Chapter Fourteen
Rhys
I answered it.
“Where are you?” he said. No hello.
“Incline. Garage. I’m about to go up.”
“Don’t. Stay in the car. Are you alone?”
“Dev, what’s—”
“Are you alone, Rhys?”
I looked around. Concrete pillars. A row of company cars. A maintenance guy with a mop bucket at the far end, singing to himself in Spanish. “Yeah.”
“Okay.” I heard him breathe out, and I heard a door close on his end. “Our general counsel got a letter at six o’clock last night. By email and by courier, both. From a lawyer in the city named Priscilla Tran.”
The name meant nothing for a second. Then it meant something. A woman at our wedding in a gray silk dress who hadn’t danced. A lawyer. A friend of Lucy’s from Berkeley.
“She represents Lucy Hart Sterling,” Dev said.
“My wife.”
“Your wife.” He let that sit. “It’s eleven pages, plus exhibits.
The exhibits are photographs. Notebook numbers, page numbers, dates in the corner in your wife’s handwriting.
Our people pulled the deck overnight and matched it.
Section four. The library, the lobby, the guest room, the bar, the stair.
Every sketch on every design page. Fourteen of them.
Every one is a drawing out of one of your wife’s notebooks, dated between 2017 and 2021. ”
I was holding the steering wheel with my free hand. I hadn’t noticed taking hold of it.
“The letter says she’s the sole author and the sole copyright owner,” Dev went on, very evenly, the way I imagine surgeons talk.
“It says she was never an employee of any Sterling entity, never paid, never signed an assignment, never granted a license. It says any use of those drawings by Sterling House is unauthorized, and it very politely requests that we tell them what we intend to do about it. It’s the most polite thing I’ve ever read that could cost me four hundred million dollars. ”
“Dev—”
“So I’m going to ask you one question, and I need a straight answer.” A pause. “Did you know your wife owns your design?”
I opened my mouth.
What came out was the first half of a sentence I’d been saying for ten years. “The drawings are for the—”
I stopped.
For. I heard it as it left me. The drawings were for Sterling.
They’d never been by Sterling. There’d never been a Sterling that could hold a pencil.
There’d been Lucy at the kitchen table at two in the morning, and me asleep upstairs, and in the morning a finished room waiting on the counter next to the coffee like something the fairies left.
“She’s my wife,” I said.
“That isn’t a document, Rhys.”
“We never—it never came up. Nobody thought—”
“Nobody thought,” Dev said. “Okay. That’s honest. I’ll give you that. It’s also exactly what our lawyers are afraid of.”
“Did she tell you she was doing this?”
“No.”
“You didn’t know your own wife had hired a lawyer?”
“We haven’t—” I rubbed my eyes. “She’s been in Truckee since June. We haven’t really talked since June.”
Dev was quiet on the line for a second. “Since the party.”
“Since the party.”
“Huh,” he said, and that was all he said, and it was worse than anything else he could have said.
Down at the end of the row, the maintenance guy finished his song and started another one.
“Here’s where we are,” Dev said. “Our investment committee pulled Sterling House off Monday’s agenda. The lenders are frozen. Diligence is frozen. We’re pausing.”
“Pausing.”
“I’m not walking. Not yet. I like you, I like the brand, and I love that library. But I can’t close on a brand whose entire look belongs to somebody who isn’t at the table. Nobody can. The lenders would laugh me out of the building.”
“I’ll fix it,” I said. It came out automatically, the way bless you does. “I’ll talk to her. Today. I’ll drive up there right now—”
“There’s more.”
I shut my eyes.
“While our counsel had the file open, they pulled every agreement that touches the brand’s IP. For the schedule. That includes Margot’s employment agreement. The new one. May.”
“Her retention package.”
“That’s what you called it. Exhibit B calls it something else.
” I heard paper move. “Four percent of Sterling House, vesting at close. Title: Design Co-Founder. There’s a paragraph describing her ‘foundational creative authorship of the Sterling House design direction.’ Your signature is on the last page. May nineteenth.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Did you read Exhibit B?”
