the way the north-facing skylight transformed everything into something more beautiful than it was. She’d done the same thing with her life.
Kit wasn’t an obstacle. Kit was a mirror she’d refused to look into, reflecting back her own capacity for self-deception. And Rowan she’d wanted them precisely because they’d never asked her to be fully present, never demanded the vulnerability that actual intimacy requires. A married lover is the perfect choice for someone terrified of real commitment. She can see that now, here, under lights designed to reveal every flaw.
Lillian’s phone screen casts blue light across her face, and Theodora recognizes the expression: the desperate scroll, the performance of busyness, the way productivity becomes a socially acceptable dissociation. They’re all doing it. Dominic with his coins and crisps, Lillian with her emails, Jules with her careful management of crisis. And Theodora with her art, her beautiful surfaces, her conviction that if she could just render things perfectly enough, she wouldn’t have to feel them.
Jules returns from speaking with the doctor and sits beside her, close enough that their shoulders touch. The contact feels like an anchor, though Theodora isn’t certain whether she’s being moored or dragged under.
“I should have told you,” Jules says quietly. Not about Kit specifically but about everything else. The financial pressures. The succession crisis. The way the publishing house has been held together with optimism and strategic omission. “I wanted you to come back to something stable. Something that felt like it used to.” She pauses, and in profile her face looks older, the silver in her hair more pronounced under the waiting room’s unforgiving light. “But nothing is what it used to be. We’re all just pretending very convincingly.”
Theodora realizes that Jules’s authority, which she’d envied and relied upon, is itself a performance. The recognition is both devastating and oddly comforting. They’re all improvising, then. All making it up as they go, hoping competence will coalesce from repeated gestures of certainty.
She watches Dominic at the vending machine, his methodical selection of items he probably won’t consume: a packet of crisps, a chocolate bar, a bottle of water he’ll leave half-drunk on the windowsill. The ritual itself is the point, she realizes. His retreat into eighteenth-century literature isn’t escape but survival, a way of bearing witness to human patterns without being destroyed by their immediate manifestations. He’s not avoiding life but translating it into a language he can process, finding in Richardson and Fielding the same betrayals and griefs at a safer distance, where the endings are already written and the moral frameworks established. She’s been doing the same thing with her art, turning emotional chaos into aesthetic problems with technical solutions: color theory instead of heartbreak, composition instead of confrontation. They’re all finding ways to metabolize what they cannot directly swallow, and there’s no virtue in one method over another, no hierarchy of coping that makes any of them braver or more honest.
Lillian’s phone buzzes again and she silences it without looking. A small rebellion, a hairline fracture in the perfect surface. Theodora remembers that engagement ring catching light during their first meeting, the pang of envy for such apparent certainty, that visible proof of being chosen. Now she wonders what Lillian sees: promise or prison, future or foreclosure. They’ve been envying each other’s illusions, mistaking different forms of compromise for actual solutions, each woman convinced the other has found the answer.
The sketchbook’s leather cover is worn soft where her thumb always rests, the spine cracked at the same angles from years of opening to favorite pages. She doesn’t sketch, the waiting room’s fluorescent glare would flatten everything to clinical geometry, but traces the edge of the paper, feeling the tooth of it. Her art has always known what she’s refused to see: the shadows she’s been painting around figures, the negative space she’s been rendering with more care than the subjects themselves, the way her compositions have grown increasingly fragmented even as she’s insisted on her own wholeness.
The door opens with a pneumatic sigh that sounds like resignation. Theodora crosses the threshold into a space that feels simultaneously too bright and too dim. The overhead fluorescents washing out color while shadows pool in the corners where institutional cleaning never quite reaches. Her boots squeak against linoleum that’s been mopped so many times the pattern has worn to ghost suggestions of itself.
Kit’s eyes track her movement with an alertness that seems at odds with their body’s stillness. They don’t speak immediately, and Theodora finds herself cataloguing details with the same attention she’d give a difficult composition: the way the hospital gown gaps at the shoulder, revealing a collarbone too prominent; the monitor’s green line tracing heartbeats into temporary existence; the water pitcher on the side table, condensation beading its plastic surface, untouched.
She lowers herself into the chair, its vinyl protesting her weight with a sound like a sigh. The sketchbook presses against her ribs, a familiar weight that usually grounds her but now feels like evidence of something: her habit of observing rather than participating, perhaps, or her instinct to transform pain into aesthetic object before it can touch her directly.
“You came,” Kit says finally. Not a question, not quite surprise. A statement of fact delivered in that scraped-raw voice that makes Theodora think of sandpaper on wood, the violence required to smooth surfaces.
“I came,” she confirms, and hears how the words echo between them, stripped of context or justification. She doesn’t say I had to or Jules asked me to or any of the other frameworks she’d constructed during the tube ride here. Just the acknowledgment of presence, of having chosen, however reluctantly, however complicated, to be in this room, breathing this air, witnessing this unraveling.
The disinfectant smell is institutional, chemical, but underneath it Theodora’s artist’s nose catches something else. Something organic and wrong, the scent of a body turning against itself. She remains in the vinyl chair, sketchbook still pressed to her ribs, and the silence that fills the space between them has transformed. Not hostile now, but vast. Oceanic. Full of all the accusations they’ve already hurled at each other, now settling like silt.
When Kit speaks, their voice emerges scraped raw, each word requiring visible effort, as though they’re translating from some internal language of pain into something the external world might comprehend. Theodora finds her gaze drawn to their hands resting on the hospital blanket. Those hands that had gestured so decisively across conference tables, that had signed documents with flourishes of authority. Now the IV bruises bloom purple across pale skin like watercolor bleeding into wet paper. Their fingers lie still, no longer gripping with that characteristic certainty that had made every gesture seem like a declaration of territory.
The monitor beeps its steady rhythm, counting moments neither of them can reclaim.
The words settle between them like sediment. Theodora’s fingers find the edge of her sketchbook, tracing its spiral binding: a nervous habit, grounding. She wants to say something about how she understands, but that would be presumptuous. She doesn’t understand dying. She only understands the smaller deaths: relationships ending, versions of yourself you have to kill to survive.
“I kept thinking,” she says slowly, “that if I could just be different enough this time. Better. Less…” She trails off, unsure what word completes the sentence. Less herself? “But you can’t negotiate your way out of being human.”
Kit’s expression shifts. Not quite a smile, but something softer than she’s ever seen there. Recognition, perhaps. The acknowledgment that they’ve both been fighting the same losing battle against their own natures.
Kit’s hand trembles as they reach for the water glass, and Theodora sees the effort it costs them to maintain even this much composure. “The worst part isn’t dying,” Kit says, voice barely above a whisper. “It’s realizing I’ve spent what time I had being terrified of exactly this: of being vulnerable, of needing people, of mattering too much to control the damage.”
“I don’t forgive you,” Theodora says finally, the words emerging without the sharpness she’d rehearsed during the tube ride over. “And I don’t think you forgive me either. But maybe,” She pauses, searching for language adequate to this strange territory. “Maybe that’s not what this is.”
Kit nods slowly, their grey eyes meeting hers with an intensity that’s transformed: no longer weaponized but simply present, simply witnessing. “Maybe it’s just two people who’ve spent so much energy defending themselves they forgot they were fighting the same war.”
