A Beautiful Surrender

Charlotte Bennett had discovered two things about being professionally competent and romantically complicated. First, the former involved considerably more spreadsheets than anyone warned you about. Second, the latter was apparently impossible to explain to an airport security officer when your handbag contained three architectural samples, a notebook marked PRIVATE, and a ribbonless gift box that rattled whenever you moved.

The commission letter lay open beside Charlotte’s suitcase, the words HARTWELL HOUSE looking more impressive than her packing. She had brought three dresses, two notebooks and one spectacularly impractical pair of heels. Her phone lit up. Alessia: Have you packed anything scandalous? Charlotte photographed the shoes. Alessia replied: Those are a health-and-safety incident.

Max, added to the conversation without warning, wrote: I have booked dinner. Wear something you can walk in. Charlotte smiled at the screen. The delicious thing about going back was that neither of them was asking her to become somebody else. They were simply expecting her to arrive.

“Any liquids?” the officer asked.

“Only a dangerous amount of optimism.”

He did not smile. Charlotte had been in meetings all morning; she had run out of the kind of confidence that made jokes land with strangers.

She set her bag on the conveyor belt and watched it disappear into the scanner. Somewhere beyond the glass and fluorescent lighting lay France, the sea, Villa Aurelia, and two people she had spent three weeks trying not to miss quite so extravagantly.

She had failed.

Her presentation for Hartwell House had finished at eleven. The Georgian townhouse commission was real now, not a hopeful conversation or a flattering promise. She had won the room over with a plan that respected the old bones of the building while giving its future occupants somewhere to live rather than merely pose. She had answered every question without apologising for knowing the answer.

Afterwards, one of the clients had said, “You seem very sure of yourself, Miss Bennett.”

“I've spent years becoming sure of my work,” Charlotte had replied. “It would be rather wasteful not to use it.”

Lucy, who had been waiting with celebratory coffee, had called that a devastatingly elegant way of telling a wealthy man to stop testing her.

Now, in the airport queue, Charlotte felt far less elegant. She had changed out of her presentation heels in a taxi, smudged the corner of a sketch with a pastry, and checked her phone twelve times in six minutes.

A message from Alessia arrived as if summoned by sheer impatience.