Olivia Cooperman pushed through the heavy doors of the Tribeca art deco office building just after eight o’clock in the morning. She swiped her ID card in the turnstile and smiled at the security guard.
For the past eight years she’d spent more time at 32 Sixth Avenue than in her own apartment. She still got a thrill out of the commanding lobby with the tiled map of the world, the mosaic ceilings, the bustle of all the people coming from and going to the twenty-seven floors filled with businesses ranging from radio stations to fashion labels to PR firms. Olivia was headed to the twenty-second floor, home to HotFeed, one of the biggest celebrity social media–management companies in the country. Olivia oversaw a team of twenty people running the accounts of movie stars, athletes, reality-TV stars, and musicians.
Last week HotFeed had won the business of a breakout star from a Netflix show. The actress, barely out of her teens, had appeared at the office for one meeting with her army of publicists and agents. Now Olivia and her colleagues were waiting to see which HotFeed account manager would get to take the reins of the plum account.
Olivia wanted the assignment. Badly.
At thirty years old, while many of her friends were planning weddings, moving to the suburbs, and having babies, Olivia devoted herself to work.
“You can have a personal life and a professional life, you know,” a friend had told her recently over drinks. A friend with a newly acquired diamond on her left ring finger.
“I think the myth that you can have it all has been debunked,” Olivia replied. The myth had certainly been disproven in her own life experience. The most recent casualty of her demanding career: her two-year relationship with a banker named Ian Brooks. Just last week, he’d broken up with her in the middle of dinner at Blue Hill.
“I hope you and your phone will be very happy together,” he’d said before he walked out.
The impossibility of a work-life balance had been painfully clear to her from the time she was a child. She’d always resented her mother’s preoccupation with her business. Ruth Cooperman had spent long days at the office; she’d never made it to any of Olivia’s school plays or baked for a single fund-raiser. She hadn’t even given a thought to dinner half the time. Her father had managed all that. Olivia had promised herself that if she had an intense career, she wouldn’t make the mistake of adding a child to the mix. For Olivia, it wasn’t just career first. It was career only.
She’d thought she’d made that clear to Ian from the start.
“Good morning, Dakota,” she said to her assistant, who was already settled in her cubicle outside of Olivia’s glass-walled office. Olivia had hired Dakota just over a year ago, fresh out of NYU. Dakota had a communications degree, a tattoo of Dorothy Parker on her left shoulder, and the ability to produce endlessly creative hashtags.
“Hey,” Dakota said, biting on the end of a pen. “There’s a delivery there for you.”
Olivia had already spotted it, a long rectangular vase filled with exotic flowers twisted into a train of petals that seemed to float on the surface. She began humming softly to herself, some pop song she’d listened to during the subway ride to the office. It could only be congratulations from someone. Someone who knew she’d landed the account. Or, more likely, the person who had granted her the account.
It was happening. Her hard work, the sacrifice of her personal life, was paying off. It didn’t matter what other people thought.
She closed her office door and smiled as she opened the small white envelope.
No hard feelings, xoxo Jessica
What? She looked through the walls of her glass office to the cubicles just outside. There, next to Dakota, was another assistant, Jessica. Jessica was young, Jessica was cool, Jessica was…getting the new account?
Heart pounding, Olivia texted her assistant. Can you come in here, please?
Dakota scurried in carrying a razor-thin company-issued laptop and her phone.
“Close the door,” Olivia said. “What have you heard about Jessica?”
“She got a promotion. And the new account,” Dakota said. “I thought you knew.”
Olivia shook her head. “This doesn’t make any sense,” she muttered.
“I mean, it kind of does,” said Dakota.
“How do you figure?” Olivia asked, her mouth dry. She’d put eight years into this company; Jessica had been there eighteen months.
“Well,” Dakota said casually, as if pointing out the obvious, “she does have the biggest Instagram following in the entire office.”
“Right,” Olivia said, her mind racing. It’s okay, she told herself. You’ve got this. The only answer to work problems was to work harder.
Elise and Fern closed the shop at six and, exhausted, retired upstairs for an early night.
The studio apartment above the tea shop had needed a lot of work. While the storefront had come with beautiful moldings and a filigree ceiling, the living quarters on the second floor had fallen into disrepair. Over the winter, a contractor had updated the electrical wiring and plumbing, plastered the walls, and stripped the floors. But the bedroom furniture had arrived just days ago.
Their first night in their summer accommodations, both Elise and Fern shifted uncomfortably in the unfamiliar bed.