The silence that follows feels archaeological, as though they’re excavating layers of old grievances to find something more fundamental beneath. Outside, a helicopter passes, its searchlight briefly illuminating the room before darkness returns, more complete than before.
“The worst part,” Kit continues, and Theodora watches their fingers worry at the edge of the thin blanket, a nervous gesture she’s never seen them make, “is that I became the thing I was trying to prevent. I turned myself into the person who leaves: just on a different timeline.” Their laugh is bitter, barely a sound. “At least your Rowan had the decency to lie. I just… ran out of time to be honest.”
Theodora shifts in the chair, squeak, and the absurd sound breaks something open in her chest. “Rowan’s not mine,” she says, and hears the truth of it for the first time without the accompanying vertigo of loss. “They never were. I just kept arranging the evidence to support a conclusion I wanted to reach.” She thinks of the marriage certificate, that bureaucratic rectangle that had shattered her carefully constructed narrative. “We’re both quite good at that, aren’t we? Seeing what we need to see until reality becomes unavoidable.”
Kit’s grey eyes find hers again, and there’s something almost like humor in them now, dark and tired but genuine. “Jules always said we were more alike than either of us would admit. I believe I told her she was being reductive.”
“I believe I agreed with you.”
“Of course you did. We were united in our mutual antagonism.” Kit’s breathing shifts, becomes more labored, and Theodora watches them reach for the pain medication button, press it with the practiced efficiency of someone who’s learned this particular choreography. “Strange how much energy that took. Being enemies. I’m rather too tired for it now.”
The hospital room’s fluorescent hum fills the pause between them. Theodora watches Kit’s hand still on the blanket, that nervous gesture arrested mid-motion.
“I thought if I could just keep you away from them,” Kit says finally, their voice rougher than usual. Whether from pain or emotion, Theodora can’t determine, “I could protect them from what happened to me. From loving someone so completely that when they left, it felt like amputation.” They pause, swallow with visible effort. “From learning that you can lose someone without them dying, which is its own particular education in grief.”
Theodora feels the words land like stones in still water, ripples spreading outward to touch her own history, the careful architecture of her defenses. “Your sibling isn’t you,” she says carefully, testing each word before releasing it, “and I’m not who I was eight years ago.” She shifts forward, elbows on knees. “But I understand why you couldn’t see that. I’ve been so busy proving I’ve changed that I didn’t notice I was dating someone who couldn’t change even if they wanted to.”
Kit’s grey eyes fix on her with an intensity that feels almost clinical. “The marriage certificate,” they say, and it’s not quite a question. “Tell me about finding it.”
Theodora leans back, the vinyl chair creaking beneath her. “Between takeaway menus and travel documents. Just: there. Five years old, witnessed and notarized.” She traces a pattern on her knee, not meeting Kit’s gaze. “They called it paperwork. A favor that got complicated. And perhaps that’s even true, but they still chose silence. Every conversation about commitment, about future: such elegant reasons for waiting. The business expansion. The travel schedule. Not wanting to rush something important.” She finally looks up. “I wanted so desperately to believe I’d chosen differently this time. Someone emotionally available. Instead, I’d just found another beautiful disappearing act with better packaging.”
“We’re quite a pair,” Kit says, the words emerging with a sound caught between laughter and something sharper. “Me attempting to orchestrate death by micromanaging everything within reach. You trying to demonstrate personal growth by selecting someone whose damage simply wears better tailoring.”
The monitors maintain their metronomic beeping. Theodora observes Kit’s hand resting against the institutional cotton, the IV line secured with translucent tape, and experiences an unfamiliar sensation. Not absolution, but recognition. They’ve both been so thoroughly absorbed in their respective narratives that they’ve overlooked the obvious: control and avoidance are merely different uniforms for identical terror.
“I consistently choose people incapable of remaining,” Theodora acknowledges quietly, “then perform devastation when they inevitably depart. As though I hadn’t choreographed the entire production from the beginning.”
The conversation continues until darkness transforms the window into a mirror, reflecting the room’s fluorescent pallor. When the nurse arrives, her expression suggesting visiting hours concluded considerably earlier, Theodora collects her belongings with unhurried movements. Kit’s hand shifts across the blanket, not quite extended but unmistakably offered. Theodora covers it briefly with her own, registering the coolness, the delicate architecture of bone beneath papery skin. They exchange no words. What remains between them isn’t forgiveness, too grand, too neat, but something more fundamental: two people who’ve finally exhausted their performance of invulnerability and discovered the ordinary terror underneath.
The studio flat becomes a kind of terrarium for her unraveling. She moves between her work table and the kitchenette in a slow orbit, boiling water for tea she forgets to drink, opening the refrigerator to stare at its sparse contents without actually seeing them. The skylight tracks the sun’s passage overhead, marking time in shifting rectangles of light across her floor, and she watches this celestial geometry with the detached fascination of someone who has temporarily abdicated from the forward momentum of living.
Her phone sits face-down on the windowsill, its periodic vibrations like the twitching of something dying. She knows Jules is worried. But responding would require assembling herself into something coherent enough to be communicated, and she’s not certain she remembers how to perform that particular alchemy.
Instead, she finds herself doing small, pointless things with great deliberation: reorganizing her paintbrushes by size, then by color of residual paint on their handles; reading the same paragraph of a novel seven times without absorbing a single word; standing at the window counting chimney pots on the neighboring rooftops. These actions feel important in the way that rituals do: arbitrary but necessary, creating structure in the formless hours.
The sketches for Kit’s book cover are everywhere, variations scattered across every surface like shed skin. She’s been circling something in these drawings, some truth about mortality and legacy that she can’t quite articulate but keeps trying to capture in line and shadow. Looking at them now, she realizes they’re not really about Kit’s book at all. They’re about her own fear of disappearing without having created something that matters.
Jules’s messages accumulate like geological layers, each stratum marking a shift in tone. The first few are brisk, professional: “Need to discuss timeline for the Westerly cover.” Then a subtle softening: “Theodora, just checking in: everything alright?” By the third day, the formality has dissolved entirely: “I’m worried about you. Please just let me know you’re alive.”
It’s the final message that undoes her: “I’m here when you’re ready. No deadlines, no expectations. Just. Whenever you can.”
Theodora reads it seventeen times, her thumb hovering over the keyboard, trying to assemble a response. But what would she say? That she’s not having a breakdown, exactly, but rather experiencing the opposite: a break-in, perhaps, where all the feelings she’s been professionally compartmentalizing have finally picked the lock? That she’s discovered there’s no vocabulary in their carefully maintained professional friendship for “I’ve stopped pretending I’m fine and I don’t know how to start again”?
The cursor blinks accusingly. She sets the phone down, still silent, and watches another rectangle of sunlight migrate across her floor.
She spends an entire afternoon methodically organizing her art supplies: arranging brushes by size, sorting paint tubes by color family, labeling everything with a precision that feels like the only control she can exert. The ritual is soothing until she’s halfway through the watercolors, when recognition hits with physical force: her mother did exactly this after her father left, that same compulsive ordering of small things when large things had become unbearably chaotic.
Theodora sits down on the floor, still holding a tube of burnt sienna, and the laugh that escapes her is half-sob. Even our breakdowns are inherited, she thinks. Even the ways we try to hold ourselves together are hand-me-downs, passed along with the good china and the family photographs.
