Chapter Eighteen
Lucy
The elevator at Summit Ridge Capital went up twenty-two floors so smoothly that my ears popped before my stomach noticed.
“Breathe,” Cilla said, without looking at me. She was watching the numbers climb, her briefcase in one hand and a paper cup of green tea in the other, in a navy suit so sharp it could have filed a motion by itself.
“I am breathing.”
“You’re breathing like a woman in a horror movie who’s just heard something in the basement.”
“I heard something in the basement. It was five million dollars.”
The number had arrived by email on Monday, formal this time, on letterhead, with a meeting invitation attached.
Cilla had called me the second she read it and said, Don’t decide anything until you’re in the room.
I’d finally deleted the draft that said Tell them yes on Tuesday morning at four, after a night of lying on the daybed with my mother’s question going around my head like a moth around a lamp.
When did you stop? I didn’t have the answer yet.
I only knew I couldn’t sign away the question before I found it.
The doors opened on white oak floors and a view that made you understand why people pay for views. The whole Bay spread out beyond the glass, gray-blue and glittering, the Bay Bridge running off toward Oakland with its lights still on in the fog.
A young man with a tablet walked us to a conference room at the corner. Long walnut table. Twelve leather chairs. A tray of pastries nobody was going to eat. And at the far end, already seated, her back to the view like she owned it, was Margot Kline.
She rose when we came in. Cream silk blouse, tailored black trousers, her hair down for once. She held out her hand across the table.
“Lucy. Thank you for coming all this way.”
I looked at the hand. I thought about the wine she’d brought to my studio door in August, the way her eyes had moved along the row of notebooks. You should keep them somewhere safe.
I didn’t take it. She withdrew it without a flicker, as if she’d only been reaching for her water glass.
“Cilla Tran,” Cilla said, and shook it instead, briskly, like she was checking it for weapons.
Dev Kapoor came in behind us with a silver-haired man in a charcoal suit, Summit’s general counsel, and a heavyset man in a bow tie who turned out to be Sterling Resorts’ outside lawyer.
Dev shook my hand with both of his. He had kind, tired eyes and a gray streak in his beard, and he looked at me like I was a person, which, that morning, felt like a lot.
“Mrs. Sterling. I’m glad you’re here.”
“Hart,” I said. “It’s Lucy Hart, for this.”
He didn’t blink. “Ms. Hart.”
The chair at the head of the table stayed empty. There was a place card in front of it, printed, not painted: RHYS STERLING, STERLING RESORTS. The coffee cup at that setting was turned upside down on its saucer.
“He’s running late,” the man in the bow tie said. “Weather in Reno.”
Of course he was.
Summit’s counsel slid a bound document across the walnut to Cilla, and a second copy to me. Settlement and Assignment Agreement. It was forty pages. Cilla opened it to the term sheet on page two without touching the rest, the way you’d skip straight to the end of a mystery.
“I’ll summarize for efficiency,” the general counsel said pleasantly.
“Summit Ridge and Sterling Resorts propose a one-time payment of five million dollars to Ms. Hart in exchange for a full assignment of all rights, title and interest in any drawings, sketches, notebooks, renderings and related materials connected to Sterling Resorts or Sterling House, past or future. A standard mutual non-disclosure agreement covering the terms and the underlying dispute. And design credit, for all existing and future Sterling properties, to remain ‘Sterling Design Team,’ consistent with established brand practice.”
“In perpetuity,” Cilla said, reading.
“In perpetuity.”
I looked down at the number. Five, and then a comma, and then all those zeros standing in a line like people waiting for a bus.
I had closed Hart & Pine in 2017 with eleven thousand dollars in the business account.
For nine years I’d paid six hundred dollars a month on a studio I didn’t use, out of a checking account Rhys never looked at, and every month I’d felt a little guilty about it, like it was a pack of cigarettes I was hiding.
Five million dollars. For the stair with the window seat. For the library with the north light. For the napkin.
“It’s a very generous offer,” Margot said, gently. “I pushed for it, actually.”
Cilla didn’t look up. “Did you.”
“I did. I think it’s important that Lucy be recognized for her contribution.
” Margot folded her hands on the table. “She’s always had such a beautiful eye.
Honestly, I think this lets everybody move forward with dignity.
