13. Celebrity #2
By the time I reach the parking garage, my inbox has three new messages from recruiters I'd been cultivating for years.
All three are withdrawals of interest.
Given the current situation, we feel it's best to pause our conversations.
We'll circle back when things settle.
Best of luck, Celebrity.
I walk toward the exit, my cardboard box heavy in my arms, surrounded by structural columns that someone, somewhere, calculated to bear exactly the right load.
I don't make it to the parking garage. He catches me at the revolving door.
Not a shout—Torrance Elkwood doesn't shout in public spaces. But it carries.
That low, commanding frequency that cuts through marble lobbies and boardroom chatter and the white noise of my entire life falling apart.
"Celebrity. Stop."
My hand is on the brass push bar. Rain is sheeting against the glass panels, turning the street into a gray blur.
I can see my reflection—the sharp lines of my blouse, the geometric cutout at my collarbone, the silk scarf I tied with military precision at 7:30 this morning because I knew this moment was coming and I'd be damned if I looked anything less than deliberate when it arrived.
"Celebrity."
Closer now. His shoes on the marble. That particular rhythm—unhurried, certain, the walk of a man who has never once doubted that the world will wait for him.
I turn.
He's in a navy three-piece. No tie. Top button undone, which for Torrance is practically disheveled. The sharp appraising gaze sweeps me from scarf to shoes in under a second, cataloging, assessing. Looking for cracks in my foundation.
Good luck. I poured that concrete thick this morning.
"We need to talk about this privately."
"No, we don't."
"You're emotional."
The word lands like a slap. Not because it's wrong—I am emotional, I am a raw wire sparking against wet pavement—but because he wields it like a diagnostic. Like I'm a material that's failed a stress test.
"I'm fired, Torrance. That's not emotional. That's factual."
I step back.
Something flickers across his jaw. A micro-tension at the hinge. He didn't expect me to retreat.
"This is a strategic delay. The investors were going to pull seventy-eight million in bridge financing. An injunction freezes the site for a minimum of ninety days. Every day of delay costs four hundred thousand dollars. I had to stabilize."
"You stabilized by handing my work to the men who stole it."
"Temporarily."
"There is no temporarily in architecture. You know that. A building doesn't have a rough draft. Once their names are on those permits, once they submit to the city under their stamp, my design becomes their design. Legally. Permanently."
His jaw works again. He knows I'm right. I can see it in the way his gaze shifts half an inch to the left—the only tell he has, the structural weakness I've cataloged over weeks of studying this man the way I study load paths.
"I will protect your authorship. That is my word."
"Your word." I almost laugh. Almost. But laughing would crack the surface, and right now the surface is all I've got.
"Your word got me terminated at 7:14 this morning.
Your word got my original ink drawings confiscated from my flat files.
Your word got Raymond Boyd standing in a conference room right now presenting my floating staircase like he dreamed it up over his morning oatmeal. "
"I didn't know they'd?—"
"You didn't ask."
That lands. His shoulders shift. Not a flinch—Torrance doesn't flinch—but a redistribution of weight. A man recalculating.
"Give me seventy-two hours. I'll have Whitfield's legal team?—"
"Whitfield's legal team just enforced a non-compete clause that Marisol Lau knows is unenforceable, because the point isn't enforcement, Torrance.
The point is exhaustion. The point is burying a twenty-six-year-old Black woman under enough legal paperwork that she runs out of money before she runs out of fight. And you handed them the shovel."
The lobby is empty except for Dale at the security desk, pretending very hard to read a clipboard. Rain hammers the glass behind me. The sound fills the silence that Torrance leaves when he has no mathematical answer.
"Come upstairs." Quiet. Almost gentle, which is worse. "Let me fix this."
"You don't fix things, Torrance. You build them. You acquire them. You optimize them." I grasp the strap of my bag until the leather bites my palm. "And when a component doesn't serve the timeline, you swap it out. That's not fixing. That's procurement."
His hand reaches for my arm.
I step through the revolving door.
The rain hits me immediately—warm, heavy, summer-storm rain that soaks through my blouse in three seconds and turns my silk scarf dark. I don't adjust. I keep walking.
"Celebrity—"
I stop on the sidewalk. Turn one last time. He's standing in the threshold, the glass still rotating slowly behind him, and for one fraction of a second I see it—something unguarded in his face. Something that looks almost like fear.
"A building constructed on a lie has a compromised foundation. You can clad it in the rarest marble on earth. You can crown it with the most innovative structure this city has ever seen. But the math doesn't lie, Torrance. It never does."
I turn away from him.
"And neither do I."