The skylight frames her vigil in shifting illumination: morning’s accusatory glare forcing her deeper under covers, afternoon’s honeyed wash briefly suggesting the world might not be entirely hostile, evening’s premature indigo that stretches interminably toward dawn. She lies there cataloguing the peculiar arithmetic of loss: how she grieves Rowan’s absence while simultaneously exhaling relief at no longer maintaining the exhausting pretense of not noticing all those careful evasions, those perfectly timed exits, the way love offered always had an expiration date she’d pretended not to see.
When she finally checks her phone on the third day, scrolling through the accumulated messages with numb fingers, she finds one from Dominic buried between Jules’s increasingly urgent voicemails, just a quote from Middlemarch about “the growing good of the world” depending on unhistoric acts, no commentary attached, and something about his characteristic retreat into literature when faced with messy human emotion undoes her completely, tears arriving not from sadness exactly but from the recognition that someone has seen her clearly enough to offer precisely what she needs without requiring anything in return.
They catalogue the losses methodically, almost clinically at first, as if creating an inventory for insurance purposes. Lillian’s spring wedding at her fiancé’s family estate in Gloucestershire, the marquee already booked, the dress hanging in tissue paper at her mother’s house. Theodora’s fantasy of Rowan eventually choosing permanence, the imagined flat they’d share with better light and space for two desks, lazy Sunday mornings that stretched into afternoon.
“I’d picked bridesmaids’ dresses,” Lillian says, refilling both their glasses with the kind of reckless pouring that suggests the bottle’s depletion is the point. “Sage green. I spent three hours looking at fabric swatches.” She laughs, but it catches somewhere in her throat. “Three hours choosing the exact shade of green for a wedding that will never happen.”
Theodora finds herself confessing things she’s barely admitted to herself: how she’d researched Rowan’s hometown in Cornwall, imagined introducing them to her mother, pictured a version of herself who belonged to someone completely. “I was going to get a better mobile plan,” she says, and somehow this detail (this small, practical preparation for a relationship that required international calls) feels more devastating than the larger admissions.
“I told Marcus’s mother I wanted children,” Lillian continues, her voice gone flat. “I don’t even know if I do. But I said it because that’s what you say, isn’t it? That’s what the future looks like.” She picks at the label on the wine bottle. “Except I kept imagining this child, this daughter, and in every scenario I pictured her asking me why I married someone I didn’t love, and I had no answer that didn’t make me a coward.”
The afternoon light shifts through the skylight, turning the studio amber, then grey, and neither of them moves to turn on lamps.
They circle each other’s wounds carefully at first, discussing the wine’s tannins and whether Theodora’s landlord will ever properly fix the skylight, the conversation moving in careful spirals around what they’re actually here to say. Lillian examines the sketches pinned to the wall with studied attention. Theodora refills their glasses though neither has emptied theirs. The afternoon stretches between them, patient and unhurried.
“Did you imagine children?” Lillian asks suddenly, still facing the wall, and the question lands like something dropped from a great height.
Theodora understands immediately that they’ve stopped orbiting, that they’ve arrived at the gravitational center of why Lillian came here, to this cramped studio instead of her own pristine flat. Not to discuss Marcus or Rowan or any of the actual people who’ve disappointed them, but something stranger and more painful. The phantom futures they’d constructed in private, the lives that never existed outside their own imaginations but feel, somehow, like genuine losses requiring genuine grief.
“Sometimes,” Theodora says quietly, and sets down her glass because her hands have started shaking.
What follows is a strange catalog, almost clinical in its precision, as they take turns naming the futures that will never materialize. Lillian’s spring wedding at her parents’ estate in Oxfordshire. She’d chosen peonies, pale pink against white linen, a string quartet for the ceremony. The honeymoon in Tuscany, two weeks in a converted farmhouse. The Islington townhouse she and Marcus had viewed twice, with its period features and potential for a nursery. Theodora’s fantasy of Rowan choosing her. Each confession met not with comfort but with witnessing, the gift of being heard without being fixed, their phantom lives laid out between them like specimens under glass.
Lillian refills their glasses, her hands steadier than they should be, and says she’d constructed an entire personality around being Marcus’s fiancée. Reading The Economist though finance bored her senseless, scheduling her life in fifteen-minute increments, performing competence like a second career. Somewhere in that performance she’d lost the ability to distinguish between wanting and should-wanting, until the ring felt less like jewelry and more like evidence against herself.
Theodora heard herself confessing the same architecture of self-erasure: how she’d trained herself to expect Rowan’s disappearances, had reframed unavailability as mystery rather than disrespect, had performed the role of the woman who needed nothing while her actual needs calcified into shame. They’d both become curators of their own diminishment, and sitting there among the wine-stained sketches, they mourned not their lost lovers but their lost selves. The exhausting years spent contorting into shapes more palatable to people who’d never truly seen them.
The curry is too hot, both temperature and spice, and Theodora welcomes the physical discomfort, the way it demands attention beyond the recursive loops her mind has been tracing for days. Jules has always eaten with focus, and watching her now, Theodora remembers childhood dinners at the Pemberton house, how even at twelve Jules approached meals with the same deliberate efficiency she brought to everything else.
“You’re catastrophizing,” Jules says finally, wiping her mouth with a paper napkin. Not unkindly, but with the diagnostic precision of someone identifying a familiar pattern. “I’ve watched you do this before. When your father died. When the gallery rejected your first exhibition. You retreat into this space and convince yourself that one failure means total collapse.”
Theodora wants to argue that this isn’t catastrophizing, that the evidence is empirical, Kit’s letter sitting unopened on her desk, Rowan’s final text message still glowing in her phone’s memory, the three missed deadline reminders from the production team. But Jules is already shaking her head.
“I should have warned you,” she continues, setting down her container. “About Kit’s situation. About how protective they’d become of their sibling. About the fact that the publishing house is barely holding together and everyone’s operating from fear rather than strategy.” She pauses, meeting Theodora’s gaze directly. “I told myself it was professional discretion, but really I was protecting my own position. I wanted you there because you’re brilliant, and I didn’t want to risk you refusing the commission if you knew how complicated it would be.”
The admission hangs between them, more substantial than any apology. Outside, someone’s practicing scales on a piano, the notes drifting up through the open skylight. “So now what?” Theodora asks, her voice rough from disuse.
Jules reaches for the second container, offering it wordlessly. “Now you decide whether you’re finished or just frightened.”
They eat in silence at first, sitting cross-legged on the floor because the armchair only fits one and the bed feels too intimate for this particular conversation. Jules doesn’t offer platitudes or professional reassurances, doesn’t soften the edges of what needs saying. Instead she asks blunt questions in the spaces between bites: whether Theodora’s called her mother yet, whether she’s been outside in the past three days, whether she’s actually planning to finish the commission or forfeit it and the advance that came with it.
The interrogation is practical rather than sympathetic, cutting through the fog of rumination and forcing engagement with actual decisions rather than endless hypotheticals. Has she eaten anything besides toast? Has she looked at Kit’s letter? Does she understand that missing deadlines doesn’t just affect her reputation but the production schedule, the marketing timeline, the dozen other people whose work depends on hers?
It’s the kind of friendship that doesn’t cushion, and Theodora finds herself simultaneously grateful and resentful, wanting comfort but needing exactly this: someone who refuses to let her disappear into her own narrative of failure.
