The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 214

The Smell of Rebuilding

HANNAH’S POV.

The warehouse had a smell now.

Not bad. Not the type of smell that makes you wrinkle your nose and go looking for the source. It was the smell of work. Fabric sizing and chalk dust and the faint sweetness of the steamer Priya ran every morning on the toiles and underneath all of that, coffee. Always coffee. At any given hour of the day there was at least one person in the kitchen corner making coffee and if you asked them if they wanted some they would say yes before you even finished the question because everyone in that warehouse was running on somewhere between four and six hours of sleep and pure collective stubbornness.

Including me.

I want to be honest about what those first ten days looked like because I think sometimes people tell the story of a comeback and they make it sound like passion alone carries you through. Like the motivation is so strong that it overrides everything and you float through it on some kind of beautiful creative high. That is not entirely untrue. There were genuinely beautiful moments. There were afternoons where the light came through the high windows at exactly the right angle and fell across a piece of fabric I had been wrestling with for hours and suddenly I could see what it wanted to be and my hand would move before my brain caught up and it was the closest thing to magic I have ever experienced in a professional setting.

But there were also mornings where I got to the warehouse at seven and stood in front of the wall and felt completely and utterly empty. Where nothing came. Where I would stand there with the pencil in my hand like it had forgotten what it was for and the wall just stared back at me and all I could think about was the archive room and the photographs and everything that was gone. Those mornings existed too and I think pretending they did not would be disrespectful to everyone who pushed through them alongside me.

On those mornings I would make myself a cup of very strong coffee, sit down at the worktable, and open the small notebook I had started keeping by my bed. Not a sketchbook. Just a regular lined notebook where I wrote things down at night. Stories Aunt Adele had told me over the months. The way she apparently used to hum while she worked. The fact that her favourite colour was a very specific shade of dusty rose that Adele had described to me once in such careful detail that I had eventually mixed a paint sample to match it just to see it.

That notebook was the archive that could not burn. And on the empty mornings it was what I came back to.

By day ten we had sixteen completed pieces and twenty-two more at various stages of construction. Sandra had sourced replacement fabric from three different suppliers, two of whom had offered us priority processing when they heard about the fire and what we were trying to do, which I was deeply grateful for even if Sandra had delivered the news of their cooperation in her usual manner, which was to say she had set the fabric swatches on the table in front of me and said “suppliers have come through, timelines are workable” in the same tone you might use to announce that the weather was unremarkable. But I had been working with Sandra long enough to know that coming through on fabric sourcing in ten days under these conditions was, for her, practically a standing ovation.

I told her so.

She said, “Don’t make it weird, Hannah.”

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