6. Chapter Six
Penelope
I’m five minutes from the end of my yoga video when my phone starts ringing.
The instructor freezes mid-breath, one arm still reaching for the ceiling, and my mother’s contact photo takes over.
The phone rings over the paused pose. I let it go once.
Then I answer, because not answering is a fight I don’t have time for before eight a.m.
“Good morning, Mom.”
“Penelope. Good morning.” No pause. My mother doesn’t do small talk. “Did you sign the contract?”
“Yes.” The word is out with no hesitation. “It’s signed. I was going to drop it off between classes.”
The manila folder is on my desk in the next room, exactly where it’s been for three days. The signature line is exactly as empty as it was when Oliver slid it across the table over chocolate mousse I didn’t order.
“Good,” she says. “The Whitmores will be pleased.”
“Is that all?”
“Do you know what project they’re putting you on?”
“They didn’t say. What projects do you know of?”
“Chicago, of course.”
Right. I roll my shoulders back and look out the window. “I have my first day of classes today. Thanks for checking in.”
“Let me know when you start at the Whitmores.”
“I will.”
The call ends. She hangs up first, the way she always does, and the yoga video starts playing — the instructor exhaling out of the pose, telling me in her warm recorded voice to notice how my body feels.
I turn it off. I don’t want to notice how my body feels right now.
I roll the mat up and put it in its corner, and then I drink my lemon water standing at the counter.
I tie my hair up, so it won’t get wet in the shower.
When I get out, I wipe the fog off the mirror with the side of my hand and look at the mark Theo left just above my collarbone.
It’s finally faded to the color of a thumbprint on fruit, yellow-green at the edges, and it should be gone by now, but it isn’t.
I tilt my chin and look at it, wishing he hadn’t kissed me there.
Then I grab my body oil, the good one that smells expensive, and apply it all over my body.
I step into my black stockings, the plaid skirt I set out last night, and a tank tucked in, a cardigan over it, two pins to keep my hair off my face, and lastly, the ruby gloss I’ve worn on every first day since I was fifteen because it makes me feel good. I love my rituals.
My first class is Movements of Architecture, and I know it’ll be an easy A within ten minutes of the class.
The lecture hall is mostly strangers. A few faces I recognize from last year, nobody I’d call a friend, and I take a seat in the middle where I can see everything.
The professor puts up a slide of a Roman aqueduct and starts talking about how the buildings we still love are the ones that solved a human problem and made it beautiful on the way.
I take the manila folder out of my bag and sign the internship papers in the dark with the professor’s voice going on about permanence and stone. It takes four seconds to sign. I slide the folder back into my bag, open my notebook, and pretend I’ve been listening the whole time.
Then I have Architectural Drawing I, and everything in me lights up.
We go straight to the boards, no syllabus, no icebreaker, just paper and pencil.
Line weight. How a heavy line comes forward and a light one falls back, how you can build depth on a flat page with nothing but pressure and patience.
My hand knows this easily. When the professor calls time, I’ve filled three pages to turn in before I leave.
There’s a supply list waiting on the professor’s desk when class lets out. I fold it into my bag and plan to buy it all after I drop off the folder. I feel good, walking out into the sun.
The Whitmore Design Group takes up two floors of a converted warehouse downtown, and I hate that I love it the second I walk in.
The bones of the old building are left exposed on purpose — riveted steel columns, brick sandblasted back to its raw color, ductwork run bare across a ceiling twenty feet up.
Everything they added is quiet and expensive.
There are long white drafting tables, dual monitors glowing on each one, a wall of material samples arranged like art — stone, walnut, brushed brass, a dozen concretes in a dozen grays.
Scale models sit under glass by the windows, whole neighborhoods shrunk to the size of a coffee table, and I want to lean over every one of them.
“Hi.” The woman at the front desk is already smiling. Julia, her nameplate says. “How can I help you?”
“I’m here for Mr. Whitmore.”
She smiles. “One second.”