When Theodora finally speaks, her voice cracks on the first words: something about being perpetually the only person who doesn’t know the script, the one everyone’s planned around rather than planned with. She’s tired of entering rooms where the real conversations happened before she arrived, tired of being someone’s redemption arc or cautionary tale or collateral damage. The words tumble out faster, overlapping: maybe she hasn’t changed at all, maybe she’s still making the same mistakes with better vocabulary, maybe the problem isn’t the contexts but her inability to exist in them without apologizing for taking up space. Jules doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t reach across to comfort, just lets the confession exhaust itself into silence while the curry goes cold between them.
Jules sets down her half-eaten samosa with deliberate care, leaning back against the bookshelf until a spine digs into her shoulder blade. The editorial director polish, the armor she’s worn for fifteen years, falls away completely. “Yes,” she says, meeting Theodora’s eyes without flinching, “I should have warned you. About Kit’s diagnosis, the prognosis, the way terminal illness makes people ruthless with their remaining time. About Dominic’s abdication creating a vacuum that everyone’s scrambling to fill. About the financial pressures turning colleagues into competitors.” She pauses, lets that acknowledgment settle. “But you, Theo. You’ve always treated advance knowledge as permission to opt out rather than information to navigate by. You research yourself out of risk and call it wisdom when it’s really just hiding with better footnotes.”
The words hit like cold water. Theodora’s fingers tighten around her mug, the tea gone tepid. She remembers those rooftops. The vertigo and exhilaration, the way dawn light turned ordinary London transcendent. When had she started choosing the ground floor? When had she begun mistaking paralysis for prudence? Jules waits, patient and implacable, while Theodora confronts the uncomfortable truth: this isolation isn’t protection. It’s just another form of erasure.
The letter remains unopened for three days, propped against the jam jar of brushes where Theodora can’t avoid seeing it. The cream envelope becomes a small monument to cowardice, catching light from the skylight at different angles throughout the day. She circles it while making tea, while pretending to work, while staring at the rooftops Jules had invoked with such precision.
On the third evening, as rain begins to stipulate against the glass, she finally picks it up. She doesn’t sit. Standing by the skylight with her back to the work table, she unfolds the pages with the careful deliberation of someone defusing something volatile.
The handwriting is shakier than she remembers from the marginal notes on contracts. Some letters trail off as though the hand had faltered mid-stroke. But the words themselves are steady, almost surgical in their clarity.
Kit doesn’t apologize. The absence of apology is almost refreshing: no performative contrition, no attempt to rewrite what happened. Instead, there’s something more valuable: a recognition that they’ve both been engaged in the same futile exercise, trying to control narratives that were never theirs to dictate. Kit writes about powerlessness with the authority of someone who has stopped fighting it, about how the only honest response might be to make something that outlasts the fear itself.
The request comes in the final paragraph. The illustrated edition. Not abandoned, not reassigned. A request that Theodora finish what they’d begun.
Theodora reads it twice, then a third time, searching for the trap, the manipulation, the strategic positioning. But if it’s there, it’s buried beneath something that reads uncomfortably like sincerity. Kit writes about the work mattering more than their conflict, about legacy being less about control than about what you choose to leave unfinished versus what you see through to completion.
The rain intensifies. Theodora folds the letter carefully and sets it down.
The request feels impossible at first. Theodora spreads the preliminary sketches across her floor, the studio’s limited space forces them to overlap like archaeological layers, and sees only contamination in every line. Each composition carries the residue of their conflict: the defensive choices, the places she’d held back, the moments she’d second-guessed her instincts because Kit’s judgment loomed over her shoulder.
But Kit’s letter includes notes about their original vision, observations about visual metaphors Theodora had abandoned too quickly. There’s a confession tucked between technical comments: watching her work had reminded Kit what it felt like to believe in something beyond strategic positioning, to care about beauty for its own sake rather than what it might secure.
Theodora sits cross-legged among the sketches, rain drumming overhead. The confession shifts something. The project was never really about Kit’s approval: that was just the convenient fiction she’d constructed to avoid the harder truth. It was about her own willingness to commit fully to difficult work, to make something that mattered even when the conditions were hostile, even when the outcome remained uncertain.
She begins with the illustrations she’d been avoiding: the ones requiring emotional vulnerability rather than technical skill. The central image: a figure suspended between architectural spaces, neither departing nor arriving. Her initial sketches had been too literal, too safe. Now she lets her hand move differently, channeling the vertigo of these weeks into line and shadow.
The anger sharpens her vision rather than obscuring it. Grief becomes a tool for precision. She discovers that crisis has taught her body something about translating complex feeling into image: how uncertainty looks in the tension of a brushstroke, how hope appears in negative space. She works with focused intensity she hasn’t accessed in years, each piece carrying everything she’s survived and chosen not to run from this time.
Lillian arrives unannounced on Saturday, still wearing yesterday’s makeup, and finds the flat transformed: sketches pinned in deliberate sequence, creating a visual narrative across slanted walls. She settles into the teal armchair without speaking, watching Theodora’s hands move with newfound certainty. The silence between them isn’t empty but companionable, two women learning simultaneously that authenticity requires first dismantling the elaborate performances they’d mistaken forselves.
Jules doesn’t offer platitudes about artistic suffering or the nobility of struggle. She simply holds up the illustration of dawn breaking over Georgian rooftops (all those careful gradations between darkness and light) and says, “You’ve stopped performing competence.” Her finger traces the skyline. “This required you to not know, for a while, how it would resolve. That’s the difference.”
The timer becomes a kind of meditation bell, marking her days into manageable territories. She learns the particular quality of light at each interval. The way morning sun slants across her work table at half-past nine, how the shadows lengthen by early afternoon, the golden hour that arrives just as her third timer chimes. Sometimes she stops mid-gesture, her brush hovering above paper, and the interruption feels violent. Other times she’s grateful for the permission to step away from a passage that’s gone muddy with overworking.
She discovers that ninety minutes is precisely how long she can hold a single thread of visual thinking before it begins to fray. Any longer and she’s chasing diminishing returns, adding details that don’t deepen the work but merely demonstrate her willingness to suffer for it. The old Theodora would have pushed through, confusing endurance with dedication, wearing exhaustion like a badge that proved she cared enough.
Now she walks to the window and watches a pigeon navigate the complicated geometry of chimney pots. She notices the way clouds move across the sky, how the church spire catches light differently as the sun shifts. Her hands remain stained with cadmium yellow and Prussian blue, evidence of work done, but her shoulders drop away from her ears. She breathes deliberately, four counts in, six counts out, the way the therapist she finally called suggested.
The breaks don’t feel like rest exactly. They feel like small acts of rebellion against the tyranny of productivity, against the voice that insists real artists sacrifice everything, that boundaries are for people who don’t care enough. She’s learning that the opposite might be true: that caring enough means knowing when to stop, that the work improves when she approaches it as someone who has a life beyond it rather than someone for whom it must substitute for living.
The email arrives at four-thirty, cheerful and presumptuous, suggesting they “hop on a quick call” after dinner to discuss timeline adjustments. Theodora reads it twice, feeling the familiar tug toward accommodation, the muscle memory of yes. Her fingers hover over the keyboard, composing the usual elaborate dance: I’m so sorry, evenings are tricky, but I could do early morning? I’m completely flexible, whatever works best for you, I know you’re juggling so much.
She deletes it. Types instead: “I’m not available in the evenings.”
