Love Redesigned

by Jenny Proctor

  “I didn’t love you because you’re a LeFranc.”

  “I’m not a LeFranc,” I shot back.

  She huffed. “You know what I mean.”

  Her words sparked something deep inside me and a dormant insecurity flickered to life. It was only a flicker now, a year after we’d broken up, but it was easy to remember the raging inferno it had been when I’d walked out. She’d said she didn’t love me because of my ties to LeFranc. And maybe she was telling the truth. But she’d never managed to convince me.

  “Maybe you didn’t,” I said, my voice doubtful despite my effort to remain neutral. “But my connections didn’t hurt.”

  She shook her head and rolled her eyes in a way that felt familiar; it’s not like we hadn’t had this argument before.

  She paused a long moment, her eyes trained on the sidewalk. “You said things got bad at LeFranc. Was it because of Sasha? Was any of what you believed true?”

  I shook my head. “I wasn’t given the opportunity to prove anything before I left.”

  My jacket dropped off her shoulder; she caught it, pulling it back up and finally slipping her arms through the sleeves. “But you still believe it.”

  I ran a frustrated hand across my face. “Dani, I can’t talk about this with you.”

  She frowned. “You can’t, or you won’t?”

  “Legally, I can’t.”

  “Legally? What does that even mean?”

  “It means Alicio sent me a cease and desist order.” Frustration filled my voice. “It means I can’t talk about anything related to LeFranc with anyone, particularly those still employed by the company.”

  She dropped her gaze, her head shaking sadly from side to side. She shrugged out of my coat and held it out to me. “So I guess that’s supposed to make it okay that you left without talking to me.” Her voice was distant, cold. “I was just another company employee.” The light of the streetlamp above her cast shadows over her face, but I could still see tears brimming in her eyes. “Here,” she said, shaking the jacket she still clutched in her hand. “I’m going home.”

  Chapter Seven

  Dani

  My Uber driver was chatty. He was nice enough, but it was taking every ounce of my will power not to burst into tears. I really didn’t want to hear about his accounting classes in business school, or his roommate from Nepal, or his four-year-old niece no matter how cute she was. The relief I felt when he finally pulled up outside my apartment was palpable.

  Outside the car, I paused on the sidewalk long enough to rate my ride and leave a tip for the driver. When I closed out the Uber app, there was a text notification on my screen.

  Dani, I’m sorry about the way our conversation ended. I never meant to hurt you, and I hate that I seem to have only made it worse. It wasn’t my intention. I only wanted to say I was sorry.

  Fresh tears filled my eyes and I closed out my screen, hiding the message from view. I didn’t want to read his apologies. Before I could drop the phone back in my bag, another notification lit up the screen.

  One more thing. Please be careful at work. Trust Chase, and your own instincts. But no one else. I’m sorry I can’t say more than that.

  What was that supposed to mean? Be careful? Careful doing what? If he couldn’t tell me everything, I’d almost rather he tell me nothing at all. Plus, he gave up his right to care whether I was being careful or not.

  I hurried up the stairs to the loft I shared with Paige. Well, sort of shared with Paige. She was a full-time nanny and had a room at her employer’s home. She didn’t always sleep over, but it was a little bit of a haul to get from the Upper East Side all the way down to Chelsea so she often chose to stay at work. She was home on the weekends most of the time, but with all the traveling she did with the family, I never knew when to expect her. Still, she paid half the rent. I’d have never been able to afford the space without her help.

  The loft was tiny. Anything even remotely affordable in the city always was. But it had high ceilings and huge windows and a funky, modern kitchen with Art Deco subway tile and light fixtures that looked like they belonged in an art museum. We were fairly certain the lights were courtesy of the previous tenant, an artist who had also left a mural that took up the whole of Paige’s back bedroom wall.

  I hadn’t seen Paige before dinner, much to my disappointment—it would have been nice to talk through my Alex anxieties with her—so when I saw her purse and coat hanging on the chair by the door, I really did start to cry.

