2. Nolan
NOLAN
The trouble with Arielle Sutton is that she walks away.
She does it like she's been doing it her whole life — turning on the ball of one heel, lifting her champagne flute in a half-salute that lands somewhere between good night and go to hell, and disappearing into the crowd before I've finished my drink.
By the time I track her shoulder line across the rooftop, she's already wedged into a conversation with a woman from the city planning office, nodding seriously, like she didn't just call my entire portfolio a charity case in heels.
"Nolan." Phillip is at my elbow again, the older man with the watch, the one who fled the minute she opened her mouth. "Greenwood's looking for you. He wants to talk about the bridge financing before he flies out tomorrow."
"Tell him I'll find him."
"He's right there."
"And I said I'll find him."
Phillip blinks at me, which is fair. I don't usually brush off men holding nine figures of private capital. I usually wait until at least the second drink.
I make myself walk in the opposite direction. I shake hands with a state senator whose name I've forgotten and whose wife is talking to me about her son's college essays. I nod in the right places. I laugh once, on cue. I am, by every external measure, doing my job.
Internally I'm scanning the rooftop like a man who's lost his keys.
I find her near the orchids. She's leaning down to listen to someone shorter than her, a woman in a beaded jacket, and she's nodding the way she nodded at me — fully, without flinching, the way most people in this room have forgotten how to listen.
Her gold cuff catches the string lights when she lifts her glass.
I excuse myself mid-sentence. The senator's wife is still talking. I don't entirely care.
Halfway across the rooftop, I pull my phone out and thumb open a browser one-handed.
Arielle Sutton Halloran-Reyes. The firm's site loads first. Her bio photo is professional, severe — hair pulled back, no smile, the kind of headshot a woman takes when she's tired of being underestimated.
Below it: Senior Architect. Urban restoration and adaptive reuse.
Lead designer, Overtown Heritage Corridor proposal.
Lead designer, Pullman Row preservation, Chicago.
I scroll. I keep scrolling. There's an interview from two years ago in some architecture quarterly where she's quoted saying, A building is a promise to the people who'll still be there when the ribbon-cutting is over.
I read it twice. Then I lock the phone and put it back in my pocket like I haven't just spent ninety seconds doing research on a woman I met fourteen minutes ago.
This is not what I do.
I find her again near the bar. She's alone now, waiting for the bartender to finish with someone else's old-fashioned, and she's rolling her shoulders in that small private way people do when they think nobody's watching. I watch anyway.
"You're going to give yourself away," I say, sliding in beside her.
She doesn't turn. "Give what away, Mr. Ashford?"
"That you're tired."
Now she turns, and the look she gives me is something I'd pay good money to bottle. "I'm working."
"You're standing in three-inch heels on marble at a rooftop party that started at six. We're all working."
"Yes, but I imagine your feet hurt less, because nobody made you wear the heels."
"Fair." I lift two fingers at the bartender, who knows me. "What are you drinking?"
"Whatever's bubbly and nonalcoholic. I'm still working, remember."
"One San Pellegrino with lime," I tell the bartender. "And another of whatever I had earlier."
She watches me order. "You always pick up tabs at parties you're hosting?"
"I'm not hosting. I'm financing."
"Big difference?"
"About forty million dollars."
She huffs out a laugh, the first real one I've gotten from her since the pastelito line, and it lands somewhere in my chest that I haven't checked on in a while.
"Tell me something," I say. "If you hate luxury developers so much, why are you here?"
"I don't hate luxury developers."
"You implied my coffee was a war crime."
"I think your coffee can coexist with a bakery. That's the whole point. You can have your forty-million-dollar tower and leave the corner store standing. The math just has to be willing to be a little less greedy."
"The math is never less greedy. The math is the math."
"Then maybe you need a new mathematician."
"Are you applying?"
"I'm an architect. I don't do spreadsheets."
"Yes you do. You just call them site plans."
She actually smiles at that — small, reluctant, and gone in two seconds.
The bartender hands us our drinks, and she takes hers without looking at me, lime wedge floating on top.
She's holding the glass with both hands, which tells me more about her shift count this week than anything she's said out loud.
"You know what I think your problem is, Miss Sutton?"
"Please. Enlighten me."
"You walk into rooms like this expecting to be dismissed. So you swing first. It's effective. It's also exhausting."
She turns toward me fully now, and her eyes go a shade darker. "You don't know me."
"I read your Pullman Row write-up between the senator's wife and the bar."
"That's embarrassing for you."
"Deeply."
"And what's your verdict?"
"My verdict is that you're better than the people who hired you, and you already know it, and that's why you're standing at a bar at nine-thirty drinking soda water by yourself instead of working the room."
She doesn't answer for a beat. The jazz trio has shifted into something slower, a thing with brushes on a snare. Somebody near the railing laughs too loud at somebody else's joke.
"That was a lot of words to call me lonely, Mr. Ashford."
"I didn't call you lonely. I called you tired."
"Same thing, some nights."
It's the closest thing to a real sentence she's given me all evening, and she says it almost to her glass, like she didn't mean to let it out. Then she looks up at me, and whatever she sees on my face makes her square her shoulders again.
"It's been a long day," she says, brisk. "I have a flight in the morning."
"Cancel it."
"Excuse me?"
"Cancel it. Have dinner with me. There's a place six blocks from here that makes the only decent pastelitos south of your bakery, and I'd very much like to keep arguing with you somewhere I don't have to share you with the senator's wife."
She stares at me. I have, in my life, watched people stare at me for a great many reasons — fear, calculation, the slow recalibration of how much they think they can get out of a conversation.
This is none of those. This is a woman deciding something in real time, and I am, against every instinct I have ever trusted, holding my breath for the answer.
"Mr. Ashford?—"
"Nolan."
“Nolan.” Her glass meets the bar with a quiet tap. “If I say yes, I need you to understand it isn’t because you own the project. I need that understood.”
"Understood."
"And I'm not saying yes because you read my Pullman Row article."
"Also understood."
"I'm saying yes because I haven't eaten since the airport, and because nobody has argued with me on purpose in about three years, and because I'm going to regret this in the morning either way."
"That," I say, "is the most honest answer I've gotten at one of these things in a decade."
She picks up her clutch. She doesn't smile. But she doesn't walk away either.
"Lead the way, Mr. Ashford."
"Nolan."
"We'll see."