Her finger hovers over the send button. The sentence looks naked on the screen, almost rude in its brevity. No cushioning apology, no compensatory offer of alternative times, no reassurance that she’s still committed, still grateful, still willing to contort herself around other people’s schedules.
She clicks send before she can reconsider.
The terror arrives immediately. A hot flush of anxiety that she’s just revealed herself as difficult, unprofessional, someone who doesn’t understand how precarious creative work is. But underneath the fear runs something else: a clean, bright thread of self-respect. The boundary exists because she’s drawn it. That’s reason enough.
She spreads Kit’s manuscript across her work table and reads it three times before touching her brushes, letting the story’s architecture reveal itself: the places where hope fractures, where control dissolves, where mortality makes every gesture both urgent and tender. The narrative’s structure mirrors Kit’s own situation: a protagonist racing against time they can’t extend, making choices that matter precisely because they’re final.
Theodora begins translating those emotional coordinates into visual language that refuses to look away. Her preliminary sketches are raw, almost confrontational. Hands reaching but not quite touching, shadows that suggest absence rather than presence, compositions that deliberately unbalance the viewer’s eye. She’s not illustrating the story so much as creating a parallel text, one that speaks in the grammar of discomfort and recognition.
She works through the weekend, her studio filling with images that refuse easy comfort: a figure dissolving into architectural lines, a clock face where numbers scatter like birds, hands that hold emptiness with the tenderness usually reserved for precious things. Each illustration carries the aesthetic of necessary pain, beauty that doesn’t apologize for making demands on its viewer.
The tube carriage rocks gently through Highbury, past stations where other passengers disembark toward their Friday evening obligations. She watches a woman check her reflection in the darkened window, adjusting lipstick for wherever she’s headed, and Theodora feels no envy, no sense she’s missing the correct version of her life. The tunnel lights strobe past like a benediction for small rebellions.
The skylight frames clouds moving with surprising speed, their edges catching the first pale gold of sunrise, and she realizes she’s forgotten how mornings actually begin when you’re not already calculating hours until deadline, mentally triaging emails, rationing attention before the day’s demands consume it entirely. Her body feels different without the alarm’s violence. No adrenaline spike, no immediate tension in her shoulders, just the gradual surfacing of consciousness like something organic rather than mechanical.
She stretches beneath the duvet, feeling the pull in muscles she’s neglected, and notices details the rushed morning routine normally erases: the particular quality of silence at this hour, before the neighborhood wakes; the way dust motes drift through the angled light like something from a Renaissance painting; the faint smell of rain on the skylight glass from overnight showers she slept through entirely. Her phone sits on the floor beside the bed where she’d dropped it last night, and she registers its presence the way one might notice a coat draped over a chair: an object that exists but requires nothing.
The urge to check it rises automatically, that Pavlovian reach toward obligation and connection, but she lets the impulse pass without acting on it, watching it dissolve like those clouds beyond the glass. Jules’s words from earlier in the week return: You’ve spent so long being available to everyone else’s timelines that you’ve forgotten you’re allowed to have your own. At the time it had sounded like the sort of thing people say, comforting but abstract, but lying here in the accumulating light she understands it as instruction rather than observation.
When she finally rises, it’s because she wants to rather than because she must, and the distinction feels revolutionary in its smallness, this reclamation of a Saturday morning from the tyranny of productivity, this permission to simply be awake without immediately becoming useful.
The sketchbook lies open beside her coffee, its pages unmarked by client specifications or reference materials, and the blankness triggers something between exhilaration and vertigo: all this space with no predetermined destination. She begins tentatively, pencil hovering before committing to the lavender stems in their mismatched jar, their purple-grey blooms listing slightly toward the light. The act of drawing them feels different without the mental overlay of how will this serve the narrative or what does the art director need. Just stems. Just flowers. Just the particular way morning illuminates the fine hairs along each stalk.
Her hand remembers this older rhythm, the one from before everything became transactional. She sketches the chipped mug warming her palm, tracing the crack that runs through the glaze like a river on a map. Then the corner where her easel stands sentinel, shadow collecting in the angles where wall meets floor. Each study is imperfect, unpolished, and somehow more honest than anything she’s produced in months. She’s teaching herself to see again without asking what the seeing is for. Just the thing itself, witnessed and recorded, sufficient in its own existence.
The watercolors bloom across the page with a will of their own, pigments bleeding into each other where she’s left the paper deliberately wet. She’s forgotten this. How the medium demands surrender, how control produces only stiffness. The empty chair materializes first, its shadow pooling like spilled ink. Then a doorway, ajar just enough to suggest both invitation and threshold. The unmade bed emerges in layers of translucent wash, each application revealing rather than concealing the texture beneath. She’s painting the architecture of solitude, the way light inhabits rooms when no one’s performing occupancy. These aren’t illustrations of loneliness but portraits of space holding its breath, waiting. The images feel uncomfortably revealing, like she’s documenting her own emotional topography without the protective distance of metaphor.
The clock reads half-past three when hunger finally registers. Her hands wear the session like badges. Seven pieces line the table’s edge, still damp, their sequence accidental yet deliberate. She’s mapped something true: how rooms hold absence, how solitude has architecture. Whether they’re good hardly signifies. Whether anyone else would understand them matters even less. They exist because she needed them to.
The afternoon unfolds without urgency. She chops vegetables with attention rather than efficiency, lets pasta water reach a proper boil, grates cheese that costs more than she should spend. At the window, fork in hand, she watches a couple maneuver a sofa through a doorway, a child chalk hopscotch onto pavement. Behind her, seven small paintings dry. Evidence. Not of arrival, but of beginning.
Theodora considers the offer for precisely three seconds before declining, her refusal gentle but absolute. She can see the surprise flicker across Jules’s face. Most freelancers would seize the security, the validation of a nameplate, the promise of regular income in an industry that offers precious little of any of those things.
“It’s generous,” Theodora says, meaning it. “But I need the separation.”
She doesn’t elaborate, doesn’t explain how the forty-minute tube journey from Stoke Newington functions as a decompression chamber, how her studio flat’s slanted ceilings and north light represent something more essential than convenience. Jules, to her credit, simply nods, understanding perhaps that some people require physical distance to maintain psychological boundaries.
The refusal shifts something between them. Not damage, exactly, but a recalibration. Jules stops treating her like someone who needs rescuing, starts engaging with her as an equal who has made deliberate choices about the architecture of her life. Their conversations in the cramped third-floor kitchen become more honest, less careful. Jules mentions the succession crisis around Dominic’s continued reluctance, the board’s increasing pressure, and Theodora listens without offering solutions, recognizing that some problems cannot be illustrated away.
The Tuesday-Thursday rhythm suits her. She arrives mid-morning, her most productive studio hours already spent, the paint-stained evidence still visible on her fingers despite scrubbing. She takes meetings, reviews manuscripts, collaborates with authors who appreciate her ability to translate their words into visual language. But she leaves by five, declining the Friday evening gatherings at The Lamb & Flag more often than she accepts, understanding that the publishing house’s gravitational pull remains strong enough to consume her entirely if she permits it.
Lillian comments on this once, her tone hovering between admiration and bewilderment. “You’ve learned something I haven’t,” she says, glancing at her phone, at her calendar’s relentless demands.
“Possibly,” Theodora replies. “Or I’ve just failed enough times to recognize the warning signs.”
