She picked up her phone and sent a message to the brand contact: *Hart confirmed, full run.
Recommend featuring her in the lead position for the summer preview.
Trust me on this one.* She didn’t do that for everyone.
She almost never did it at all anymore.
But twenty-two years was long enough to know a good bet when she saw one walking out of her office.
✦ ✦ ✦ Lucien’s phone showed a notification at four seventeen p.m.: a new name added to the Nova agency’s public roster.
His assistant had set up an alert.
He had asked her to and then felt mildly absurd about it for the rest of the afternoon.
He clicked through.
The listing was minimal — name, height, eye colour, one test shot.
The photograph was the one from the sportswear shoot.
She was looking directly at the camera with an expression he couldn’t categorise.
It wasn’t the look she’d given him in the study.
It wasn’t the look she’d worn at his business dinners, carefully pleasant, carefully present.
This was something else.
Something that hadn’t existed in the version of her he’d been married to for three years.
Or perhaps it had existed and he simply hadn’t looked.
He closed the browser.
Opened it again.
Closed it.
“Mr Cole?” His assistant’s voice through the intercom.
“The Singapore team is on the line.” “One minute,” he said.
He looked at the photograph one more time.
Then he closed the laptop and picked up the phone.
……………….
The apartment on Senter Street had three things wrong with it: the radiator clicked every forty minutes with the reliability of a metronome set to the wrong tempo, the kitchen window faced a brick wall, and the bathroom mirror was hung at a height that suggested the previous tenant was approximately four feet tall.
It had two things right: it was hers, and it was quiet.
Lina unpacked on Saturday afternoon, which took less time than it should have because she had so little.
One suitcase.
She had packed it in forty minutes on a Tuesday night after thirty-two years in the Cole estate, and she had chosen with a precision that she was only now, spreading things across the bed, beginning to understand.
Two good blouses.
One blazer.
Three casual tops.
A pair of trousers she’d bought years ago before the Cole wardrobe took over, still perfectly cut, a little dated now but nothing that couldn’t be styled around.
Her running shoes — she had started running in her first life at fifty-two, when the doctor said she had to, and she had loved it furiously, loved it like something stolen.
She was going to start now instead.
Four pieces of jewellery, aside from the ring.
A pair of pearl earrings her mother had given her at her university graduation — she had spent two years in a business degree she’d used for nothing and yet the earrings had survived everything.
A thin gold bracelet from her own savings, bought before Lucien, before she’d learned to wait for someone else to give her beautiful things.
A watch that wasn’t expensive but was reliable.
A brooch she had no memory of putting in the suitcase, shaped like a small bird, that she found in the side pocket when she was nearly done.
She held the brooch for a moment, turning it in the light.
She didn’t know where it had come from.
She had a vague sense of it being in a drawer somewhere in the Cole master bedroom, one of those objects that accumulate in drawers without history or explanation.
She pinned it to the lapel of the blazer.
Then there were the documents: the divorce papers, folded.
The ultrasound photograph, tucked carefully.
Her passport and identification.
A small folder of research notes from the internet café, organized by category: photographers, brands, industry contacts, publications, dates.
And at the very bottom of the suitcase, wrapped in one of the casual tops to protect it: a hardback notebook, navy blue, the kind with the elastic band and the ribbon placeholder.
She had bought it the day she left.
She had spent thirty-two years in the Cole estate keeping no record of herself at all — no diary, no letters, nothing she wouldn’t have been embarrassed for someone to find.
In this life, she was going to write everything down.
She set it on the desk.
She looked at what was spread across the bed: the entirety of her material self, stripped down to what she had chosen under pressure, in forty minutes, knowing she wasn’t coming back.
It was enough.
It was more than she’d started with the first time she’d walked into the Cole estate as a bride, when everything she was had been carefully packaged and presented as appropriate for the role she was about to perform.
She folded everything and put it away.
Then she opened the notebook to the first page and wrote: *I am twenty-three years old.
I have one suitcase, eight weeks of a daughter I am going to raise correctly, and the knowledge of what comes next.
That is, it turns out, more than enough.* She closed the notebook, made tea on the hotplate, and sat at the window watching the brick wall opposite until the city outside went dark and quiet and the radiator clicked, steadily, through the night.
✦ ✦ ✦ Maggie found out where she was living on a Wednesday.
Lina suspected she had always known — Maggie had been running the Cole household since before Lucien had taken over from his father, and there was very little that happened within a five-mile radius of anything Cole-adjacent that Maggie didn’t eventually learn.
She arrived at the apartment on a Wednesday evening with a ceramic dish covered in foil and an expression that suggested she was not going to make this sentimental.
“It’s braised chicken,” Maggie said, looking around the apartment with carefully neutral eyes.
“You look like you’ve been eating crackers.” “I’ve been eating perfectly well.” “You have one pot,” Maggie said, spotting the hotplate.
“One pot is sufficient for one person.” “How is — ” Maggie stopped.
Set the dish down.
Started again.
“Are you well?” Lina looked at the woman who had been the nearest thing she’d had to a consistent presence in the Cole house.
Who had brought her tea when Lucien was away and never once said anything about the way Lina waited by the window for his car.
Who had, she now realised, known everything and said nothing because that was what her position required of her, and who had done this for years with a quiet dignity that Lina had never properly acknowledged.
“I’m pregnant,” Lina said.
“About eight weeks.
I’m well.
The baby is well.
I have work starting next week.
I’m managing.” Maggie sat down on the edge of the small sofa without being invited, which was unlike her, and Lina realised this was Maggie outside the Cole house — not the housekeeper, just the woman.
“Does he know?” Maggie asked.
“He knows I’m pregnant.
He doesn’t know the due date or — the rest of it.
I told him at the estate.
He signed the papers.” A silence.
The radiator clicked.
“Maggie,” Lina said carefully, “I’m not going to ask you to carry information between us.
That’s not fair to you and it’s not something I want.
Whatever you tell him is your business.” “I won’t tell him anything you don’t want told.” “I know.
Which is why I’m not asking you not to.” Maggie looked at her for a moment with an expression Lina couldn’t quite read.
Then she stood, unwrapped the foil from the dish, and began looking through Lina’s single cabinet for a plate.
“Eat,” she said.
“Then tell me what you need.” Lina sat down and ate the braised chicken, which was the best thing she’d had in a week, and told Maggie about the catalogue shoot and Carla and the notebook and the ultrasound and her mother, and the radiator clicked every forty minutes and neither of them mentioned Lucien again, and it was, in its small and imperfect way, the most honest evening Lina had had in years.
Drop a love for this woman.
She deserves the world.