The first week back was filled with tasks so ordinary they seemed insulting beside the scale of what had happened. I answered questions about paint samples, corrected an invoice, bought groceries and met with a banker to learn how our joint wedding-expense account could be closed by agreement. There was paperwork to do and laundry to fold and a leaking faucet that still needed fixing, although I had spent months imagining those chores would now belong to a household of two. The world offered no special arrangement for a marriage that had collapsed before the thank-you cards were mailed.
At work, Nina helped me create an orderly record of the Ashford House problem. We saved the original sketches with their dates, documented how Julian had obtained access to them and noted every description of Lark & Line's involvement in the Westbridge materials. We made a simple timeline, not because I wanted to destroy his career, but because his story changed whenever a new fact became impossible to deny. A record was one way of keeping the facts from changing with his mood.
Nora reviewed the materials and sent a narrowly focused letter to Westbridge. It requested that the company cease distributing our unpublished concepts, acknowledge that no design services had been contracted and provide copies of any document representing otherwise. It did not accuse Julian of a crime or demand punishment for a private betrayal. The letter concerned our work, our rights and the possibility that a prospective investor had been shown materials under an inaccurate description of their authorization.
The response came from a woman named Catherine Bell, Westbridge's general counsel. She confirmed that the investment committee had deferred final consideration of Ashford House until the supporting materials were corrected. She offered a meeting with Nina and Nora to determine what could be removed and whether any retained use required a license. The firm had begun its own review of the project's internal approvals, including the expense reports related to the trip and the instructions given to Sofia.
It was the kind of response I had once hoped for from Julian: a clear acknowledgment of the issue, a process for investigating it and a distinction between what was known and what still needed to be determined. Westbridge was a business protecting itself, not a moral authority, but even its caution felt more respectful than Julian's attempts to turn every consequence into my responsibility. I forwarded the letter to Nina and returned to the conservation drawings on my desk. The building on the page was old enough to have survived two storms and a fire. It deserved better than being used as collateral in my marriage.
The wedding photographs arrived that afternoon. There were nearly six hundred images arranged in folders labeled getting ready, ceremony, portraits and reception. I opened them on my office computer while Nina was out meeting a client, believing that looking would be easier in a room where I knew how to work. I made it through the first dozen photographs without feeling anything but exhaustion.
Then I reached a picture of my mother fastening the pearl hairpin in my hair. Her expression was full of the kind of concentration she used when she was frightened of hurting something precious. My father had bought the hairpin for their tenth anniversary, and she had kept it in a soft cloth pouch for years before offering it to me. I stared at the photograph until the person smiling in it felt like a stranger I wanted to warn.