  “Paige?” My voice cracked. “Where are you?”

  She appeared in the doorway that led to the short hall separating our two bedrooms, her face wrinkled with worry. “What’s wrong? Are you okay? Did someone die?”

  I shook my head and dropped my bag on the table by the door. “I’m so glad you’re home.”

  We met on the couch where I walked her through the entire day, from running into Alex in the coffee shop, all the way through dinner and the disastrous walk afterward.

  “Wow,” she finally said, after I’d finished. “You’ve had some day.”

  I huffed. “Tell me about it.”

  “I saw the flowers when I came home and wondered where they came from. That was at least nice of him, to tip you off about dinner. Can you imagine if you’d shown up and found him sitting there with Isaac?”

  I sniffed and wiped my eyes on the back of my hand. “I’d have died. Alex was always like that. I’m not surprised he sent flowers.”

  Paige gave me a knowing look. “Ohhh, no.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “What?”

  “You are so not over this guy.”

  “Yes I am,” I said, but the new tears welling up from her words indicated otherwise.

  She opened her arms and pulled me into a hug. “Oh, honey,” she said, patting me on the back. “No, you’re not.”

  “I’m still so mad at him, Paige. And I can’t even begin to make sense of things he said tonight. Stuff that he can’t legally tell me? What does that even mean?”

  Paige shifted and I sat up, pulling a blanket off the couch and wrapping it around my legs. “What do you remember about the last time he did talk to you about LeFranc? Before he left.”

  “I don’t remember specifics. He had suspicions about Sasha, which made me defensive because I’d just started working for her and I loved my job. She was letting me design, you know? And he seemed so determined to bring her down. I guess I didn’t feel like he had a lot of convincing evidence.”

  “But if he had, you would have believed him, right?” Paige said. “If he’d had actual proof that she was doing something shady, you would have taken his side.”

  I thought back through the conversations Alex and I had had those last few days before he left. We hadn’t spent a ton of time talking about work. I loved LeFranc, and Alex had only seemed to tolerate it. He’d loved that I wanted to be a designer, but he’d always had complaints about the way Alicio did business, and he was particularly hard on Sasha. He’d never liked her—even less so when she and Alicio had become engaged.

  And I’d always defended her.

  “What if I didn’t listen to him?” I asked Paige, fear creeping into my voice.

  Paige grimaced. “You did have Sasha-shaped stars in your eyes those first few months. But, Dani, this is Alex we’re talking about. You cared about him. You would have listened.”

  I shook my head, forcing out the sympathy that had slowly been creeping into my brain. “You know what? It doesn’t even matter if I would or wouldn’t have listened. He could have done a thousand different things to let me know he was leaving. Even if he thought my loyalties were to LeFranc, I didn’t deserve to be cut off.”

  I thought of all the texts and emails I’d sent him in those first weeks after he’d left. Ranging from curious, to a little more desperate, to downright distraught and worried. A surge of embarrassment coursed through my veins.

  “He doesn’t get a pass on this,” I said, with an air of finality. “I’m g
lad he apologized. Maybe it’ll help him get some closure, but it doesn’t change anything.”

  “Fine,” Paige said, with a defiant fist pound onto the back of the sofa.

  “Fine,” I echoed.

  She grinned. “Do you feel better?”

  I wasn’t quite ready to smile back, but I did breathe out an audible sigh. “Maybe a little.”

  “Good. Can we sort of change the subject?” Paige asked. “Also, are you hungry? I’m hungry.”

  “I’m starving. I was too nervous to really eat my dinner.”

  Paige stood and started rummaging through the kitchen—rather, the tiny counter behind our tiny living room where we kept our food. She returned to the couch with a loaf of French bread, a block of Wensleydale cranberry cheese, a bowl of strawberries, and a knife wedged between her teeth.

