17. Celebrity #3
The press lingers. Handshakes, business cards, a photographer from Architectural Digest who asks me to pose against the steel skeleton with my hard hat tucked under one arm like some kind of construction-site editorial.
I give her three minutes because that magazine will reach every dean of every architecture program that rejected my scholarship applications, and petty fuel burns just as clean as the noble kind.
Torrance's hand doesn't return to my back.
He keeps a professional distance through the remaining press interactions, shaking hands with investor representatives, exchanging clipped pleasantries with the city council chair.
But I feel him tracking me the way I track load distribution across a floor plate—constant, precise, aware of every shift in weight.
His car idles at the curb. Black Maybach. Tinted windows so dark they're probably illegal in three boroughs. His driver holds the door and I slide in first, the leather seat cool against the backs of my thighs where my trousers have gone damp from standing in construction-site humidity.
Torrance drops in beside me. The door closes. The city noise vanishes.
Neither of us speaks for four blocks.
His hand rests on his thigh. Open. Palm up. Not reaching for me. Just... available. Like a blueprint laid flat on a table, waiting for someone to read it.
I don't take it.
"Your communications director tried to hand me a revised talking-points card before I went on," I say, while the cross streets tick past through the tint. "She wanted me to say 'Elkwood Development's visionary leadership made this project possible.'"
"What did you say?"
"I said if she handed me another card, I'd feed it to the shredder while she watched."
His jaw works. Not anger. Something else. Something that lives in the same neighborhood as the look he gave me on the fiftieth floor when I unrolled the penthouse blueprints and the flashlight beam caught the folded-plate geometry for the first time.
"You handled every question."
"I did."
"Without looking at me once."
"That was the point."
The Maybach pulls into the underground garage of Elkwood Tower at 4:47 PM.
We ride the private elevator to the fifty-eighth floor in silence.
His office occupies the northeast corner—floor-to-ceiling glass on two walls, a view so expansive it borders on violent.
The desk is a slab of blackened walnut that weighs more than most sedans.
Behind it, a leather chair that probably cost as much as my first year's rent.
I step inside. He follows.
I reach behind me and close the door. The latch engages with a solid mechanical thunk that reverberates through the glass walls. Then I turn the deadbolt. It requires deliberate force—heavy brass, built to resist casual entry—and the sound it makes when it slides home is absolute.
Torrance stops three feet inside his own office. His hands hang at his sides.
I turn around.
"Sit down."
One beat. Two. His gaze moves across my face with the intensity of a site survey, measuring grade, checking foundation, looking for any crack that might indicate I don't mean exactly what I said.
He finds nothing.
He walks to the leather chair behind the walnut desk and sits.
The leather groans under his weight. His knees fall apart, shoulders settling against the backrest, hands gripping the armrests with the kind of conscious restraint that tells me every cell in his body wants to stand back up and close the distance himself.
I cross the office. Slowly. My heels on the hardwood sound different than they did on the marble this morning—deeper, more resonant, a frequency that fills the room from the floor up.
I stop between his knees.
"Twenty days." I hold up the portfolio case I've been carrying all afternoon, then set it on his desk without breaking eye contact.
"Twenty days you let those partners butcher my design.
You saw them swap my Carrara marble for composite.
You saw them eliminate the folded-plate roof in favor of conventional truss framing because it was cheaper and faster. Twenty days, Torrance."
His grip tightens on the armrests. Tendons standing rigid beneath his skin.
"You bought me a firm. You put my name on a billboard.
You stood behind me today and gave me the podium.
" I brace one hand on each armrest, bracketing his fists, and lean down until my face is level with his.
Until his breath lands warm on my chin. Until the cedar-and-steel scent of him is the only air in my lungs.
"Those are transactions. Grand gestures from a man who solves every problem by writing a check. "
His pupils swallow the gray of his irises.
"But trust?" I shake my head. Slow. "Trust isn't bought. It's built. Load by load. Beam by beam. And you don't get to set the schedule."
I straighten. Look down at him the way he has looked down at me across drafting tables and construction sites and hotel beds for weeks. From above. With full authority over what happens next.
"Tonight, you earn your praise. My way. My rules. My timeline." I push one finger beneath his chin and tilt his face up. "And you don't get to come until I tell you the foundation is sound. Understood?"
His throat works. A single, visible swallow.
"Yes."