She dials, and before I’ve finished looking at the models, Oliver comes around the corner in a shirt with the sleeves rolled, no tie, like a man who owns his time.
“Penelope. Hello.”
“Hi,” I say, not expecting to see him. I thought I’d be working more with his father. I inhale and hold out the folder. “I’m accepting the offer.”
“Good.” He takes it, hands it to Julia without looking at her, and then he looks at me instead — a slow, easy pass, head to hem. “Do you have a moment?”
“Just a minute. I didn’t plan for traffic, and I have an afternoon class.”
“Did you give us your schedule?”
“I did.”
“Good.” He’s already walking. “Right this way.”
The tour of the place is short. His office is in the back, glass-walled, a real drafting table beside the desk like he still draws. And then the corner, near the good windows, where an empty desk sits clean and waiting.
“That’s where the interns work,” he says.
I picture myself at it before I can help it. Morning light off the river, models under glass, my name on a badge in this beautiful, reasonable building. I picture wanting to be here.
“I like it,” I say.
“I already have work for you.” He opens a drawer and hands me a set of plans.
“Read over this house layout, apply the marked changes, add your dimensions, and check that every door swing matches the plan. Then a lot I need researched — zoning, accessibility, parking. It’s all in there.
” He says it lightly, the way you’d ask someone to grab coffee. “Get it back to me tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.” I take the plans. “Yes. Of course.”
“Julia will sort your schedule. We’ll have it done for you when you come in.” He smiles. “Welcome, Penelope.”
I thank him, and I mean it. He’s charming. The work is real. My mother would be so pleased. Every single part of this is good and standing in the elevator on the way down with a stranger’s house in my hands, I can’t figure out why my chest is tight.
I have Building Systems I back on campus in forty minutes. I make it with two to spare.
That night, I turn the dining table into a workstation and have the whole apartment to myself.
Ivory’s out. I put on a cozy YouTube vlog on the TV for the noise of it, pull my laptop close, and start hunting for the zoning code on Oliver’s lot.
It’s harder than I expected — the property map takes an hour just to find, buried three links deep on a county site built in 2004 — but I find it, and once I have it, I have all that I need.
Then I spread the house plans out and start making the changes in his notes, redrawing the door swings so nothing opens into anything, and the hours go.
I like being good at things. I won’t pretend I don’t. There’s a clean, quiet satisfaction in handing back work that’s better than what was asked for.
The front door bangs open near ten, and Ivory blows in on a cloud of her own weather.
“What is happening here?” She takes in the table, the plans, and the laptop.
I look up and lift a brow. “I’m officially an intern.”
She snaps a photo of me before I can wave her off.
“You look so professional. God, I love that top.” Then she drops into the chair across from me, and it all comes out of her at once — Drew’s barely texting her back, says he’s slammed with classes and hockey, she can’t tell if he’s busy or bored of her. “Did you hear from Theo?”
“No,” I answer.
“Still? That doesn’t bother you?”
“No.” I don’t look up from the plans. “It’s not that serious.”
She stares at me like I’ve said something horrible. “I hate when people are nonchalant. I am so not nonchalant.”
“I know you’re not.”
“It’s a compliment to me and an insult to you.”
I laugh, and she storms off to her room to be dramatic in private. I go back to my door swings. She thinks it’s coolness, the way I am about Theo. It isn’t. It’s just that I keep enough distance so that nothing gets close enough to cost me anything.
Design Fundamentals Studio I class finishes at lunch the next day. I stop for coffee on the way to Whitmore Design to drop off my work, and then I plan to get lunch after.
Julia hands me a printed schedule when I come in. “Got you sorted.”
I look down at it and inhale. He wants me here every day this week. Every single one.
“Everything all right?”
“Yes.” I fold it in half, so my face has somewhere to go. “Is Oliver in?”
The office is busier today, more people at more monitors, and I feel their eyes track me down the row of cubicles to his door. I knock. He lights up when he sees me, which I notice. It makes me nervous.
“Penelope,” he greets.
“I have everything done.” I hand him the folder.