Lucy gets to go back to her painting, and her little fire station project—which I hear is lovely—and she never has to think about any of this again. ”
Her little fire station. It had an apparatus bay deep enough for two engines and a ladder truck, and bunk rooms for twelve firefighters on rotating shifts. The trusses were being delivered on Thursday.
“And the name?” I said.
Margot tilted her head. “The name?”
“On the rooms. It says Sterling Design Team forever.”
“That’s standard, Lucy. Nobody puts an individual’s name on a hotel. Guests don’t care who picked the tile.”
“I didn’t pick the tile,” I said. “I designed the bathroom the tile is in. And the building the bathroom’s in.”
Dev made a small movement in his chair. Summit’s counsel wrote something down.
Cilla closed the document. “My client and I would like a moment.”
“Of course.”
Nobody moved to leave. Cilla turned her chair toward me and lowered her voice, and the rest of the table became very interested in their pastries.
“Lucy,” she said. “This is a real number. I want you to hear me say that. It’s real, and it’s now, and there are people I’ve represented who would have cut off a finger for it. If you take it, you’re secure for the rest of your life. You never have to read another comment section.”
“And if I don’t take it?”
“Then it gets long. And expensive. And ugly. And we’re going to have to prove things that feel obvious to you and me, in front of people who are paid a great deal not to find them obvious.”
I looked across the table at the upside-down coffee cup at the empty place. I looked at Margot’s folded hands. I thought about my mother’s fingertip on the corner of the reading-loft drawing. L.H. The little looping letters. Then the clean white corners, one after another, where I’d stopped.
“Cilla,” I said. “I didn’t come here for the money.”
“I know that.”
“I don’t think they do.”
I turned my chair back to the table.
“No,” I said.
The man in the bow tie actually leaned forward, as if he’d misheard. “I’m sorry?”
“No, thank you. I won’t sign it.” My voice came out steadier than my hands, which I kept flat on the walnut where everyone could see them.
“I don’t want five million dollars to disappear.
I don’t want to be a line on a term sheet that says Sterling Design Team.
I drew those rooms. I want my name on the rooms.”
The room went quiet enough to hear the heating come on.
“Lucy.” Margot’s voice had a tender, patient edge, the voice you use with a child who’s knocked her own tower over. “Nobody’s saying you didn’t contribute—”
The door opened.
Rhys came in with rain on the shoulders of his coat and his hair wet, a little out of breath, as if he’d taken the stairs from the lobby. He looked at the table, at the bound documents, at the empty chair with his name on it. Then he looked at me.
“Sorry,” he said. “Reno was fogged in. I drove.”
“We were just finishing up,” the man in the bow tie said. “Ms. Hart has declined the proposal as drafted. We can discuss amendments—”
“Amendments to what?” Rhys didn’t sit down. He stood behind his chair with both hands on the back of it. “What’s in it?”
Summit’s counsel read him the terms again, more briefly. The number. The assignment. The NDA. The credit.
He listened with his head down. When the lawyer got to non-disclosure, his hands tightened on the leather.
“No NDA,” he said.
The bow tie turned in his chair. “Rhys, that’s standard language in any—”
“I don’t care if it’s standard. She doesn’t sign anything that says she can’t talk about her own work.” He lifted his head and looked at Dev, not at his own lawyer, not at Margot. “She’s been quiet for ten years. That was my doing. I’m not paying five million dollars to make it permanent.”
Dev watched him for a long moment. Then he nodded, very slightly, and wrote something on his legal pad.
I didn’t look at Rhys. I couldn’t. If I looked at him, I’d feel something, and I needed every bit of me for the next five minutes.
Margot hadn’t moved. Her folded hands had gone white across the knuckles, but her face was perfectly composed, the face from the magazine cover, the visionary behind Sterling’s look.
“Fine,” she said. “No NDA. No money. No credit agreement. Let’s be clear about what that means.
” She turned to me. “You’re claiming you created the Sterling design.
We have a team. We had meetings. We had mood boards, site visits, a whole process in 2017 and 2018.
And we have a stack of notebooks with dates written in them by hand—by you—that you could have filled in any time in the last ten years. ”
“They’re dated,” I said. “Every page.”
“Anybody can write a date, Lucy.” She smiled, and it didn’t reach anything. “You want your name on the rooms? Then prove the drawings came first.”