Chapter Twenty-Three
Lucy
“State your full name for the record.”
“Cilla, you know my—”
“For the record.”
I sat on the stool at my own drafting table as if it were a witness chair, which, for the afternoon, it was. Cilla had swung my one good lamp around to shine in my face. She said that was for realism. I said it was for sadism. She said in her experience those were the same thing.
“Lucy Hart Sterling.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Sterling.”
“It’s Hart.”
“Not on your driver’s license, it isn’t.” She wrote something on her yellow legal pad in her tiny upright print. “They’ll call you Mrs. Sterling every chance they get. It’s a reminder of whose wife you are. Don’t correct them. Let it slide off.”
Below us, Owen’s table saw screamed through a board and wound down. Juniper, on her blanket by the radiator, lifted her head at the noise, decided it was beneath her, and went back to sleep.
It was the last week of October. The aspens along the river had gone to gold and then to nothing, and the north window was a gray square of sky.
On the table between us sat a stack of exhibits Cilla had printed at the library in town: the 2019 website with its row of smiling faces, a photo of me in a hard hat at the Glenbrook site, the Alpine Living cover folded so Margot’s face was on the inside.
“Mrs. Sterling. What was your title at Sterling Resorts?”
“I didn’t have a title.”
She slid the website printout across the table and tapped a highlighted line. “Would you read that aloud, please?”
“Design Director.” I swallowed. “Unpaid.”
“So you did have a title.”
“It was a joke.”
“Whose?”
I remembered the kitchen island. Rhys with a beer, grinning at the laptop. What do I call you? I remembered laughing so hard Juniper got up to see what was wrong.
“My husband’s.”
“You found it funny.”
“At the time.”
“So at the time, you were comfortable being described publicly as the company’s Design Director.”
“I was comfortable being teased by my husband at eleven o’clock at night.”
“Good answer,” Cilla said, in her own voice. “Cut ‘at eleven o’clock at night.’ It sounds cozy. You don’t want cozy.” She switched back. “You attended company meetings.”
“Some.”
“You directed contractors on company job sites.”
“I answered their questions about my drawings.”
“Your drawings. You keep saying my. Who paid for the paper?”
I stared at her. “Are you serious?”
“They will be. Who paid for the notebooks?”
“I did. At the art supply store on Donner Pass Road, every time, since grad school. You were with me for half of them.”
“Receipts?”
“Who keeps receipts for notebooks?”
“Nobody. That’s why they’ll ask.” A mark on the pad. “Who paid for your travel to the job sites?”
“My husband. We were married. He paid for the groceries too. Does that make me the company chef?”
Cilla’s mouth twitched. “Strike the chef. Keep the tone.”
She got up and went to the window, the way she used to pace our studio at Berkeley at three in the morning when we both should have been asleep and neither of us could stop working.
Cilla has always thought better on her feet.
She stood there with her back to me for a long moment, looking down at the alley where Owen stacks his offcuts.
“Now I’m going to be ugly,” she said. “Ready?”
“You haven’t been ugly yet?”
She turned around, and her face had changed. She’d put something on it, smooth and faintly bored, and I realized with a jolt that I had seen that exact face across a conference table in San Francisco, over a five-million-dollar offer.
“Mrs. Sterling. You worked alongside your husband’s company for ten years without once asking to be paid.”
“Yes.”
“Without once asking for credit.”
“Yes.”
“Without once objecting when the credit read ‘Sterling Design Team.’”
My hands were flat on the table. I could feel the old grain under my palms, the groove my T-square had worn into the edge. “I didn’t think—”
“You didn’t read your own brochures? The plaques in your own lobbies?” She let it sit. “Isn’t it true you only cared after your husband toasted another woman?”
Something went up the back of my neck like a lit match.
“That’s not—”
“Isn’t it true this is about a toast?”
“I painted three hundred place cards—”
“Isn’t it true that a humiliated wife saw a four-hundred-million-dollar deal and an opportunity to—”
“Stop it.” I was on my feet. The stool went over behind me and Juniper jolted up and barked once, hoarse, at nobody.
“You don’t get to—I drew every room in that company.
I drew them before Margot Kline could find Lake Tahoe on a map.
