Chapter 64 Eight minutes about Daniel Ashford!
Chapter 64 Eight minutes about Daniel Ashford!
I call Elise at eleven at night because I have reached the deepest stage of exhaustion where keeping things to myself stops being a discipline and starts being a structural failure, and I need her to hear all of it, every single piece, and help me before I lose all of my nerve to say any of it out loud.
She answers on the first ring, which she has been doing since we made up two days ago, the kind of first ring answering that tells me she has been carrying some version of guilt about the fight even though I have told her three times that I was the one who needed to apologise and she has told me three times that we were both wrong and we have settled into the comfortable agreement that we were both wrong and we are not discussing it further.
"Competing gurlie! Talk to me." she says the instant she picks up, her voice perked.
"I need to vent." I say. "Properly. Like, full unfiltered, do not interrupt me until I am finished, kind of venting."
"I have wine and nowhere to be." she says.
I sit down on the edge of my hotel bed.
I look at the ceiling, breathe through my lips, and I let it all out.
.....
" ..... stage 3 is groups of three. Which I did not choose. Which the judges decided, deliberately, on purpose, with intention, and somehow, Elise, somehow out of twenty four candidates, they put me in a group with Callum." I groan.
"Wait, the fuck?"
"I said do not interrupt."
"Sorry, continue, this is insane, continue."
"Callum and Nadia. Both. In my group. For forty eight hours. Working on a brief that the judges, also deliberately, also on purpose, decided should be a newlyweds house. A newlyweds house Elise. With my ex husband from my past life and the woman he cheated on me with. I did not write this. I could not have written this if I tried. This is not fiction. This is my actual reality."
"Your reality is insane, bestie."
"Still not finished, Elise. Stop interrupting me!. Nadia lasted about three hours before she tried to grab my notebook out of my hands in front of everyone and got physically removed from the group with a formal warning, which honestly, fine, good, deserved, but then they replaced her with Roe, who you have heard me mention, who is hilarious and chaotic and a genuine architectural mind but is also, and I cannot stress this enough, the single most devoted fan of Daniel Ashford that has ever existed in human history."
"Daniel Ashford the man who hit you with his car."
"That Daniel Ashford. Yes. The one who paid my hospital bill. The one who noticed my haircut. The one who sat across from me on a plane to Paris and told me he does not believe in coincidences. The same Daniel Ashford that you know about." I snap.
"Roe wants to build our entire newlyweds house in the visual language of an Ashford Industries commercial property and I had to explain to him, calmly, with patience I did not know I had, that a man who designs hotel lobbies and research centres for a living is not the right reference for a house two people are supposed to feel safe and chosen in."
"Okay but you sound like you know a lot about what Daniel Ashford designs."
"That is not the point."
"It might be slightly the point."
"Elise."
"Continue. I'm listening. With my whole chest. Continue."
I lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling and feel something in my chest loosen the way it loosens when I am finally saying things out loud instead of writing them in italics in my own head where nobody can hear how ridiculous they sound.
"He is everywhere." I say.
"That is the actual problem. Not the competition, not Callum, not even Nadia, though obviously also Nadia. It is him. He is on the judging panel, which means I am going to be evaluated by him for the rest of this competition. He put me in a group with the two people most likely to make me lose my mind, on purpose, for reasons I do not understand and cannot ask him about because contact outside formal evaluation results in disqualification."
"And every time I am in a room with him he looks at me like he is reading a document I have not given him permission to read and I cannot tell if it is irritation or curiosity or something else entirely and it is making me unbearable to be around, Elise, I am unbearable, I caught myself this morning thinking about the way his sleeve was rolled up at the orientation and I had to physically put my notebook down and walk to the window and remind myself that I am a grown woman competing in an international architecture competition and not a teenager."
There is a pause on Elise's end.
"Are you finished?." she asks
"I think so." I say.
"Maybe. There might be more. I genuinely do not know." I shrug.
"Sera." she calls me gently. The way she says my name when she is about to say something true and wants me to actually hear it rather than just receive it.
"You have spent ten minutes telling me about Callum and Nadia for approximately ninety seconds and Daniel Ashford for the remaining eight and a half minutes."
I sit up.
"That is not true." I whine.
"I timed it." she says.
"Mentally. I am very good at mental timing."
"You are not." I laugh
"I am tonight." Her laughter mixes with mine.
I look at the window. The Paris night outside. The quiet of a city that does not need to perform anything because it has already proven everything it needs to prove a long time ago.
"He terrifies me." I say quietly. The truest thing I have said all night.
"Not in a bad way. Or maybe in a bad way. I cannot tell which kind of terrifying it is and that is what is actually terrifying. I do not have a category for it."
"Maybe it does not need a category." Elise says. "Maybe you can just let it be a thing that is happening without deciding what shelf to put it on."
"That is very unhelpful advice."
"It is the only advice I have." she says. "Also drink some water. You sound dehydrated and stressed and those two things make people say things they regret whether on the phone at night or to the faces of people they hate."
"I am not regretting anything."
"Yet." she says.
I laugh despite my deep frustration and annoyance.
"I miss you." I say.
"I miss you too." she says. "Go to sleep. Build your newlyweds house. Do not think about his rolled up sleeves." Her giggling travels over the phone.
"I was not thinking about ...."
"Goodnight Sera.