Chapter Twenty
Lucy
Juniper heard the truck before I did and was at the top of the stairs with her tail going before I’d put my pencil down.
Headlights swept across the north window and went dark. A door shut. Boots on Owen’s outside stairs, slower than usual, like whoever it was was carrying something heavy or afraid of what was at the top.
I opened the door before he could knock.
Rhys stood on the landing in his good coat with a fat brown accordion file under one arm and a single sheet of paper in his other hand. His hair was a mess. He looked like he’d been sitting on a floor for ten hours, which it turned out he had.
“It’s one in the morning,” I said.
“I know. I’m sorry. Jonah said you’d be awake.”
“Jonah doesn’t get a vote.”
“No.” He held out the piece of paper. “But I found something. I didn’t want to email it. I didn’t want it to come from a lawyer. I wanted to hand it to you.”
I didn’t take it right away. I looked at his face under the porch light, trying to read the pitch in it, the angle, the thing he wanted. I couldn’t find one. He just looked tired and sure.
I took the paper.
I read it on the landing, in the cold, in my socks. The header. The date. Tuesday, January 16, 2018, 10:52 PM. The architect’s question, short and harried, the way he always wrote. Lucy’s sketches from last spring and a few different notes floating around from your office. Which governs?
And under it, two lines from my husband.
Everything per Lucy’s sketches. She’s the designer, I’m just the guy with the money.
I read it again. Then I stepped back and held the door open wider, and he came in, and Juniper leaned against his legs so hard he had to put a hand on the wall.
“Where did you find it?”
“Old mailbox. There’s an archive under the lodge kitchen.” He set the accordion file on the table by the door. “I called the architect. He says he’ll testify. He says Margot never sent him a drawing in her life. Just spreadsheets.”
“Spreadsheets,” I repeated.
“Tile costs.”
I laughed. I didn’t mean to. It came out of me sharp and wet and too loud for one in the morning, and I put my hand over my mouth, and he watched me with his hands in his coat pockets like he didn’t know if he was allowed to take them out.
“Sit down,” I said. “You look like you’re going to fall over.”
He sat on the stool by the north window, the one my mother always takes. I sat back at the drafting table with the email flat in front of me under the lamp. I smoothed it with the side of my hand. My mother’s gesture. I noticed and didn’t stop.
“January 2018,” I said. “That was the week we framed the library.”
“I know.”
“We went up with a flashlight after the crew left. You kept knocking on the studs like they were going to tell you something. And I stood where the north windows were going to be and you said—” I stopped.
“I said, ‘You can see it, can’t you. You can already see it.’”
“You remembered.”
“I read fourteen hundred emails tonight, Luce.” His voice was rough. “I remember a lot of things now. That whole year, I wrote about you like you hung the moon. Ask Lucy. Lucy’s right. Wait till you see what my wife drew. I sounded like a kid.”
“You were happy.”
“We were happy.” He looked at the floor. “Then I typed in 2020, and I sat there with my finger on the key, and I didn’t hit enter. I didn’t want to see what the number went down to.”
The heater ticked. Juniper lay down between us with a groan and put her chin on his boot.
2020. I hadn’t said the year out loud in front of him since it happened. Neither of us had. We had a whole house built around not saying it.
“Say it,” I said.
He looked up.
“I told you on the phone. Don’t fix it. Say it out loud. That goes for this, too.” My throat was tightening. “Say what happened in 2020.”
He was quiet so long I thought he wouldn’t. Then he said, very low, “We lost the baby.”
“In March.”
“In March. You were eleven weeks.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I sat with you at the hospital in Truckee. I drove you home. I made you soup from a can and you didn’t eat it. And then the bank called, and I took it in the other room.”
“And then you went back to work.”
“I didn’t know what else to do.” He dropped his hands.
His eyes were red. “Everything was falling apart that spring. The lodges were closing, the lenders were calling every day, and I thought—if I could just keep everything running, if I could keep the whole thing standing, then at least you’d have somewhere to land.
I thought that was what I could give you. A building that didn’t fall down.”
“I didn’t want a building.”
“I know that now.”
“No.” I shook my head. “You don’t. Not yet. You know it the way you knew that email, Rhys. You know it in writing.”
He took that. He sat on the stool with his hands between his knees and took it.
“I redrew your second lodge that spring,” I said. “Every room. At the dining table, until two in the morning. You’d come in and say that’s beautiful, Luce, and go to bed.”
“I thought you were okay. You were drawing. I thought—if she’s drawing, she’s okay.”
“I was drawing because I couldn’t stand the quiet.”
I didn’t know I was going to cry until I was already doing it, and then it wasn’t the kind I could manage.
It came up from the bottom of me like something that had been stuck there for six years and had finally come loose.
I put my forehead down on the drafting table, on the email, and I cried so hard the stool rocked.
I cried for March. I cried for the second time, two years later, which we had never once said out loud either.
I cried for the woman at the dining table with her pencil going and going, drawing rooms for other people’s children to sit in and watch the snow.
I heard the stool creak as he stood up. I heard him stop.
“Luce.” His voice was wrecked. “Can I come over there?”
Ask first. He didn’t know yet that it would become a rule. He was just asking.
“No,” I said into my arms. “Stay there.”
He stayed. He didn’t come closer and he didn’t leave.
He stood by the north window with his hands open at his sides like a man who’d been handed something and didn’t know where to put it down, and he let me cry, and he didn’t say it’s okay and he didn’t say I’m sorry and he didn’t make a single phone call.
After a while he sat back down on the stool.
After a longer while, he leaned over and pushed the box of tissues across the table until it touched my elbow.
It wasn’t enough. It was the first time in six years he’d been in the room for it at all.
It was almost three when I sat up and wiped my face on Owen’s flannel sleeve.
“You should go,” I said.
He looked up from his hands. He didn’t argue. That was new, too.
“This doesn’t fix anything,” I said. “I need you to hear that. I’m glad you found the email. I’m glad you stayed. It doesn’t mean I’m coming home.”
“I didn’t come here to bring you home.”
“Then why did you come?”
He got up slowly, one hand on the table. He looked at the email under the lamp, blotted now in two places, the ink run a little in the word designer.
“Because it was yours,” he said. “Everything in that file is yours. I should’ve handed it to you years ago.”
Juniper walked him to the door and stood there after it closed, listening to his boots on the stairs, the truck starting, the tires on the gravel. Then she came back and lay down with a sigh at my feet.
I didn’t go to bed. I pulled the accordion file over and unwound the string from the button.
It was fat with paper. Change orders, lien releases, a letter from the county about septic setbacks.
Copies of Owen’s shop drawings, every one with his stamp in red in the corner—PER L.
HART SKETCH—and I touched each one as I passed it.
My punch-list notes. A sticky note in Rhys’s handwriting that just said call L re: sconces! !
Near the back, between an insurance certificate and a receipt for flagstone, there was a single page on company letterhead. Internal memo. From: Margot Kline, Chief Operating Officer. To: Rhys Sterling. Date: April 9, 2018. Re: Brand Credit—Design Attribution.
It was four sentences long. The third one had been underlined once, in black ink, by the person who’d written it.
Recommend we credit ‘Sterling Design Team’ for brand consistency.
And in the top right corner, in blue ballpoint, small and slanted and familiar as my own—the same hand that had written call L re: sconces!!—two letters.
RS.