I drew Glenbrook’s great room on a napkin on my wedding day while she was—”
Cilla was already sitting back down. She picked up her pen.
“And that,” she said in her own voice, “is how you lose.”
I stood there breathing hard. Downstairs, the saw had stopped. I pictured Owen with his hand on the switch, head tipped toward the stairwell.
“They want the napkin,” Cilla said quietly. “They want you on your feet, shaking, saying place cards. Every word you just said is true, and a transcript makes every word of it sound like a woman who’s mad at her husband. Pick up the stool.”
I picked it up. I sat on it. Juniper came over, stiff in the back legs, and leaned against my shin, and I put my hand on her head and kept it there.
“Again,” Cilla said. “Isn’t it true you only cared after your husband toasted another woman?”
I made myself look straight at her.
“No,” I said. “It’s true I noticed after my husband toasted another woman. I’d cared for ten years.”
Cilla wrote it down. She underlined it twice.
“Better,” she said. “Much better. Now the hard one.”
“That wasn’t the hard one?”
She reached into her bag and took out two of my Moleskines.
She’d borrowed them from the box that morning without asking, which I would have killed anyone else for.
The first was from 2018, a coffee ring on its cover in the rough shape of Nevada.
She opened it to a page I knew by heart: Glenbrook’s boathouse, plan and section, a tiny sailboat doodled in the margin.
In the bottom right corner, in my old quick hand: L.H.
Then she opened the other, from 2021. A reading nook for the third lodge, window seat and bookshelves, a good drawing, one of my best that year.
The corner was empty.
“Your mother told me you stopped signing,” Cilla said.
“Anybody who lays these out in order will see the week your initials disappear. It’s spring of 2019, by the way.
I checked. Their lawyer will say you stopped because you understood the work belonged to the company.
So tell me why you stopped. And don’t make it pretty. ”
I looked at the empty corner for a long time.
I’d been turning the question over since the night my mother asked it, the way you turn over a stone you already know has something ugly underneath.
“Because it felt vain,” I said finally. “Every drawing went into a deck with ‘Sterling Design Team’ on the cover, and my initials down in the corner started to look like a kid writing her name on the refrigerator. Because Rhys would hold a page up in a meeting and say we, and I liked being a we. Because it was easier to be useful than to be anybody.” My voice wobbled.
I let it. “Nobody took it from me, Cil. I put it down. I made it easy for them.”
The radiator ticked. Juniper sighed against my leg.
“Say it exactly like that,” Cilla said softly. “Every word. Opposing counsel hates a witness who’s already confessed. There’s nothing left to catch you in.”
“It doesn’t hurt us?”
“Putting down your pencil isn’t signing it over.
Making it easy for them to take your work isn’t the same as giving it away.
You’re allowed to have been tired. You’re allowed to have been in love.
” She closed the 2021 notebook, gently, the way you’d close a door on someone sleeping.
“Copyright doesn’t care if you were humble. It cares who drew it.”
I laughed, wet and surprised. “Put that on a mug.”
“I bill six hundred and fifty an hour. I don’t do mugs.”
Her phone buzzed on the table between us, face up. She glanced at it, and then she looked again, and the lawyer went out of her face all at once.
“It’s from Sterling’s general counsel,” she said. “A courtesy copy. Filed this morning.”
“Filed what?”
She didn’t answer. She opened her laptop, clicked twice, and turned the screen toward me.
DECLARATION OF RHYS STERLING.
I read it the way you read test results.
Fast, then slow. I, Rhys Sterling, declare as follows.
Numbered paragraphs, stiff as starch. I am the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sterling Resorts.
Lucy Hart has never been an employee of Sterling Resorts or any affiliated entity.
Lucy Hart has never received wages, salary, fees or other compensation for her design work.
Lucy Hart has never executed any assignment, license or transfer of rights in her drawings.
The description “Design Director (unpaid)” on the company’s 2019 website was written by me, personally, as a joke, and did not reflect any employment relationship.
Cilla had stopped breathing beside me. So had I.
Paragraph nine didn’t sound like any lawyer. It didn’t sound like a man who sold things. It sounded like my husband at two in the morning, when he still used to talk to me in the dark.
My wife drew every room. I let the credit walk out the door. I’m the one who held it open.