Jules notices the shift immediately: not just in the work itself, though the line quality in Theodora’s latest cover illustration speaks volumes, but in how Theodora carries herself through the building. There’s a confidence that emerges when creating without the metallic taste of desperation, when the work originates from abundance rather than need.
During a meeting in the Brontë room, Jules slides a proposal across the mahogany table. “Fourth floor,” she says. “Northern light. Your own nameplate.”
The offer is strategic, Theodora recognizes. But it’s also genuine, an extension of friendship that predates their current professional arrangement.
Theodora traces the edge of the document without reading it. “I’m grateful,” she says, meeting Jules’s eyes. “Truly. But I need the physical separation.”
She doesn’t mention how the tube ride functions as a decompression chamber, how arriving matters as much as the work itself. Jules, who has spent decades reading people as carefully as manuscripts, simply nods.
“The offer stands,” she says, retrieving the proposal. “If you change your mind.”
They both know Theodora won’t.
Theodora’s refusal emerges without the defensive edge that once characterized her boundaries. She explains about the tube ride: how those forty minutes underground function as essential transition, how she boards at Stoke Newington still wearing her studio self and emerges at Russell Square ready to inhabit collaborative space. “If I’m here permanently,” she says, gesturing toward the building’s elegant bones, “I stop arriving. I just am. And that changes the work.”
She doesn’t articulate the deeper fear: that accepting an office means accepting definition, becoming Fairfax’s illustrator rather than an artist who sometimes works with Fairfax. The distinction matters more than Jules’s practical mind might initially grasp, though Theodora suspects she understands anyway.
Jules nods, her silver-threaded bob catching the morning light filtering through the entrance hall’s tall windows. She’s witnessed too many illustrators accept desk space only to find themselves producing competent work that no longer startles anyone, least of all themselves. “Tuesday mornings, then,” she confirms, already mentally reserving the corner table where the acoustics allow conversation without performance. “Though you’ll have to tolerate my terrible coffee opinions.”
The rhythm establishes itself organically: her studio mornings sacred and solitary, the publishing house afternoons collaborative but bounded. She arrives carrying finished work rather than seeking validation mid-process, leaves before the evening drinks blur professional edges into something messier. Jules understands this instinctively, perhaps because she’s watched too many talented people mistake proximity to literary culture for creative sustenance, their particular vision diluted by committee thinking and commercial compromise.
The project becomes something she hadn’t anticipated: not a battle but a collaboration stripped of pretense. Kit’s notes arrive at odd hours typed on their phone between what she imagines are bouts of pain they’d never acknowledge. “The typography overwhelms the image,” one reads. “You’re hiding behind technique. Trust the starkness.” Another: “This is better. Now push it further.”
She learns Kit’s visual vocabulary through their rejections. They hate sentimentality but respond to emotional precision. They dismiss anything that panders to market trends but appreciate commercial intelligence when it serves artistic vision. Their illness, never mentioned, manifests in the gaps between responses: three days of silence that make her wonder if she should contact Jules, then a flurry of detailed feedback that proves their mind remains diamond-sharp even as their body fails.
The strangest part is how the antagonism transforms into something almost companionable. Not friendship, the foundation is too barbed for that, but mutual respect earned through the work itself. Kit stops trying to protect their sibling from her influence, perhaps recognizing that Theodora has already chosen distance from Rowan, that some entanglements resolve themselves through clarity rather than drama. She stops interpreting Kit’s criticism as personal attack, understanding finally that their harshness is a gift: they’re teaching her to see her own work with the ruthlessness it requires.
By the fourth cover, Jane Eyre, naturally, she anticipates their objections before they articulate them. She submits three versions knowing they’ll choose the most uncompromising one, and when Kit’s email arrives, “Yes. This one. Finally.”. She feels something unexpected: gratitude for an adversary who demanded she become better rather than simply more palatable.
The first cover, a reimagining of Wuthering Heights, takes her three weeks of false starts. She tries windswept moors, then stark typography, then a symbolic approach with twisted branches that Kit dismisses as “undergraduate semiotics.” Their feedback arrives in terse emails that dissect her choices with surgical precision, never cruel but never gentle either, each critique a lesson in seeing past her own attachments.
She learns to translate criticism into clarity, to recognize when she’s compensating for insecurity with excessive detail, when she’s mimicking styles she admires rather than trusting her own vision. Kit’s ruthlessness serves the work rather than diminishes her: this becomes obvious only after she stops defending her choices and starts interrogating them with the same rigor they apply.
Their exchanges become a strange tutorial in separating ego from craft. “You’re illustrating the novel’s reputation instead of its essence,” Kit writes about her seventh attempt. “Forget what everyone thinks Wuthering Heights is. What do you see when you close your eyes?”
She closes her eyes. She sees fire and frost, passion calcified into cruelty.
The eighth version, Kit accepts without comment. Which, she’s learning, constitutes praise.
By midsummer she’s found the rhythm. Jane Eyre emerges in shades of crimson and shadow, the cover suggesting confinement and flame without literal illustration. Middlemarch follows. A complex geometric pattern that resolves into a provincial street when viewed from distance, the whole town contained in abstract forms.
Kit’s emails change. They arrive late at night now, longer than necessary, observations about George Eliot’s treatment of ambition bleeding into reflections on what endures beyond individual lives. “Legacy is what we make despite ourselves,” one message reads, ostensibly about Dorothea Brooke but clearly about something else entirely.
Theodora responds to the editorial content, ignores the subtext. Some conversations require silence rather than acknowledgment.
The flat startles her. Its austerity feels like preparation, belongings already edited down to essentials. Kit moves as though conserving something precious, each gesture economical. The covers lie between them like a conversation neither can have directly. When Kit’s hand trembles reaching for the Villette mock-up, Theodora pretends absorption in her notes, offering the dignity of unwitnessed weakness. They discuss typography and color saturation while discussing everything else entirely.
The illustration arrives at Fairfax & Sons on a Thursday morning, wrapped in tissue paper that whispers against itself. Kit’s email comes Friday at dawn: “You understood what I couldn’t articulate.” The payment posts Monday. Standard fee plus thirty percent she hasn’t invoiced. She stares at the bank notification, recognizing generosity as Kit’s final edit: gratitude expressed through numbers rather than words that might crack the careful distance they’ve maintained.
The work consumes her in ways she hasn’t experienced since art school, before she learned to protect herself from complete immersion. She pins Kit’s specifications to the wall beside her desk (precise Pantone references, historical design notes, margin measurements calculated to the millimeter) and finds herself dreaming in their visual vocabulary. Emma emerges first: she renders Highbury in jewel tones that shimmer with surface brilliance while suggesting the claustrophobia of a world where everyone watches everyone, where comedy and cruelty share the same drawing room. The gold leaf she applies to the title catches light like gossip, beautiful and cutting.
Wuthering Heights proves harder. She works through three false starts, each too pretty, too domesticated. Finally, at two in the morning during a thunderstorm that rattles her skylight, she understands: the moors aren’t romantic backdrop but active participant, landscape as violence. She paints in storm grays and bruise purples, lets the wind’s motion blur the boundaries between earth and sky, renders Heathcliff and Catherine as figures dissolving into the elements that shaped them. Obsession, she realizes, doesn’t elevate: it erodes.
Persuasion arrives in autumn light, and she paints patience as a form of power, second chances in watercolor washes that suggest both fragility and endurance. Each illustration becomes a conversation she’s having with Kit across the distance they’ve agreed to maintain: about control and surrender, about the cost of perfection, about what remains when you strip away everything except the essential truth of a story.
