Chapter Thirteen
Lucy
I laid the notebooks out on the floor in order, one through thirty-one, in a long black row from the drafting table to the door, like a timeline you could walk.
It took a while. My hands weren’t steady.
Number one was soft as a glove, the corners gone round, the napkin from our wedding still taped inside the cover.
Number thirty-one was barely broken in—the fire station, mostly, and a few pages of Juniper asleep.
The ones in between were the last ten years of my life, and I’d never once seen them all lying down together.
Then I tore the four magazines apart.
I didn’t cut them. I should have cut them. I tore the pages out along the staples, one by one, and set each one on the floor above the notebook it came from.
The Glenbrook library, Kline’s signature north-light library, went above #22.
I found the page in under a minute: 4/2/18—library, N wall, final, with the tall windows and the ladder rail, exactly as Owen built it.
The powder room went above #20: 11/6/17—tile.
GREEN. Not sage. Not mint. GREEN. The great room went above #1 and #19, both, because it started on the napkin taped inside the cover of #1 and ended in #19 with dimensions.
Then the Sterling House pages.
The library went above #22, too, beside its sister.
3/26/18—library, scheme C. All glass. Gorgeous.
Freezing. NO. I’d crossed it out with one diagonal line.
They’d used it anyway. They’d even kept my note to myself in the margin, and the line of the window mullions, the slight unevenness where my ruler had slipped.
The guest room went above #27. 3/9/21, 2:40 a.m.—room for the Mammoth site. Bed in the wall. Window seat deep enough to sleep in. The bar went beside it. 3/11/21—banquette, 5th try. FINALLY.
I sat back on my heels in the middle of the floor.
Every one of them matched. Not resembled. Not was inspired by. Matched. Line for line, proportion for proportion, and above every one of them, in my own capitals, a date.
Juniper came and lay down across notebooks #8 through #11 and sighed. I didn’t have the heart to move her.
I picked up my phone. I looked at Rhys’s name for a long time. Then I scrolled past it and pressed the one below it, because the alphabet is kind sometimes.
She picked up on the second ring. “It’s nine forty on a Tuesday. Either somebody’s dead or somebody’s getting sued.”
“Cilla.”
A pause. I heard her put something down. When she spoke again, her voice had changed; it had gone level and careful, the voice she used on the phone with clients.
“What happened?”
“Have you seen Alpine Living? The September issue?”
“I don’t read magazines about people’s second homes, Lucy. It gives me hives.”
“Margot Kline is on the cover. In my great room.” I heard my own voice go thin. “And inside there are three renderings of the new brand, the city hotels, and they’re my drawings, Cil. From my notebooks. From 2018 and 2021. One of them still has my handwriting on it.”
Silence.
“Your handwriting,” Cilla said.
“North light here. In the margin. In pencil. They didn’t even erase it.”
“Are the notebooks with you?”
“They’re on the floor. The dog’s on four of them.”
“Don’t touch anything else. Don’t call anybody. Don’t post anything. Don’t call Rhys.” I heard keys. “I’m getting in the car.”
“Cilla, it’s three hours—”
“It’s three hours and ten minutes if I stop for gas, and I’m not stopping for gas.”
* * *
She arrived at twenty to one, in a black Volvo, with her reading glasses on top of her head and a canvas tote in each hand. One held a laptop, a legal pad and a digital camera. The other held a box of archival sleeves and a pair of white cotton gloves.
“You said handwriting,” she said. “I brought gloves.”
We’d shared a terrible apartment on Dwight Way when she was at Berkeley Law and I was in the architecture studio across campus, and in the fourteen years since, I had never once seen Priscilla Tran hurry.
She didn’t hurry now. She stood in the doorway in her trench coat and looked at the long black row of notebooks on the floor, and the magazine pages laid above them like captions, and the dog.
Her eyes went past all of it to the drafting table, to the fire station elevations taped there under the lamp.
“You’re working again,” she said.
“It’s a firehouse. It’s pro bono.”
“It’s drawing, Lucy. On a table. With the light on.” She said it the way she’d say a verdict. “I haven’t seen you do that since Dwight Way.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything, and she didn’t make me.
“Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay. Walk me through it.”
I walked her through it. She knelt on the floorboards in her good slacks and put the gloves on and turned every page I showed her by the very corner.
She photographed each match twice, once close, once wide, with the notebook number in the frame.
She asked for the loupe. When she got to north light here, she looked at it for a long time, and then she looked at the notebook, and then at me.
“Same h,” she said.
“My mother taught me that h.”
“It’s a very distinctive h.” She sat back on her heels. “Okay. I’m going to ask you some questions, and I need you to answer them like I’m opposing counsel. No stories. Just yes or no.”
“Okay.”
“Were you ever an employee of Sterling Resorts or any Sterling entity?”
“No.”
“Ever on payroll? W-2? 1099? Ever receive a paycheck, a stipend, a per diem, a consulting fee?”
“No.”
“Did you ever invoice them?”
“No.”
“Did you have a Sterling email address? A desk at HQ? A badge?”
“I had a parking spot at Glenbrook. It said OWNER’S WIFE. Somebody on the grounds crew painted it.”
She wrote that down. I don’t know why that made me want to laugh, but it did, and then it made me want to do something else, and I pressed my lips together until it passed.
“Who decided what the rooms looked like?”
“I did.”
“Did anyone at the company ever change a drawing of yours? Sit down with you and design something together?”
“Rhys changed the number of rooms. Margot changed the budget. Nobody ever changed the drawings.” I looked at the floor. “Nobody ever looked at them long enough to change them.”
Cilla nodded slowly. She took off the gloves, one finger at a time, and set them on her knee.
“Then here’s what you probably have,” she said.
“Copyright attaches the second you put pencil on paper. You don’t have to register it, you don’t have to put a little c in a circle on it, you don’t have to do anything.
It’s yours. The only way a company owns what you draw is if you’re their employee drawing it as part of your job, or if you sign something in writing that gives it to them.
You were never their employee. And if you never signed anything—”
“So—”
“So every page on this floor belongs to you. Every line. It always has.” She tapped the Sterling House library with one finger. “And if those three renderings are in a glossy magazine, you can bet they’re in the deck Summit Ridge used to price this deal. Probably more of them. A lot more.”
“Is that bad?”
She actually laughed, a short dry sound.
“For you? No. For Summit Ridge? Lucy, private-equity firms don’t buy hotels.
They buy brands. Their lenders are going to want a schedule of every piece of intellectual property the brand is built on, with a clean chain of title on every line.
And the whole look of this brand, the thing they’re selling, is built on drawings Sterling doesn’t own and never licensed.
” She took her glasses off her head and folded them.
“That’s not a hiccup. That’s a hole in the middle of a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And you’re standing in it.”
I looked down at the row of notebooks. At number one, soft as a glove. At the dog, asleep across a year of my life.
“I don’t want money,” I said.
“I didn’t say anything about what you want. We’ll get there. Tonight I’m telling you what you have.” She picked up the legal pad. “Does Rhys know?”
“I don’t know.” My throat closed on it. “That’s the worst part, Cil. I don’t know. And I don’t know which answer would be worse.”
She didn’t say anything to that. She reached over and squeezed my ankle, once, hard, which is the most physical affection Priscilla Tran has ever shown another human being. Then she uncapped her pen.
“One more question. It’s the one they’ll ask first, and it’s the only one that really matters.” She looked at me over the top of the legal pad, steady as a level. “Did you ever sign anything giving Sterling your drawings?”
“Think about it before you answer. Really think. Closing papers on the lodges. Investor documents. Anything Rhys ever slid across the kitchen counter with a sticky arrow on it and said sign here, babe, it’s nothing.”
I thought about it. I made myself. Ten years of papers.
Tax returns, which I signed at the counter without reading, like every wife I knew.
Loan papers for the house. Birthday cards.
The form that let the vet keep Juniper overnight when she ate a sock.
I went through all of it, year by year, the way I’d go through a building room by room looking for a leak.
There was nothing. There had never been anything.
I looked at the thirty-one notebooks. Ten years. Four lodges. Every room.
“Nobody ever asked me to,” I said. “Nobody thought they were worth anything.”