My Husband's Company Was Bought With My Dowry · Ava Sterling

Chapter 3: Ellis

The press preview was Wednesday at the King Street store, sixty people, doors at six.

I got there at four because somebody has to be there at four. The florist had brought scabiosa instead of the ranunculus and had cut everything to the same height, which makes a bowl look like a haircut, so I stood at the back counter and took forty stems apart and put them back together while the AV boy cursed at a projector.

At half past five Sloane came through in the emerald dress with a clipboard and said, "Oh, you're doing flowers, that's so sweet," and I said yes.

At six they let the room in.

* * *

The film ran eight minutes. It cost two hundred and ten thousand dollars and it is, I will say this, extremely good.

Black and white for the first two minutes. The van. A mill in Kortrijk with the light coming down through the roof glass onto a loom, and a Flemish man's hands on the selvedge. Gideon at thirty-six on a loading dock in Greenville with his sleeves rolled, looking like a man who has decided something.

Seven of them said no. The eighth gave me a corner by the register.

There is a shot at four minutes and eleven seconds of a woman's hands putting stems into a bowl. You cannot see her face. It is on screen for about two seconds and it is not captioned, and it is me, in the first store, in March of 2019.

At five-forty there is thirty seconds of water — a river the color of weak tea with a white boat on it and a man in a rubber apron on the deck. It is the Anclote, at the sponge docks in Tarpon Springs, and I shot it on my phone in 2019 standing on the seawall behind my father's freezer plant, and I sent it to Gideon because I thought the color was right for a bath towel.

The card under it in the film said: Sourcing trip, Mediterranean.

My father was not in the film. My father was in the ground in Tarpon Springs since March of 2023 and he had loved that film's first cut so much he watched it twice on a laptop with the sound up too loud, in a hospital bed, saying look at him go.

* * *

Then the candle.

Sloane took the stage with Gideon for the fragrance segment and put up a photograph of the new glass, and I did not understand what I was looking at for a full three seconds, which I think is a record for me.

It was our candle. The signature. Sixty-eight dollars, thirty-one percent of fragrance revenue, the one that has been in every gift guide since 2021. Mastic and orange leaf and wet stone and a black note underneath that our chemist calls tar and I call rope.

For eight years the label has said ELENI.

The label in the photograph said ELLIS.

"We're evolving the name," Sloane said. "Not the juice — the juice is untouched, I want to be really clear, we would never. But 'Eleni' has been a friction point in the European rollout, it's read as a person's name, it doesn't travel, and honestly at retail people mispronounce it and then they don't ask for it. 'Ellis' reads cleaner, it's ownable, and" — she looked at Gideon and did the small smile — "it happens to be Gideon's middle name, which we love."

Applause. Somebody said oh, that's lovely.

Gideon put his hand over his heart and did a small bow, gracious about it, a man accepting something he had not asked for.

Eleni Zervas is eighty-four years old. She has a kitchen in Tarpon Springs with a mastic tree in a pot by the back step and a jar of orange leaves on the sill and a hundred feet of tarred sponge rope in the shed that has not been on a boat since 1988. I built that candle out of her house. It took nine months and forty-one modifications and I paid the last four out of my own account because Marcus wouldn't code them.

* * *

The Q&A was at seven-fifteen.

A woman from a Charleston magazine, maybe thirty, raised her hand and turned around and found me at the side wall by the towel wall, and she was being generous. I want that on the record. She was trying to include me.

"Nora — what's it like being married to a founder?"

Sixty faces.

I opened my mouth, and Gideon leaned into the mic.

"It's like being married to a man who has strong opinions about grosgrain at two in the morning," he said, "and she'll tell you it's exhausting, and she'd be right."

The laugh was warm and it was long. The woman from the magazine wrote it down.

He held the mic out to me afterward, generously, an afterthought made public. "Nora. Come tell them about the candle. She's the nose in this family."

I came up. I said thank you. And because he had asked, and because it was the first question anyone had asked me in that store in a year, I said the true thing.

"It's named for my grandmother. Everything in it is from her house — the mastic tree by her step, the orange leaves she dries on the windowsill, and the rope. My family dove sponges out of Tarpon Springs for three generations, and tarred rope is what the boats smell like, and that's the black note under it that nobody can ever place."

There was a small sound in the room. The good sound. Two people had their phones up.

Gideon took the mic back, and he did it kindly, with a hand on my back.

"That's the lovely version," he said. "And I'm not going to be the man who ruins it. But the honest version is a lot less romantic — it came off a name list from an agency in Atlanta, we paid eleven thousand dollars for forty names, and Eleni was number nine." He smiled at me. "She's a storyteller. It's why the brand works."

The room laughed. It was affectionate. Several of them looked at me the way you look at a child who has said something charming and slightly untrue at a dinner party, and the woman from the magazine crossed out what she had written.

I stood there. I did not correct him. My hands were empty and visible and I smiled, because that is what my face does now, and Sloane started clapping and everyone joined in, and that is how the fragrance segment ended.

* * *

Lorraine found me at the coats.

"That was sweet, what you said." She patted my forearm twice. "You want to be careful with the sponge business, though. It's a fishing town, darling. People hear fish."

* * *

I did not open the release until eleven that night.

Gideon had gone to bed. The house on Legare was quiet in the way that big empty houses are, which is not quiet at all, and I sat at the kitchen island with the pendant light on and the PDF open, because a woman who cannot correct her husband in front of sixty people still has to be useful to somebody by the end of the day.

Four pages of release language. Releasor irrevocably waives, releases and discharges any and all claims to units, membership interests, profits interests, or economic rights in Merrow House LLC arising from or relating to any contribution of capital made by Releasor or on Releasor's behalf.

And then Exhibit A, which the lawyers had attached because lawyers attach everything, and which I do not believe Gideon ever read, because he had no reason to think anyone would send it to me.

A bank confirmation. Scanned, slightly crooked, a coffee ring on the top right corner.

VALUE DATE: 09/07/2018 ORIGINATOR: ZERVAS FAMILY HOLDINGS LLC BENEFICIARY: MERROW HOUSE LLC AMOUNT: USD 4,000,000.00 OBI: PROIKA — N.Z.

Proika. You would not know it unless you grew up with it. It is not a word my father used in English, ever, not once, because he thought it made us sound like we had just come off the boat.

It means dowry.

And under it, because Bregman Tao are thorough children who print everything, was the reconstructed capital ledger for the formation period. I ran my finger down it looking for the return transfer, the one that went back out to Kortrijk on the sixteenth, the one my husband had described to me in a hallway on Monday with his hands perfectly still.

There was no transfer out.

There was one more line, ten days later, and it read:

09/17/2018 — MEMBER CAPITAL CONTRIBUTION — G. E. MERROW — USD 4,000,000.00