Her studio fills with rejected sketches, color tests, experimental compositions. She stops answering Rowan’s increasingly infrequent texts, lets Lillian’s dinner invitations accumulate in her inbox. The work demands everything, and she gives it willingly, understanding that this intensity is temporary, finite, precious. That she’s being trusted with something that matters to someone who has stopped pretending anything else does.
The email arrives without preamble or explanation, and Theodora reads it three times in her studio’s afternoon light, trying to parse what “minor setback” means in the vocabulary of terminal illness, what “tethered” reveals about Kit’s state of mind. She types and deletes four responses before settling on: “Take whatever time you need. The work will be here.”
But she doesn’t wait. She begins Sense and Sensibility that evening, working with a focused urgency that feels like defiance against the hospital room she can’t see, the deterioration she can only imagine. She paints restraint and wildness as sisters, renders Marianne’s passion in watercolors that bleed beyond their boundaries while Elinor’s composure holds its precise lines. The composition becomes about containment and its costs, about what happens when feeling exceeds the forms meant to hold it.
She works until her hands cramp, until the skylight shows dawn breaking over Stoke Newington’s rooftops. When she finally photographs the finished piece and sends it at six in the morning, she writes only: “Here.”
Kit’s response arrives within minutes: “Perfect.”
She delivers Northanger Abbey in mid-September, its gothic playfulness masking genuine darkness. The illustration balances whimsy and dread, youthful naivety confronting actual cruelty.
For five days, silence. Long enough that Theodora begins checking her sent folder compulsively, wondering if the file corrupted, if she’s misread everything. She emails Jules on the sixth morning: “Has the project been cancelled?”
Kit’s response arrives an hour later, not Jules’s: “In hospital, minor setback, your work is keeping me tethered to something beyond this room, continue.”
Theodora stares at those words (tethered, beyond this room) understanding what Kit won’t say directly. She opens her sketchbook to Emma that same afternoon, hands steadier than they should be.
The illustration evolves through iterations that feel archaeological. Excavating truth beneath social propriety. Anne Elliot’s expression holds regret without self-pity, resilience without hardness. Theodora paints translucent layers, building depth the way wisdom accumulates: incrementally, painfully. She works through two false starts before recognizing she’s been painting what Kit is becoming: someone transforming suffering into something approaching serenity. The final version balances melancholy and hope so precisely it aches.
The photograph shows Kit’s hands (thinner than Theodora remembers, veins prominent) arranging the covers with curatorial precision despite trembling fingers. The hospital blanket’s institutional blue makes the illustrations’ colors more vivid: jewel tones against sterility, art against mortality. Theodora’s vision blurs. She presses her paint-stained fingers against the printed image, touching those absent hands, and grief arrives not as storm but as recognition: that beauty and loss have always been inseparable, that she’s been illustrating this truth all along.
The service begins with a string quartet and Theodora watches the room fill with the architecture of Kit’s life: publishing executives in expensive black, authors whose careers Kit championed, junior editors who’d feared and admired them in equal measure. She recognizes faces from industry events, from book launches, from the careful ecosystem Kit had navigated with such precision.
Kit’s younger sibling speaks from beside the fireplace, backlit by autumn light through the tall windows. Their voice carries the same sharp intelligence Kit possessed, but softened by grief into something more permeable. They speak of Kit’s exacting standards, their loyalty to writers who took risks, their ability to see potential in manuscripts others had dismissed. They mention the final project, “a series of illustrated classics that will be Kit’s lasting legacy”, and Theodora feels dozens of eyes find her in the back corner, a momentary weight of attention before the eulogy continues.
The sibling doesn’t name her. Doesn’t need to. The acknowledgment exists in the pause, in the slight catch of breath, in the way their gaze holds hers for three seconds that contain entire conversations: Thank you. I understand. This mattered.
Theodora understands then what she’s been learning all along: that significance doesn’t require public declaration, that she’s been woven into this story in ways that transcend bylines and credits. Kit saw her work, pushed her toward something better than she’d thought herself capable of, and died knowing those illustrations would outlast them both.
Around her, people shift and murmur. Someone reads a passage from one of Kit’s favorite novels. The quartet plays again. And Theodora stands perfectly still, bearing witness to a life that intersected with hers at precisely the angle needed to redirect her trajectory, feeling gratitude and sorrow braided so tightly she cannot distinguish one from the other.
She attends the memorial service in a charcoal dress she bought specifically for this occasion, not quite black, which felt presumptuous for someone who’d been adversary as much as ally, arriving early enough to see the entrance hall transformed. White flowers bank the marble fireplace in architectural arrangements that would have pleased Kit’s aesthetic sensibilities. Chairs stand in careful rows, their uniformity a rebuke to the building’s usual creative disorder. The checkered floor has been polished to mirror brightness, reflecting the autumn light that slants through the tall windows.
Theodora chooses a position near the back corner, beside a bookshelf containing first editions of novels Kit had shepherded into existence. From here she can observe without being observed, can witness this final chapter of Kit’s story without claiming a place in it she hasn’t earned. She’s aware of her own ambiguous status. Neither family nor colleague, not quite friend, something more complicated than any available category. The illustrations connect her to Kit’s legacy, but grief is a private country, and she’s careful not to trespass on territory that belongs to those who loved Kit longer, knew them more completely.
The gathering swells beyond what the entrance hall was designed to contain. Established authors whose careers Kit championed arrive in expensive mourning clothes, their grief performative but not insincere. Young writers Kit mentored with surprising patience cluster near the front, some openly weeping. Editors from rival houses speak in hushed tones of Kit’s integrity even in competition, a professional respect that transcended market rivalries.
Theodora watches them file in and understands with sudden clarity that she knew only one facet of this complicated person. The antagonist of her own narrative was the protagonist of dozens of others, each relationship revealing different dimensions of the same sharp, brilliant, dying soul. Kit contained multitudes she never witnessed. The realization feels like a kind of loss itself: not of the person, but of the possibility of knowing them more completely.
Kit’s younger sibling, tall, angular, carrying that same controlled intensity, approaches the lectern with measured steps. Their voice, when it comes, is steady despite the tremor in their hands. They speak of Kit’s ferocity, the refusal to let illness diminish ambition, the late nights spent restructuring contracts to secure the house’s future. Then: “The artist who brought new vision to our classics series”, a pause, eyes scanning the room but not landing, “understood what Kit was building.” The indirection feels like a hand briefly touching hers across an impossible distance.
The autumn air tastes of woodsmoke and possibility. She walks past the British Museum, its columns indifferent to individual grief, past students arguing about Foucault outside a café, past the flower seller packing up unsold chrysanthemums. Her phone buzzes, Lillian, Jules, probably Rowan, but she lets it ring. Some transitions require solitude. The tube entrance swallows her into its familiar fluorescent depths, carrying her toward Stoke Newington and the work waiting beneath her skylight.
The work becomes its own kind of meditation. Each morning, Theodora climbs the stairs to her studio with coffee going cold in her hand, pins the latest manuscript pages to her board, and loses herself in the visual translation of Kit’s fierce, precise prose. The series, historical fiction about women who’d operated in the margins of power, courtesans and spies and forgers, demanded illustrations that honored both beauty and danger.
