A Room Without Visitors

By 2018 we had hotel work, commissioned films and licensed audio used by visitors and local institutions. Erin joined as a developer to make delivery more dependable. She was twenty-eight and refused to build a complicated application when a clear accessible page would serve the listener better. We spent a week testing on poor connections and old phones. At the end she invited me to hear a band, then pulled me into a dance I had not planned to survive gracefully. Erin said I looked better when I stopped rehearsing. I asked whether that was advice or a compliment. She said I could work with both.

Alice was thirty-one, a museum curator with a talent for asking what a piece of work would mean after the launch photographs were taken. Her commission gave the studio a new direction: material people could listen to from anywhere, with clear rights, credited creators and updates somebody was actually responsible for making. We became friends through long discussions in quiet rooms. One evening she put down her notes and asked me to dinner instead of another meeting. Alice was calm about it, but the slight color in her face made the invitation feel more intimate than any extravagant speech.

Hana made ceramics and taught small classes. She was twenty-seven, patient with clay and much less patient with people who described creative work as a hobby until it became profitable. We produced a film about her process under terms she helped define. After the final shoot she guided my hands through a hopeless attempt at making a bowl. Her hands were warm over mine; her laughter came close to my ear. The bowl collapsed. Hana said this gave us an excuse for another lesson. I accepted with considerably less dignity than I had brought to the studio that morning.

We now had twelve women whose interest had moved beyond professional approval: Tui, Rose, Kate, Zoe, Jess, Meg, Iris, Beth, Ruby, Erin, Alice and Hana. The ease with which I could list their names frightened me. Remembering them was not the same thing as knowing how to treat them. Kate wanted a weekend I kept postponing. Rose wanted an answer about whether dinner was becoming something more. Tui wanted work decisions protected from whatever I eventually chose. I could charm a room more easily than I could answer a single woman’s direct question.

The business’s first outside investment bought twenty percent in 2018. A later employee pool reduced the founders’ combined eighty percent to seventy-two: my forty-eight and Tui’s twenty-four, alongside employees’ eight and the investor’s twenty. We kept production staff paid, credited contributors and agreed explicitly on each license. Annual revenue passed two million four hundred thousand dollars in 2019. Operating profit before financing and tax was around three hundred sixty thousand. I bought a modest apartment with a view of the harbor and finally replaced the sofa on which I had returned to my younger life.

The opportunity everyone wanted me to accept was a visitor center tied to a long expensive lease. In the old life I had seen a similar venture fail after international travel collapsed. I declined. Instead we put part of the profit into cash reserves and work for clients who needed learning, interpretation and communication regardless of travel. Tui did not accept the decision because I looked certain. She made me show that the alternative could earn money before 2020 as well as survive something I could not sensibly explain. Her questions saved us from treating a warning as a business plan.

Kate came to the apartment carrying ingredients and a bottle of wine. We cooked together while I tried not to reveal that I had once spent years imagining a room like it. She wore a soft gray top, her hair loosely tied, and looked more at home than I had allowed myself to feel. After dinner she moved beside me on the sofa and asked why I sometimes looked at ordinary evenings as though they might disappear. I told her I had wasted too many of them. Kate kissed me slowly, then said I could begin wasting fewer by putting tomorrow’s papers away.

I did. We stayed beside the window as the harbor lights trembled on the water. I knew that a difficult year was approaching. I could prepare a company, hold reserves and explain risk. I could not make the people I loved pass through it untouched. That was the difference between remembering a decade and owning one. Kate fell asleep with her head against my shoulder. I sat quietly, letting an evening count as something valuable without requiring it to become proof that my prediction had succeeded.