Marco looked down. “Gigi.”
“What is this place?”
Marco leaned against his desk. “A return-to-work studio.”
“For women?”
“Mostly.”
“Why?”
He started to speak, but I held up a hand. “No. First, tell me why every woman online talks about you like you’re some secret.”
The color drained from his face. “Gigi.”
“One said her husband doesn’t know she comes here, Marco.”
“Her husband thinks she’s too old to work,” he said.
I went still.
“Another is rebuilding after a divorce,” he continued. “Another hasn’t told her family she’s applying anywhere because she’s terrified she’ll fail.”
I stared at him. “Their stories weren’t yours to tell me.”
Marco nodded. “No.”
“But yours was,” I muttered. That landed. He looked away. I stepped closer.
“I’ve spent three years believing my husband worked at a hospital.”
“I consult with one,” he acknowledged. “Their social work department refers women here when they’re trying to return to work after years of caregiving.”
“That’s not what I believed, Marco.”
“I know.”
“Do I?” I pointed toward the office. “I had to book an appointment under my maiden name to find out what my own husband does all day.”
Marco’s face dropped. That finally hurt him. Good. Because I was done pretending this was just a misunderstanding.
Then my eyes landed on something beside his computer. A small plastic token. Blue. Worn smooth. I’d seen it before. It used to sit in a bowl at home with loose change.
“What is that?”
Marco followed my gaze. He blinked, caught off guard. He picked up the token. For the first time since I’d walked in, he looked frightened. And exposed.
“Gigi.”
“What?”
He turned the little token between his fingers. “This is why I started all of it.” He looked down at the little blue disk. “My mother used to take me to a laundromat after school,” he revealed. “My father left when I was eleven. Mom had been home with me for years, so suddenly she needed a job.”
He swallowed back a breath. “She went to an interview and came back crying.”
I sat slowly. “What happened?”
“The interviewer asked what she’d been doing all those years.”
“What did your mother say?”
Marco gave a humorless laugh. “She said she’d been raising me. They asked what she’d been doing professionally.”
My anger softened enough to let me hear him.
“Afterward,” he continued, “we sat in that laundromat while the dryers turned. Mom kept saying she had nothing to put on a résumé.” His voice dropped. “And I remember thinking, but she does everything. I just didn’t know the words yet, Gigi.” Bills, school, appointments, meals, repairs, his mother had handled it all.
Marco held up the token. “Years later, I did.”
I looked around his office again. The clothes. The camera. The mirror. And the measuring tape. None of it looked suspicious anymore. It looked purposeful. And somehow that made what came next harder.
“Do you know what I did last night?” I asked.
Marco closed his hand around the token. “Gigi.”
“I cooked dinner.”
“I know.”
“No, you know there was dinner.” I stood. “I set the table. Lit candles. And waited.”
He looked down.
“I reheated the sauce at nine, Marco. At ten, I blew out one candle.”
“Gigi, I’m sorry.”
“At eleven, I put everything away.” He started toward me. I held up a hand. “You spend your whole day teaching women that their time counts.” Marco stopped. My voice cracked. “When did mine stop counting?”
“Gigi, I’m sorry.”
He had no answer. Good. I needed him to hear. After a long silence, he said, “It never did.”
“Then why did I have to make an appointment to meet my husband?”
That broke something in him. Marco sat down. “When I started this place, people made jokes.”
“What kind?”
“That I dressed women for a living. That no man should care this much about middle-aged women getting jobs.” He rubbed both hands over his face. “So I stopped explaining.”
“And then?”
“Then not explaining got easier.” There it was. Confidentiality had become secrecy. Secrecy had become habit. And habit had become a wall.
“I thought keeping work out of the house was protecting us, Gigi.”
“You weren’t keeping work out,” I cut in. He looked at me. “You were keeping me out,” I finished.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.