Holland
Chapter Nineteen
The light came through the warehouse windows in long pale sheets, the way it always did at this hour, and I watched it slide across the drafting table, across the scattered pencils, across the sleeve of Finn's shirt where his arm rested on a fresh sheet of vellum.
He hadn't noticed I was awake yet. His glasses sat low on his nose and his hair was a disaster, one dark wave falling across his forehead while the rest stuck up in the back from the couch cushions. He was sketching, the pencil moving in short, sure strokes. Every few seconds he’d stop and turn the page slightly, then continue.
I realized I had never watched him work before.
Not like this. Not in the quiet of a morning that belonged to no one but us.
I lay on the studio couch, blanket pulled to my shoulder, and waited for the familiar rush—Callum's schedule, project deadlines, Laura's next move.
But the list didn't come. The silence in the room simply held, asking for nothing.
The city woke up twelve floors below, and for the first time in seven years, my own mind was quiet with it.
This morning I had nothing to solve.
Finn looked up and caught me watching him. He didn't smile right away. "He set the pencil down, took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb. Then he said, "You sleep at all?
"Some."
"Some is better than none."
"I'm not sure that's true."
He put his glasses back on and pushed them up. "You want coffee or you want to keep lying there pretending you're still asleep?"
"I wasn't pretending."
"You were doing a very convincing impression of a person who wasn't watching me draw."
I sat up, pulling the blanket with me. "How long have you been awake?"
"Hour. Maybe a little more." He stood and walked toward the small kitchenette at the far end of the studio, and I heard the coffee maker start. "The light was good. I didn't want to lose it."
I watched him pour two mugs and bring one back to me. The mug was heavy ceramic, dark blue, and when I wrapped both hands around it the warmth went straight into my palms and stayed there. He sat on the edge of the couch, not close enough to crowd me but close enough to be present.
"Sloane texted," he said. "About twenty minutes ago. She wants to know if you're coming to her place for dinner tonight or if you need another day."
"What did you tell her?"
"I didn't. I figured you'd want to answer that one yourself."
I took a sip of the coffee. It was strong, the way he always made it, and I thought about Sloane and her apartment and the guest bed I'd slept in for two weeks, and how she'd stood next to me at the gala with her hand on my elbow like she was ready to catch me if I fell.
She'd been waiting for me to fall for years. She'd just never said it out loud.
"I'll go tonight," I said. "I owe her more than a text."
Finn nodded. He didn't say anything about how I should handle my sister or what I owed anyone. He just drank his coffee and let me decide.
That was the thing about him. He'd been doing it for ten years and I'd only just started noticing.
"The business attorneys called this morning," I said. "Yesterday, I mean. Before the gala. They left a message."
"What did they say?"
"That the operating agreement is clear. My name is on it as design principal. The capital contribution is documented. They said Callum can't remove me from the company without my consent, and he can't claim the intellectual property as his own." I paused. "They said I have leverage."
Finn set his mug down on the floor beside the couch. "Do you want to use it?"
"I don't know yet. Part of me wants to burn the whole thing down. The other part—" I stopped. "The other part just wants to walk away and never think about Crestline again."
"Both of those are reasonable."
"They're not the same thing."
No," he said. "Not even close."
I looked at the drafting table, at the sketch he'd been working on when I woke up. It was a roofline, clean and low and modern, with a cantilevered overhang that reminded me of something I couldn't quite place. "What is that?"
"Nothing yet. Just an idea."
"For a client?"
"For me. For the studio. Theo's been on me about expanding the portfolio and I've been putting it off." He shrugged. "It's a good time to try something new."
I stood up and walked over to the table, still holding the coffee mug.
The sketch was more than an idea. The proportions were right, the sight lines were carefully considered, and the way the roofline intersected with the vertical plane of the glass – I knew that move.
I'd seen it before. I'd drawn it before, ten years ago, in a studio on campus with three hours on the clock and Finn Morrow across the room doing the same assignment.
"That's the cantilever from junior year," I said.
"It's a version of it."
"You kept it."