He opens it and goes through my work slowly, and I watch him closely. “Perfect. Now put the changes into the computer at your desk.”
I blink. “I wasn’t planning on staying, actually.”
“You don’t have a class.”
Right, he has my class schedule. “No, but I haven’t had lunch.”
He checks his watch and stands. “Neither have I. Come on.”
“Oh — you don’t have to. I can just ––”
“I haven’t eaten either. Let’s go.”
He’s already moving, and I’m following, because it would be rude to say no to my new boss. The whole office watches us leave together. Julia gives me a little smile on the way out, and it makes my stomach squeeze.
The sandwich shop is a few doors down. It’s quiet with three tables and a simple menu.
The man behind the counter looks up and says, “The usual, Mr. Whitmore?” before we’ve even reached him.
I order a turkey sub off the menu with no changes, and then we sit and eat.
In between bites, Oliver asks polite questions about my classes and how they’re going so far. I give good answers, and it’s pleasant.
When we get back to the office, he introduces me to another intern who appears to have just clocked in. She still has her bag on her shoulder when Oliver says, “Penelope, this is Lyla Gilmore. She’s a senior at Camden.”
I shake her hand.
“Nice to meet you,” she says.
I grin. “Likewise.”
Lyla looks at Oliver, and he clears his throat. “Lyla will show you the ropes, how to clock in, how to use the programs.” He points at the folder on my desk. “Don’t forget to log those into the system. Let me know when it’s done.”
“Yes,” I say, and then he’s walking into his office.
Lyla turns to me after setting down her purse. “Okay. Right this way, and I’ll show you how to clock in.”
For the rest of the afternoon, she’s teaching me how the programs talk to each other, how to log Oliver’s folder into the system under a project number.
She’s easy to be near — dry, quick, a senior who’s clearly done all of this a hundred times and stopped being impressed by any of it.
I like her immediately. I think we could be friends.
The afternoon flies by. I look up once and the light through the twenty-foot windows has gone gold. I look up again and it’s flat and gray, and the monitors down the row are winking off one by one as people gather their bags and leave.
“You’re fast,” Lyla says, watching me log the last of it. “He’ll like that.”
I came here to drop off a folder. Just a second, I said, in the doorway of my own morning. I look at the clock, and it’s almost six.
Oliver comes out of his glass office as I’m packing up, shrugging into his jacket.
“Good first day, Penelope.” He’s kind about it, meeting my eyes. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
It feels like I’ve handed over my freedom. I nod at him before he walks off. The last few people still at their desks glance up when he walks past, telling him to have a good night. He doesn’t bother to tell them he’ll see them tomorrow.
Lyla walks with me to the elevator after we clock out. In the brushed-steel doors, I can see both our reflections, and she’s looking at me with something I can’t read all the way.
“Did he take you to lunch today?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I reply simply.
She nods. “The Whitmore men are nice,” she says. The elevator opens. “See you tomorrow, Penelope.”
When I get into my car, I start driving before I’ve even buckled my seatbelt. Oliver assigned me more tasks, and they’re sitting neatly in the folder on my passenger seat. I pull out into the evening and let the streetlights come at me one after another.
I keep waiting for the feeling I’m supposed to have. Lucky. Chosen. Privileged. This is the smart move, a good opportunity, my mother pleased for once in a way that I haven’t been able to please before. It should feel like winning something. Everything is moving exactly as it’s meant to.
The apartment’s dark when I get in. Ivory’s door is shut with no light under it.
It’s quiet, so I don’t turn on the overhead light.
I go to my drafting table by the window, where the pencils are still lined up the way I left them, 4H to 2B, and my own drawing is still pinned to the board from last spring.
I pull the stool out and sit. I pick up a pencil, and I draw.
The roofline pitched the way I want it. A window where the afternoon light would fall in a square you could sit in.
The line goes down exactly the angle I think is best. Everything I draw is exactly as I want it.
I don’t lift the pencil from the paper because for the first time today, I’m doing something that I want to do, something that is just for me.