Elise closed the book of essays and placed it on her nightstand alongside the blue candle she had bought to match the walls, which were painted a shade called Sapphireberry. At the shop, she’d been told the candle was for healing, forgiveness, fidelity, happiness, and opening lines of communication.
It’s going to take a lot more than a candle tonight, Elise thought.
She lit the candle.
Next to her, Fern paged through a short-story collection. Elise knew neither one of them could absorb a word of any book. They hadn’t spoken since midafternoon.
“Do you think this blue is too blue?” Elise said, to break the ice. She had selected the bright color herself, and Fern, who usually had a more conservative eye for interior design, had not protested. In an attempt to overcome Elise’s reluctance about renting out the house for the summer, Fern had given Elise a lot of leeway in decorating their new living quarters.
Fern closed her book and looked at her. “Are we going to talk about what happened today?”
Elise sighed. “I’m sorry. I’ve said I’m sorry a million times. It was a temporary freak-out.” She reached for Fern’s hand and Fern didn’t pull away. That was a good sign.
“We have a contract with our tenant. This is business,” Fern said. “What you did today undermined everything we’d agreed on.”
Elise nodded. Starting Tea by the Sea was a risk financially, and renting out the house for extra income was insurance. They were already renting the building Tea by the Sea was in and working long hours there. It made perfect business sense to give up the house for the summer.
Except Shell Haven was not business. It was personal. It had never been just a house. It was their first step toward starting a family.
Their decision to move to Provincetown was not based on the natural beauty of the place or the fact that Provincetown was one of the country’s oldest artists’ colonies. It wasn’t that it had two bookstores within a mile of each other and a magnificent library in between. It wasn’t that Commercial Street had only one traffic light (if you didn’t count the flashing light where Commercial and Bradford merged). It wasn’t the literary festival or the film festival or the wildlife sanctuary or the lobster rolls at the Canteen.
It was that they could live their life together without anyone raising an eyebrow. Ever.
But while they succeeded in finding their dream home, one thing had not come easily. Their first attempt at IVF failed. Their second attempt worked but ended in a miscarriage, as did their third.
Their fertility doctor, a specialist in Boston named Dr. Sparrow who was as tiny and birdlike as her name, tried to keep their attitudes positive. Elise clung to her words of encouragement like gospel. Still, it didn’t happen for them.
Frayed from the hormonal roller coaster, Elise barely recognized herself. She felt betrayed by her body for failing to carry the pregnancy to term. As for her relationship with Fern, it became less like a love affair and more like a business partnership struggling to get a failing endeavor off the ground. They were miserable.
“Enough,” Fern finally said after the second miscarriage.
“We can take a break,” Elise agreed.
“No,” Fern said. “Not a break. I’m done.”
She didn’t even want to try anymore. At first, her decisiveness was a relief. Elise was too emotionally exhausted to make rational decisions.
After a few months, when her head cleared a little, Elise thought maybe Fern could try to carry their child.
“Elise, I meant what I said. We can’t keep going down this road. Financially, physically—it’s not healthy. We gave it a shot, it didn’t work, and we need to be happy with what we have. Each other.”
“But we always planned to be parents,” Elise said.
“It’s out of our control.”
“You’re just giving up! What about what I want?”
But Fern wouldn’t hear another word about it. The last conversation had been over Valentine’s dinner at Napi’s Restaurant; they’d ended the evening with an argument and went to bed without speaking. There was a time when it seemed they might break up over it. But they’d gotten past it. Now there they were, sleeping in their new bedroom above the tea shop. Surrounded by bright blue walls.
“I’m sorry,” Elise said again.
Fern hugged her. “For the record, I like the paint color. How can you go wrong with something called Sapphireberry? In fact, if we get a dog, I’m voting for that name.”
Getting a dog had also been explored last year. Another consolation prize.
Stay positive, Elise told herself. She leaned over and blew out the candle on her nightstand. “You know what I was thinking we need for this room?” she said. “We should buy a mosaic from Amelia.” See? She was invested in the new space. She was contributing ideas. She was on board.
Fern smiled. “I have a better idea. You can take her class and make one of your own. It might be a good hobby for you.”
Amelia Cabral taught mosaic-making out of the art studio on the third floor of the Beach Rose Inn, classes she’d started three years earlier, shortly after she’d been widowed.
Yes, Elise would busy herself with the tea shop and maybe take a mosaic class. She would decorate and embrace her new temporary living quarters. She would move forward, not looking at what she’d left behind.
She would do it for Fern.