He came up beside me, close enough that I could smell the soap on his skin and the faint trace of coffee on his breath. "I kept everything you ever drew that semester. I had a folder. Theo used to give me shit about it."
"Why?"
"Because you were the only person in that program who was better than me, and I couldn't decide if I wanted to beat you or hire you."
I turned to look at him. His eyes were on the sketch, not on me, and his expression was unreadable in the way it always was when he was thinking about something he wasn't ready to say out loud.
"You never told me that," I said.
"It didn't seem like the kind of thing you tell someone who was already taken."
"I wasn't taken. Not then."
"You were on your way to being taken. Callum was already—" He stopped. "It doesn't matter. It was a long time ago."
I set the coffee mug down on the edge of the drafting table. "Finn."
He looked at me then, his eyes behind the glasses the same steady green I remembered. For years I had held that color at a careful distance, afraid that looking too closely would force me to admit what was missing in Callum’s gaze.
"The clients have been calling," I said. "Since the gala. The Morrisons. The Thompsons. Three others I haven't gotten back to yet. They all want to know if I'm starting something new."
"Are you?"
"I think I have to. Not because I need the money. Because I need—" I searched for the word and couldn't find it. "I need to build something that has my name on it from the beginning. Not something I funded and designed only to let someone else put their name on it."
Finn leaned against the drafting table and crossed his arms. "What kind of something?"
"There's a historic restoration project I've been wanting to do for two years. An old theater in Evanston. The foundation's failing and the original plasterwork is intact but nobody's touched it since the twenties. Callum said it wasn't worth the investment."
"Callum was wrong about a lot of things."
"He was wrong about everything that mattered." I looked at the sketch again, at the clean lines and the careful proportions. "I don't have a studio. I don't have a team. I don't have—"
"You have me."
I stopped.
"I'm not offering to run your company," he said.
"I'm not offering to be your CEO or your public face or whatever the hell Callum was pretending to be.
I'm offering you space. The studio has an extra drafting room that nobody's used in six months.
You can work there while you figure out the rest. You can use my name on the permits if you need to, or you can use your own.
I don't care which." He paused. "I care that you do the work you want to do. The rest is logistics."
I felt something shift in me, the way a door that's been painted shut will sometimes move in its frame when the pressure on the other side finally equalizes.
It wasn't relief. It wasn't gratitude. It was something simpler than either of those things.
It was the feeling of being seen by someone who wasn't trying to use what he saw.
"You'd do that?" I asked.
"I'd do that regardless. You're the best designer I've ever worked with. The fact that Callum spent seven years pretending otherwise doesn't change what I know."
"And what do you know?"
He picked up the pencil and held it loosely, not writing anything, just turning it end over end.
"The cantilever competition. Junior year.
You finished in half the time and spent the rest of it refining details nobody was grading.
" He set it down. "The Morrison lakefront was yours from the first line.
Callum was in a meeting about a meeting.
The Thompson substrate— you caught that before the soil report even came back.
And the Alden fix." He paused. "Laura was still reading your notes when she walked into that room.
You kept shrinking yourself down to fit inside someone else's idea of what you were supposed to be. That's over now."
I didn't answer. I couldn't. The words were all there, but they were stuck somewhere behind my ribs, and if I opened my mouth they'd come out in the wrong order.
"Holland." He said my name the way he always said it, like it was a complete sentence. "You don't have to decide anything right now. The drafting room will be there tomorrow. The offer doesn't expire."
"I know."
"Do you?"
The morning light was doing something to his face—catching the line of his jaw, the gray coming in at his temples—and I found myself thinking about the night before.
The couch. His arm around me in the dark.
I thought about every time I'd dialed his number with a load calculation in front of me and told myself that was all it was.
I thought about how he never let it go to voicemail.
"I know," I said again. "I've known for a while. I just didn't let myself—"
"Admit it?"
"Act on it."
He didn't move toward me. He let me close the distance myself, and for the first time, an open space felt like an invitation. I put my hand on his chest, just below his collarbone, and felt the steady beat of his heart through the thin cotton of his shirt.