  “Bless you, woman,” I said, reaching for a strawberry. She unloaded the impromptu meal onto the coffee table, but before sitting down, returned to the kitchen, this time retrieving a pint of Talenti gelato from the freezer, and a couple of spoons from the drawer. The girl had a killer metabolism, which I probably should have found annoying, what with my own petite and curvy frame. I loved it though. She wasn’t quite tall enough to actually be a runway model, but she was still lean and lanky and was perfect for when I wanted to make something for a normal-sized human, as opposed to the miniaturized clothes I made for my own not-quite-five-foot-three self.

  “What are we changing the subject to?” I asked, reaching for an offered spoon.

  “Right, yes,” Paige said, settling back down on the couch. “Why on earth did Isaac need to hire a business manager?”

  “I know!” I said. “Weird, right?”

  “And someone like Alex. He’s so business-y. And Isaac is so . . . Isaac.”

  “Seriously. They’re so different. It seems like such a weird combination. Alex made it seem like Isaac was ready to diversify and do something more profound with his money. So that’s why he brought him on.”

  “How much money are we talking, here?” Paige asked. “Is he really that successful?”

  “I have no idea. I mean, he bought a house, so that’s something, I guess.”

  “What kind of house?”

  “I don’t know, but . . .” I reached for my phone. “He sent Mom the address the other day in a group text. I guess I can google the address.”

  Paige looked over my shoulder. “Uh, he bought a house on Church Street?” she asked, as soon as I pulled up the text. “I bet it’s historical.”

  I copied the address into Google. A listing on one of those “value your home” websites pulled up. I quickly scanned the information.

  Isaac hadn’t just bought a house. He’d bought an early 19th century Single House in the heart of the Charleston peninsula.

  “Built in 1804,” Paige read over my shoulder.

  I swallowed. “And worth more than two million dollars.”

  I swiped through the photos of the home, likely the ones that had accompanied the last real estate listing.

  I gasped at the next photo that filled my screen. “Paige! Look at this garden!” I turned my phone around so she could see. Brick walkways, Carolina Jasmine curling around a wrought iron fence. Flowers everywhere.

  Charleston city ordinances required historical homes to stay historical, keeping the outside looking just like it would have when it was originally built. It gave the city an old-world feel that my entire family had always loved. Cobblestone streets, gas lamps, and beautiful gardens like the one in the photo.

  But loving downtown and living downtown were different things. That Isaac was living there indicated a measure of financial success I could hardly fathom.

  “Um, Dani?” Paige held her own phone now, the gelato temporarily forgotten. “Have you checked out Isaac’s YouTube channel lately?”

  “What? Why?”

  “He has over ten million subscribers.”

  My jaw dropped. “Are you serious?”

  “I’m pretty sure that makes him like, legit YouTube famous. Ten million subscribers is a lot of people.”

  I’d never felt so out of touch with my brother’s life. I remembered a few years before when he’d hit the one million subscriber mark. And I’d known then that it was a pretty big deal. But, ten million? “So I guess we know why he needed to hire a money guy,” I said.

  “I should say so,” Paige agreed, through a mouth full of gelato.

  “They’re planning this big charity thing on Christmas Eve,” I said. “An online scavenger hunt called the Compassion Experiment to benefit some charity organization. I’m totally baffled by the whole thing.”

  “More baffled than you are by a two-million-dollar house?” Paige asked. “I just can’t believe they didn’t tell you they were working together. Such a dude thing to do. Did they seriously think you wouldn’t find out? Or wouldn’t care when you did?”

  “Isaac did tell me. I guess it was my mistake for assuming it was just to do his taxes.”

  “Yeah, but Alex should have said something too.” Paige sighed. “So lame. I’m sorry, Dani.”

  I shrugged. “At least it’s over now. He’ll go back to Charleston, I’ll go back to work, and we’ll both go back to not ever seeing each other.”

  “It sucks,” she said. “Nothing like grinding a little bit of sand into your sunburn.”

  I reached for the gelato and scooped up a generous spoonful.