She paints a Restoration-era intelligence gatherer in silk and shadows, her face turned away but her posture radiating calculation. A Victorian counterfeiter’s hands, ink-stained and elegant, holding a banknote up to candlelight. An Edwardian actress whose stage makeup conceals bruises, her eyes meeting the viewer’s with uncomfortable directness.
The work is different from anything she’s done before. Not because the technique has changed, her brushwork remains fluid, her color sense unerring, but because she’s painting for an audience of one who will never see the finished pieces. Kit’s notes, scrawled in the margins of the manuscript, guide her: Make her dangerous, not decorative. Show the intelligence, not just the beauty. This woman survived by being underestimated: let the reader make that mistake once, then correct it.
She finds herself arguing with those notes sometimes, defending choices Kit would have challenged, then reconsidering, adjusting. The collaboration feels more honest than many she’s had with living clients. There’s no ego to manage, no compromise for the sake of professional relationships. Just the work, and what it requires.
Her studio fills with studies and rejected versions. The north light through the skylight shifts as October deepens, turning the space amber in late afternoon. She works through the evenings now, not from desperation but from momentum, each illustration building toward something she can’t quite articulate. A completion that has nothing to do with closure.
The books arrive on a Wednesday morning whilst Theodora is wrestling with a particularly difficult composition. A suffragette forger whose expression must contain both defiance and exhaustion. Her phone buzzes against the work table.
Jules’s message contains a single photograph: six volumes arranged in a careful fan beneath the stern gaze of Cornelius Fairfax, founder. The spines graduate from midnight blue to silver, Theodora’s cover illustrations visible even in the compressed image. Fragments of faces, hands, the curve of a shoulder disappearing into shadow.
She zooms in, studying how the entrance hall’s marble floor reflects the books’ metallic accents, how they sit among the institution’s accumulated history without being diminished by it. Her name appears on each spine in small, elegant type. Not shouting for attention. Simply present.
The image saves automatically to her phone. She returns to her painting, but something has shifted. The suffragette’s expression resolves itself. Not despite the exhaustion but because of it, the defiance earned rather than performed.
By evening, she’s finished the illustration. It’s the strongest piece in the series, and Kit will never see it, and somehow that feels appropriate rather than tragic.
The pub’s corner booth feels less like territory claimed and more like space shared. Jules orders a Talisker eighteen-year that none of them would choose independently, and they raise their glasses to Kit without needing to articulate what they’re honoring. The sharpness, the protection, the ruthlessness that came from caring too fiercely.
Lillian mentions a debut novel about Victorian poisoners, her enthusiasm genuine rather than performative, and Jules asks Theodora’s opinion on cover concepts, and the conversation flows like this now, professional, warm, bounded. Theodora contributes ideas without needing to prove herself, listens without performing interest.
When they part on Rose Street, Theodora walks toward the tube alone, aware she’s woven into their world without being consumed by it.
The message arrives while she’s mixing titanium white with raw umber, and she reads it twice before setting down her palette knife. Her fingers hover over the keyboard, drafting explanations that become justifications that become apologies, each version more elaborate than necessary.
She deletes them all.
Types: “I don’t think so.”
Sends it before doubt can complicate what clarity feels like.
The biography contract sits on her work table beside preliminary sketches she’s already begun. A woman’s hands holding a fading photograph, light fracturing through a prism of grief, the negative space between what’s remembered and what’s imagined. She signs the contract with her left hand while her right continues drawing, both commitments equally binding, neither canceling the other’s claim on her attention.
She drops her bag by the door and stands for a moment in the threshold, neither fully in nor out, letting the transition happen at its own pace. The flat receives her without judgment. The work table with its perpetual chaos of brushes and ink bottles, the velvet armchair she’d reupholstered herself during a particularly anxious spring, the bookshelves listing slightly under the weight of art monographs and novels she returns to when the world feels too sharp.
The condolence cards spill from her bag as she sets it down, their careful sentiments suddenly unbearable in their inadequacy. With deepest sympathy. As if depth could be measured, as if sympathy were the point. She leaves them where they’ve fallen and moves to the window instead, watching the church spire catch the last of the daylight while the rooftops below settle into shadow.
Her hands find the kettle without conscious thought, filling it, setting it to boil, the ritual of tea-making a kind of punctuation between the memorial service’s formal grief and whatever comes next. The water heats. The room darkens incrementally. She doesn’t turn on the lights yet.
When the tea is made, strong enough to taste of something besides comfort, she carries it to her work table and sits in the chair that knows the exact shape of her spine. The sketches for Kit’s biography are there, half-finished, demanding completion. But beside them, pinned with less ceremony, are the drawings she’s been making for no one: a series exploring negative space, the shapes created by absence rather than presence, forms that exist only in relation to what surrounds them.
She pulls a fresh sheet of paper toward her, uncaps a pen, and begins to draw without planning, letting her hand remember what her mind is still processing: that grief and gratitude can occupy the same moment, that endings and beginnings aren’t always distinguishable, that she’s here, still making marks on paper, still insisting on her own particular way of seeing.
The autumn light slants through the skylight in that particular golden-amber way that only happens in late October, catching dust motes and transforming them into something almost sacred. The sketches pinned across her walls receive the light unevenly, Kit’s book illustrations alongside her own experimental work, commercial projects bleeding into personal explorations, the boundaries between what she makes for money and what she makes for survival increasingly difficult to distinguish.
A portrait study of hands holding a manuscript. A color study of grief rendered in indigo and ochre. The cover design for Kit’s biography, nearly finished, the typography she’d agonized over now seeming inevitable. And beside it, unpinned and loose, the drawings she’d made during sleepless nights when the memorial service loomed: abstract forms that suggested bodies without depicting them, negative spaces that held more weight than the lines surrounding them.
All of it unmistakably hers in a way she’s only recently learned to recognize without apologizing for, without qualifying, without the reflexive self-deprecation that used to accompany any claim to her own vision. The light shifts incrementally westward, and she watches her work transform under its passage, each piece revealing different qualities as the angle changes.
The tea grows cold on the windowsill, untouched, while she sheds the careful black dress and tights that had felt like costume at the memorial service. The paint-stained jeans and ink-marked shirt she pulls on instead carry the accumulated evidence of months of work, Kit’s project, yes, but also the late-night experiments, the failures she’d allowed herself to make without audience or judgment.
At her work table, the biography materials occupy their designated folders with the contained finality of completed work. Beside them, a stretch of blank paper waits with that peculiar quality blank surfaces have. Not empty but latent, holding every possible mark she might make. No client brief dictates its purpose. No deadline constrains its becoming. Just her hands, her vision, and the insistent pressure of images that need making for reasons she doesn’t yet understand.
The images that emerge resist easy categorization: neither illustration nor fine art but something between. Grief rendered as architectural cross-sections, showing how Kit’s fierce protectiveness and Rowan’s beautiful evasions have become load-bearing walls in her internal structure. She sketches the negative space where people once stood, discovering that absence itself has shape, weight, substance worth documenting.
She works as the light fades from gold to rose to that particular blue hour silence, her hands moving with the confidence of someone who has finally stopped asking permission: not seeking approval from absent lovers or dying champions or even her younger, more desperate self. The studio flat around her transforms from refuge into foundation, not a place to hide from the world but the solid ground from which she moves through it, carrying her losses and her work and her hard-won self-knowledge forward into whatever comes next.