All Chapters of Her Rebirth, His Regret : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

My mother's expression changed.The warmth didn't leave all at once, it curdled, slowly, the smile holding its shape while everything behind it shifted into something harder and colder and considerably more honest."Why are you so stubborn?" Her voice came out tight. "We took you in. We raised you. We gave you everything and last night you said those words and now you're standing here refusing to apologize?" She shook her head, her eyes moving over my face with something that wasn't worry anymore. "After everything we've done for you."Just as my lips parted to speak, Dorothy appeared in the kitchen doorway.She looked between me and my mother and then her face settled into that expression of hers, soft and pained and perfectly constructed, and she crossed to my mother and put a gentle hand on her arm. "Mama, don't be too hard on her." Her voice was warm and careful as usual. "Maeve truly loved Alexander. Seeing his ring on my finger must be breaking her heart right now, she already c

MAEVE I didn't really plan to sleep for eleven hours.I pulled Jane's guest room duvet up to my chin fully expecting to lie there running everything through my head the way I had been doing for weeks. Instead I was just gone. Out completely before I'd finished the thought.When I woke up I felt lighter than I had in years. Like my heart was bigger, my chest wider. Somehow not smelling the familiar scent of my old room back at the Quinlan house was reason enough to make me feel like I could do anything, achieve anything. I lay there in the quiet and just let that feeling exist.Coffee smell drifted under the door. Jane's voice floated from the kitchen, firm and instructional, clearly mid-disagreement with one of her plants.I smiled at the ridiculous snippets of the one sided conversation that reached my ears.I padded out in my socks and Jane handed me a mug without turning around and kept pressing her case to the plant. I stood there and drank my coffee and thought quietly that I wa

MAEVE The Gilded Fork was a five stare hotel and also my last resort. It had floor to ceiling windows, warm amber lighting visible even from the sidewalk, the kind of entrance that had a canopy and a doorman and flower arrangements that got changed every two days because the owner believed wilting flowers communicated a wilting standard. I had looked it up the night before the interview and spent a considerable amount of time convincing myself I was qualified enough to walk through that door.I was. I knew I was. I just needed my nerves to catch up with that information.The woman who met me in the lobby was not what I had expected.Mid fifties, natural silver locs pinned back elegantly, reading glasses pushed up on her forehead like she had forgotten they were there, a deep burgundy wrap dress and the specific energy of someone who had built something from the ground up and knew exactly what it was worth. She looked at me when I walked in and her whole face changed."Maeve Quinlan.

MAEVE Patricia called me into her office the morning after the gallery event and looked at me across her desk with an expression I couldn't immediately read. "Sit down," she said. I sat. She laced her fingers together on the desk and looked at me for a moment and I held my breath. Was she about to fire me? "I watched the coverage from last night," she said. "The gallery event. Your piece." She paused. "Maeve, I've been in this city for thirty years. I know talent when I see it and I know when someone is wasting it." She held my gaze. "You're wasting it managing my restaurant." I opened my mouth. "I'm not firing you," she said quickly, one hand coming up. "Lord knows I need you here and Marcus isn't back for another few weeks. But I want to say something to you that I mean sincerely." She leaned forward. "Whatever happened that made you end up answering my job listing instead of building your own label, you need to fix it. Because what I saw in that display case last night does

MAEVE The call with the competition coordinator lasted forty five minutes and by the end of it my hand was cramping from writing notes and Jane was sitting across from me at the kitchen table mouthing questions at me that I kept waving away.Two boutique houses wanted to commission work. One was based in the city, small and selective and the kind of place whose pieces ended up on the right people without the label needing to advertise itself. The other was in Paris.Paris.I wrote it down on my notepad and looked at it and felt something shift in my chest that I wasn't ready to fully examine yet.The coordinator, a woman named Clara who spoke at the efficient pace of someone with seventeen things to do after this call, told me that both houses had reached out within twenty four hours of the announcement and that this was, in her experience, unusual. "People move fast when they find something real," she said. "I'd recommend moving faster."We agreed on a timeline for introductory call