Pretty Falling Pieces by Isabelle Culpo

Chapter Twenty

Iwake up in the fourth different bed in as many days.

Last night when I arrived at the Hilton, I went straight to my room and slept for nine hours straight. My mind probably needed extra time to reset and process after yesterday’s events.

It’s now mid-morning and I’m in that strange place where you feel both disappointed and validated. Disappointed that when I finally was starting to feel happy, it was all shattered in one text, but validated because I knew this would happen all along.

My heart’s broken but at least I can tell myself I told you so.

I grab my phone, but it’s already gone dead.

I wonder if the hotel has a charger I could borrow.

Jess is probably at work right now and luckily her office is within walking distance. I meet her there often just to catch up and have our lunch break together so, while my phone is still flat, I feel comfortable stopping by to see if I can stay with her for the next few days.

The Hilton is lovely, but I’m sick of hotels and she never fails to cheer me up and put me in a better mood. I grab a quick shower and get into the most casual outfit I wore in Queenstown. I decide against asking the hotel for a charger and decide to just pick one up on my way to see Jess. With a light touch of makeup, I grab my purse and manage to get out the door by eleven.

* * *

Jess’s building is shared with a financial services firm and there’s young, up and coming professionals left, right, and centre. It should be bustling with energy and vibrancy, but instead the atmosphere feels kind of flat. As if the reality of attaining a fast-paced corporate career wasn’t as rewarding as everyone initially thought. So many people start thinking they can do any job for the right price, and before they know it, they’re a slave to a company that sees them as a cog in the machine, working late nights and having virtually no work life balance.

It makes me wonder how someone like Theo would’ve tackled the corporate ladder. He never had to though since he built his own castle from scratch. From the look of things that might just be the best way to go.

I knock on Jess’s office door which is closed; maybe she’s in a meeting? I regret not giving her a heads up now. She opens the door looking flustered, her usually pin straight blonde hair is tousled at the roots.

“Where the fuck have you been, Imogen? We’ve been looking for you everywhere?”

She grabs my arm and pulls me into her office, shutting the door behind us.

“Theo’s been losing his mind. He said he woke this morning, and you were gone. We’ve been trying to reach you, but your phone is off,” she says, waiting for me to explain myself.

It takes me a second to digest everything she’s just said. “My phone ran out of battery and my charger was in my apartment,” I argue.

She walks behind her desk picking up her phone. “I need to ring Theo and let him know you’re okay. He’s been worried sick, Imogen. He was at my apartment at 6:30 this morning looking for you. He totally freaked out when I said I didn’t know where you were.” She goes to call but I intercept her, covering it with my hand.

“Wait! Theo and I aren’t together anymore. I don’t want to get into the details, but I’ll text him. Now I just need to borrow your charger for a second.”

She nods, putting her phone down, and looking at me with sympathy in her eyes. “Imogen, you were so happy, what happened? He seemed to have no idea why you got up and left.”

“It’s fine really. I just need to focus on my apartment right now. Not a relationship.”

I can tell Jess wants to push for more details, but I think we both know that right now, at her workplace, isn’t the right time.

“Okay, I get it. Why don’t you stay with me then? We can watch Netflix, do some face masks, and order pizza for dinner. It’ll be great.”

“That sounds perfect.” And it’s exactly what I need right now.

* * *

When I get back to the Hilton, I’ve picked up a phone charger and a few extra supplies that I can take with me to Jess’s. As soon as the battery is sufficiently charged, it starts going off like crazy. Message after message from Theo, wondering where I am, what happened to me and telling me to call him back as soon as possible.

At some point I’ll have to speak to him, but today is not that day.

Checkout is at 2 p.m. so I pack up my things and head straight to Jess’s place using the spare key I have. My laptop is still in my apartment so I can’t access my design software, but I can catch up on emails from my phone and use the sketch pad and pencils I just bought. Everything that I transfer to my computer is created on paper first anyway.

Since Theo is technically my most important client right now, meeting up with him in the near future is inevitable. I wish I could say that seeing him again wouldn’t bother me, but unfortunately that’s not the case. When we do run into each other next, I hope things can remain professional between us. Regardless of our personal lives, if I do well on this project it could open up even more doors for my career, and given I’ll probably be in the market for a new home in the near future, securing new business will be a priority for me.

Since I can remember, I’ve always coped with conflict by distancing myself from whatever’s troubling me. In high school, we were once asked to complete a personality assessment as part of our social studies curriculum. We took the Myer Briggs Personality test.

