“I know. I know exactly what this is. This is an event that tells people who we are.” And my hands were still shaking because she was right and because I was standing here selling confidence on a day when I could barely keep myself together. I was balancing the Harringtons’ entire evening on a tightrope made of my own competence, and right now, today, that competence stretched thinner than it had ever been.
I left her office and walked to the corner of the floor where the windows looked out over downtown Brooklyn. Three weeks. Twenty-one days to solve a problem that showed up with no warning, while Ellis was somewhere in the city also falling apart, and instead of being able to talk to him about it, I was standing here pretending that everything was manageable.
My phone buzzed again. Another text from another vendor. A logistical conflict with the bar setup, the electrical outlet they thought was on the east wall was actually on the west wall, and that changed the whole layout. That changed the traffic flow. That changed the experience.
I texted back something competent and professional while my brain was screaming. Heartbreak did a thing I hadn’t accounted for. The Ellis problem, the asking for space, the saying yes because I was trying to be a better person, bled into every other thing. You got stupid. You missed details. You stood in the CFO’s office looking like you didn’t have control of your own event because you didn’t have control of anything.
I could call someone. Sierra. Calliope. My mom. But my mom had stopped calling months ago, Sierra would tell me to step back, and Calliope would tell me to drink, and none of that helped the Harringtons’ light situation or the florals or the fact that I’d convinced myself that if I just work hard enough, fast enough, long enough, I could outrun this feeling.
By 2 PM, I was back at my apartment with my laptop open, pulling up lighting diagrams and florals catalogs, reworking the entire visual plan around the loss of the tall arrangements. Three mugs of coffee went cold across the desk before I caught any of them. I was running numbers on costs. I was emailing backup florists. I was doing the work, the only thing I knew how to do, which was to remake the world until it fit inside the container I promised.
The work wasn’t fixing it. The work was just making me tired. Underneath the tired sat the real problem: I was doing this alone. There was no one else in this apartment who could look at a floor plan and tell me if it was going to work. That person, the one who would sit with me and make jokes and somehow make it less catastrophic, was the exact person I couldn’t call because he asked for space and I was trying to respect that, even though respecting it was killing me.
This was what distraction looked like, the desperate flavor of it. Running so fast from one thing, you barreled into the next.
“Jett, open the door. I can hear your misery through the wood and it’s very loud.”
I should have locked the deadbolt. Despite moving the spare key, Sierra quickly located it and wasted no time removing the barrier between meand the world.
Sierra stood in my doorway for a moment, taking in the scene: the bins, the napkins, the laptop glowing in the darkness, me at 7 PM still in the same Henley. Her camera was around her neck, which was never a good sign. She put things in her viewfinder when she was about to have important conversations, like she needed the distance the lens provided.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever this is. I’m working.”
She stepped over a bin of votives and sat directly on the napkin samples without asking permission. Her dark curls were in a bun. She was wearing one of her oversized vintage blazers. This was her intervention outfit.
“When did you last shower?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me this?”
“Because you smell like a basement had a baby with a gym locker and everyone is concerned.” She picked up one of the napkins, examined it. “Which shade is this?”
“Eggshell.”
“They all look the same.”
“Exactly. That’s why I need to pick the right one.”
She set the napkin down and turned to me with the expression I’d been dreading since I heard the key in the lock. The one that meant she was about to say something true.
“You can’t organize him back,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“You are. You’re trying to control the one thing you have left that responds to a checklist. Jett, he put your hoodie in his bed. He’s sleeping with your clothes. He’s miserable.”
The floor tilted slightly. “How do you know that?”
“Because I have eyes and I’ve been talking to him.”
I stood up, which was a mistake because now I was pacing and therewas nowhere to go in this apartment without stepping on evidence of my breakdown. “He’s the one who asked for a pause. He’s the one who decided we were moving too fast, that he needed to figure out who he is without me in the picture. He gets to make that choice, and I get to be here buying napkins.”
“You get to call him back.”
“And say what, Sierra? ‘I’ve organized cocktail supplies, please love me again’?”
