Chapter 3 - Ninety-Three Calls
Over the next thirty-six hours, I called Isabelle ninety-three times.
For months afterward, I would describe that number as proof of how desperate I had been.
My therapist eventually asked a question that silenced me.
“Had she asked you to call?”
I had not known, then, that persistence could become another way of refusing to listen.
At the time, I thought enough calls might reverse what seven days had done.
I called from my phone.
The house phone.
My office.
When Mae stopped answering, I contacted an old friend of Isabelle’s who lived in Brooklyn.
She said only, “Speak to her attorney.”
By Monday afternoon, a letter arrived asking me to stop contacting Isabelle directly and route practical matters through counsel.
I read it as cruelty.
Then I read it again.
There were no insults.
No threats beyond ordinary legal boundaries.
She had asked for space.
I was treating that as an obstacle.
Camille arrived that evening.
She entered without waiting for the housekeeper to announce her, carrying the sunglasses I had forgotten in Rome.
“Your assistant said you canceled everything.”
I stood beside the kitchen counter.
“Yes.”
“Are you ill?”
“Isabelle had surgery.”
Camille set down her bag.
For a second, she looked genuinely concerned.
“Is she all right?”
“She’s recovering.”
“Then why are you acting as though someone died?”
The sentence landed between us.
Camille saw my expression.
“That came out wrong.”
I looked at the woman for whom I had repeatedly rearranged my life.
She was twenty-six.
Ambitious.
Beautiful.
And not responsible for making me faithful to my wife.
I had spent nine months preparing a version of myself in which I was neglected, misunderstood, trapped in a marriage that had quietly ended.
Camille had believed the story because I had made it useful to believe.
“Did you tell me the truth about your marriage?” she asked suddenly.
I said nothing.
“You told me you slept in separate rooms.”
“Sometimes.”
“You told me she knew you were unhappy.”
“I assumed—”
“You told me you were discussing a separation.”
I looked away.
Camille folded her arms.
“Were you?”
“No.”
For a moment, she looked younger than I had ever allowed myself to notice.
Then she laughed once, without humor.
“So I wasn’t the only person you were lying to.”
“You knew I was married.”
“Yes,” she said. “And that’s mine to live with.”
She picked up her bag.
“But don’t use me to make yourself look less responsible.”
After she left, I sat at the kitchen table until midnight.
I had expected anger.
I had not expected accuracy.
The next morning, I ended the relationship in writing without inviting another conversation. My personal attorney and the company’s human resources director arranged for her modeling contracts to be handled by people independent of me.
I had already confused private appetite with professional power.
I would not make her employment depend on whether she comforted me afterward.
Then I went to the office.
My chief operating officer, Elena Vargas, watched me enter.
“You look terrible.”
“I need a week off.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“You just had one.”
I deserved that.
“I know.”
She closed the door.
“What happened?”
I told her.
Not everything.
Enough.
When I finished, she leaned back.
“Isabelle used to bring corrected sample patterns here.”
I frowned.
“What?”
“In the early years. Before the atelier expanded. She caught grading problems, seam issues, things that would have cost us production runs.”
“She helped at home.”
Elena looked at me steadily.
“Gabriel. She helped build your product.”
My first impulse was defense.
I had done the selling.
The financing.
The risk.
Then I remembered the scissors in the third box.
“I know,” I said.
Elena did not let me escape into the sentence.
“Do you?”
That afternoon, I opened old company folders.
Scanned sketches.
Pattern notes.
Photographs of our apartment.
There was Isabelle’s handwriting in margins I had stopped recognizing.
Adjust shoulder before second fitting.
Pocket placement wrong.
He likes this neckline. Try again.
Not every design was hers.
Not every success belonged to her.
But there had been a partnership before I rewrote the origin story around myself.
At seven, my assistant reminded me about an awards dinner.
“They’re honoring your contribution to American fashion.”
I looked at a photograph of Isabelle sitting on our apartment floor, surrounded by fabric.
“Cancel.”
“What reason should I give?”
I almost said a family emergency.
Instead, I said, “A personal matter.”
Her privacy was the first thing I had no right to spend.
That night, I found a therapist and booked an appointment.
I wanted instructions for getting my wife back.
He asked whether I was willing to become someone she could safely leave.
May you like
I nearly walked out.
I stayed.