My result came back as an INFJ.

I only remember two aspects of this personality test 1) that it’s the rarest archetype with reportedly only 1% of the population having it, and 2) the INFJ door-slam.

For some reason the concept of the INFJ door-slam resonated more with me than any other part of that course. It’s when an INFJ slams the metaphorical door of a relationship. Closing themselves off completely to protect from the pain.

Jess always used to (and still does) get frustrated when I wouldn’t stand up for myself. Whether it was bullies at school like Allie or my parents neglecting me to go off on yet another “family” vacation without me. I’ve just always found it easier to detach myself completely and sever any emotional ties.

Essentially disappearing from their lives.

I don’t and never would put Theo in the same category as them, despite the messages I saw on his phone. A part of me knows I should’ve talked to Theo first before jumping to conclusions.

However, there’s a bigger part of me saying, You knew this would happen! You knew that if you let someone in, they’d betray you! Now I can crawl back into my shell where no one can hurt me and go back to having crushes on book characters.

This time though, I’m not going to step back into old habits and “door-slam” Theo. I’ll be professional and cordial whenever we see each other. Our best friends are in a relationship so even once the project has finished, we may run into each other occasionally. I want Theo to feel comfortable when we see each other and without awkward tension between us that’s so thick it’s felt by everyone else in the room.

I arrive at my home away from home (a.k.a. Jess’s apartment) prepared to unload.

I know it will feel cathartic to talk it through with her when she gets home tonight so I picked up our favourite bottle of Rosé. For strictly therapeutic reasons, I also grabbed a block of caramel nut milk chocolate.

There were a few dishes left in her sink that I wash and put away. Satisfied with that task, I move on to the other and the next half an hour is spent pottering around the apartment fixing up things Jess doesn’t have time for in her busy schedule, including a quick vacuum, mopping the floors, and wiping down the glass and windows. Being the quintessential Virgo that I am, I can’t sit down to work until my environment is neat and tidy.

Now that I’ve straightened up the place, I sit down on Jess’s couch and pick up my phone to check my emails and then start working on some designs. It’s mostly junk, with a couple of emails from Andrew which I’ll respond to later but then I spot an email that makes my heart begin racing.

A reply from Campbell & Co.

I tap to open the email and read the first line.

Hi Imogen,

Thank you for your email. As much as we would like to support The Rubanza Elephant Sanctuary, unfortunately we aren’t currently in a position to partner with any other charities at this stage…

My heart sinks as I read the rest of their email, basically saying they’re already at capacity for non-for-profit funding and they’ll revisit Rubanza in their next annual review. It’s disappointing as I had set my hopes on this company, but I’m not going to give up now. I can probably expect another hundred rejections before someone says yes. To distract myself from the bad news, I pull out my pad to start sketching. There were a few details that I wasn’t quite happy with, so I take the time to iron them out in my head. Making sure every element of the design is copasetic and functional.

I grab my phone to look up some photographs of a project I completed just before Africa. The colour palette was quite similar to the one I’m working on now, and I wonder if there’s anything I can pull from it for inspiration. After a couple of minutes scrolling, I stumble upon exactly what I was looking for.

The living room follows my typical neutral colour scheme, but I added a few jewel tones to enhance the aesthetic and make it look more luxurious. Anyone who chooses to work for me knows that “colour” is not my forte, but if I find one of my clients is struggling to get on board with the neutral designs, adding touches of ruby, amethyst, and peridot can help them fall in love with it.

One of my first projects was converting a couple’s basement in a bedroom where I used sapphire, their daughter’s birthstone. That reminds me, my other client Grace said she wanted me to work on something for her daughter since she was moving in with her baby.

After everything that happened that night, I completely forgot about our conversation.

We agreed to meet up for coffee and I’m sure she said something about thinking I was no longer available to take on new clients?

Luckily her number was saved in my phone, and she answers after a couple of rings.

“Imogen, how lovely to hear from you again. It was such a nice surprise seeing you at the mission gala last week.”

“Hi Grace, how are you? Yes, it was a nice evening.” The start of it was anyway. “I’m glad we got the opportunity to meet in person now that I’m back. Would you be available sometime this week to catch up and discuss your plans?”

“Of course, that would be amazing! Shall we meet at mine?”

“Sounds good.”

“My daughter will be there as well, and she already has plenty of ideas of what she wants done which should make things easier.”

“Perfect, that always really—”

“Oh! And I remembered the name of the lady that phoned me by the way.”

I hold my breath.

“Her name was Sarah.”