For seven years, I had worked at Crescent Design Studio. I started as a project coordinator, then senior coordinator, then lead project manager. By the time I got married, nearly every major project in our office passed through my desk at some point: contracts, client revisions, permit schedules, engineering approvals, budget changes, vendor deadlines. Nothing glamorous — just hundreds of small details that became expensive when someone forgot one.
Gregory Lawson, Crescent’s founder, understood that. His son Tate did not.
Tate became my supervisor three months before my wedding. Within a week, the atmosphere changed. He stopped inviting me to planning meetings. He canceled training sessions I had scheduled. He called documentation “busywork.” When a client praised a system I had built, Tate smiled and said, “My department has been modernizing.” My department. I noticed. I kept working.
Then came my wedding day. Kieran and I had chosen a small church outside downtown. Nothing extravagant — close friends, family, flowers everywhere because my mother insisted weddings needed “something alive in every photograph.”