The garage was very quiet. Somewhere above me, an elevator was moving in its shaft, a soft steady hum.
“No,” I said.
“No.”
“It was a Tuesday. I had a board call at two and a flight at four-thirty. Her assistant brought it in with the arrows on it. Sign here, initial here. Margot handles—” I heard it. I heard exactly what it sounded like. “Margot handles the contracts.”
“Apparently she handled that one.” Dev’s voice wasn’t unkind.
It was patient, like a man explaining a bill to somebody who couldn’t read it.
“Our lawyers would like to know what, exactly, she co-founded. They’d also like to know who, on your design team, drew those fourteen pages. Can you give me a name?”
“The renderers in Denver—”
“The renderers in Denver cleaned them up. Our people talked to them at seven this morning. They were sent scans. They didn’t draw anything. Give me a name, Rhys. One designer.”
I sat there with the phone against my ear and the steering wheel under my hand and went through ten years of the Sterling Design Team in my head, every press release, every plaque, every tour. I’d said those three words so many times they’d worn smooth, like a stone in a pocket.
There was one name. There had only ever been one name.
“Where’s Margot?” Dev asked.
“Aspen. Hospitality conference. She’s on a panel.”
“What’s the panel called?”
I closed my eyes. “‘Design as Destiny.’”
Dev was quiet for a long moment. Then he made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Of course it is.”
“Dev, I didn’t know.”
“I believe you. I do. That’s not the same as it being okay.” A chair creaked on his end. “Find out what’s true, Rhys. All of it. Before my lawyers do, because they’re very good and they don’t like surprises. Call me when you know.”
He hung up.
* * *
I didn’t go upstairs.
I sat in the truck with the engine off and opened the contract on my phone, because of course I had it, it had been sitting in my email since May.
I scrolled past the salary and the bonus and the non-compete to the back, to the exhibit I’d never opened.
Four percent. Design Co-Founder. Foundational creative authorship.
My own signature at the bottom, in blue, a little rushed, the tail of the g flying off the line because I’d been standing up to leave while I signed it.
I thought about the September issue. Margot’s team had sent a box of twenty copies to the house the week it came out, with a sticky note on top: Great press for SH!
!—M. I’d flipped through it at the kitchen island with a coffee.
I’d looked at the cover. I’d looked at the photographs of Glenbrook and thought how good the light was.
I had turned right past the Sterling House pages without stopping, because I’d already seen them in August, and I’d already decided not to hear the wrong note.
I’d typed Lucy a text that morning. Did you see the Alpine Living piece? I’d looked at it for a while and deleted it, because we were giving her space.
Margot had told me to give her space.
I called Lucy. It rang four times and went to voicemail. Hi, it’s Lucy. I’m probably up a ladder. She’d recorded that greeting in the car years ago, laughing, with Juniper barking in the back seat. I’d heard it a thousand times. I’d never once listened to it.
“It’s me,” I said. “Dev called. I know about the letter. I—” My voice did something I didn’t expect. “I didn’t know, Luce. I’m not saying that so it’s okay. I just didn’t. Can you call me? Please.”
I hung up. I texted the same thing, shorter. It sat there on the screen, delivered, unread.
The garage filled up around me. Car doors. Heels on concrete. Somebody from finance waved at me through the windshield and I lifted two fingers off the wheel like it was any Thursday. At 8:40 my assistant texted to ask if I was coming up for the nine o’clock. I didn’t answer.
I kept thinking about that night in August, parked across the road from Owen’s shop, watching her through the window.
The pencil lifting a little early at the end of every stroke.
A little flick. I’d seen it in the deck that morning, and I’d seen it in her hand that night, and I had sat in the dark with both of those pictures in my head and never once let them touch.
I’d told her in June that her scans were safe in the archive. I’d said it like a man bragging about a lock he’d never tried.
At 8:51 the phone rang again. Dev.
I picked up. He didn’t say hello this time either.
“One more thing. The scans in your archive were uploaded by Margot’s assistant. The folder’s called ‘LH Moleskines.’ She knew exactly whose they were.”