  “Does Sasha ever ask about Alex?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I mean, she knows everything. She was pretty sympathetic when he left New York. She gave me the day off, even. But no one at work really talks about him much. He’s not actually a LeFranc, you know? And he was there such a short time. I don’t know that he ever really felt like a part of the company. Sasha definitely doesn’t talk about him like she talks about Gabriel and Victor.”

  “Isn’t Sasha only slightly older than Gabriel and Victor?”

  “Oh, she’s younger than Victor,” I said. I fluttered my eyelashes with dramatic flair. “But she’s going to be such a good stepmom.”

  Paige frowned. “I know you say she’s good to you, Dani, but there’s a lot about that woman that bugs me.”

  I stared into my gelato, not sure if I was ready to admit how I was really feeling. For almost two years, Sasha had been my everything. She was my ticket—the one who held all the power to give me my dream job. I had given everything to LeFranc. Worked ridiculous hours. Answered the phone no matter the time of day. I’d designed at home, giving Sasha my designs without question, without demanding anything in return because I knew she saw my value and would, as soon as she could, promote me to the design team.

  But when?

  More and more lately, I’d been feeling a lot more used and a lot less appreciated. “Honestly, she’s been bugging me lately, too.”

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t know. She’s talking so much about how privileged I should feel that she’s taking my stuff to the design team. But she’s not giving me any credit for it. Literally, no one but Chase knows I know anything about clothes.”

  “So you’re basically doing her job for her, but she’s getting all the credit?”

  “I’m not doing her job. Not completely. But she’s using more and more of my ideas. Which is great, but—”

  “But it sucks not to get any validation yourself.”

  “Exactly. It’s not really that I care so much about getting credit. I just wish I could be in on the collaborating. I’m never in on the talks about fabric or theme or overall style. So I’m really just sort of stabbing in the dark hoping I come up with something Sasha can use. It would be so much more rewarding if I got to be a part of the actual team.”

  “I’m sure your time will come.” Paige reached over and squeezed my knee. “In the meantime, you could always go out on your own doing wedding gowns.” She smiled wide and lifted her shoulders in a playful shrug.

  I narrowed my gaze. “Did you pe
ek?”

  She placed her hand on her heart. “Cross my heart. I promise I . . . did.”

  “Paige!” I jumped off the couch and flew to my workspace. “I told you not to look!”

  Our loft wasn’t spacious enough for me to have an actual workroom. For that reason, Paige deserved a ton of credit for tolerating just how much of our shared space was dedicated to fashion. Racks lined two of the four walls in the living room, full of things I’d made through the years. And the back half of the room—the half I’d commandeered as wedding dress central—was the happiest of my happy places. My sewing machine sat on a table against the back wall, underneath tall windows that let in tons of natural light. On either side of the table, huge bins held fabric, buttons, zippers, and other notions I might need while working. Years of collecting had yielded a pretty impressive assortment—impressive enough that I probably shouldn’t have been spending a third of every paycheck at Mood. But it was hard to resist the siren call of a great fabric store. Paige’s obsession was shoes. My mom couldn’t resist buying pretty paper and fancy pens. But me? Fabric was my weakness.

  I crossed to the back corner where a dress form was hidden by an old sheet. Paige was great. Not Bridezilla at all. But working with someone watching over your shoulder, observing the minute-by-minute progress of a dress they hoped to eventually wear was intensely stressful. Creation was a process. And rarely did the finished product look anything like the first few versions. By the end of week two of dressmaking, I had stopped working on the dress whenever Paige was around, covering it with a sheet when I wasn’t home, and threatening to turn it into a mermaid dress with puffy sleeves if she came within three feet of my sewing area.

  Little cheater.

  I pulled the sheet off the dress form and studied the half-made dress, intentionally angling my body to block Paige’s view.

  “Oh, come on!” Paige called.

  I turned around to face her, my hands on my hips. “Did you seriously look?”