10. Our Boy Did It #2
I run my thumb along the edge of that blueprint and feel the old wound pulse. It’s not sharp anymore. It’s duller. The kind of ache that’s settled into the bone and become part of the architecture of me.
Gently, I flip through the designs like pages of a novel. Each chapter of my life, showcased in blueprints.
All of it mine. All drawn by my hands, in this style—the angular lines that soften at transition points, the obsessive attention to how light enters a space, the way I design buildings around the people who’ll use them instead of the people who’ll photograph them.
And none of it belongs to me anymore.
I should have burned these a long time ago. I should put them away now. Looking at these is the architectural equivalent of pressing on a bruise—it serves no purpose except to confirm the injury still exists.
But Nana Mae said to stop hiding, and the truth is, the story of this file isn’t the only thing I’m hiding. If I accept that she’s entered my biggest lie into competition, I won’t be able to hide it any longer.
Fifty thousand dollars.
That’s what sits at the top of the prize sheet, printed in bold under the Meridian letterhead. Fifty thousand dollars for first place, paid out within fifteen days of the ceremony.
It’s enough to cover what Devin took from The Haven.
Nana Mae doesn’t know about Devin—not the full scope of it, anyway.
There’s no way she knew we’d need this prize money.
She entered me to beat her nemesis, Paula Van Holten, to fulfill an ache that’s never left her.
She also doesn’t know I’ve fought with myself about this contest for months, knowing The Haven might need the money but unable to risk engaging with a company that made millions off my designs without their knowledge.
But no matter how I look at it, the prize money from Natalie’s company could undo the damage Devin has caused.
One stolen thing paying for another.
Stop hiding, Nana Mae’s note says.
If only she knew what that would actually cost me.
My attention snags on my mother’s drafting compass. She was an architect too, though I only know that through Nana Mae’s memories and a few inanimate objects. I don’t usually let myself think about her. Tonight I’m thinking about her, which means I’ve stopped keeping my own rules.
I glance at the bottom drawer—the locked one—the one that contains the blueprints with JM sketched into the cornerstone of every detail.
I’m designing that home based on the way Junie moves through space—wide hallways because she reads while she walks, a south-facing kitchen because she gravitates toward the sun’s warmth, even if she doesn’t realize it.
A reading nook tucked behind the stairs because she always loves spaces that feel hidden but aren’t.
I glance back at the application Nana Mae submitted. The timeline to withdraw is…
Wait. I glance down at my watch, then click through apps on my phone until I find the calendar. What the actual fuck?
The timeline to withdraw was midnight. Midnight last fucking Friday.
My empty stomach twists, and my ribs sink into my lungs, constricting air until my vision blurs.
Stop hiding.
Stop fucking hiding. She didn’t give me a choice.
I stand abruptly, tossing the archival tube and grabbing my pencil.
I can’t think when my mind is like this. I can’t focus on anything but the heartbeat in my ears, so I do the one thing, the only thing I can do in my sleep—I design.
I rework the library design on autopilot. Adjusting sight lines and recalculating angles until finally, the rest of the world falls away.
This is the only time my brain goes quiet anymore. Not in my bed, or the porch, or even the ocean that’s a hundred yards away. When my life implodes, I turn to my drafting table. Pencil on vellum. The act of creating an idea and making it real.
This is where I lose track of time. My pencil moves precisely, my breathing slows, and the constant low-grade hum of anxiety that’s been my baseline since Boston dims to something manageable.
Which is why I don’t hear her enter.
“I knocked. Twice.”
I jolt so hard my pencil skids across the vellum, ruining a line I’d been refining for longer than I care to admit.
My body is rigid before my brain catches up—Junie’s in my doorway.
The one I always lock but forgot to tonight because Nana Mae’s note rattled something loose and I was in too deep to notice.
Junie’s standing three feet inside my private office, and I swivel my head, searching for any signs of the life I’m designing for her without her knowledge. Or worse, the truth I’ve kept hidden from her so she’d always have a safe place to land.
It’s hidden. Right?
“Cole?”
My gaze snaps back to hers. She’s in an oversized T-shirt and shorts, her hair damp from a shower, and she’s holding a manila folder against her chest like a shield.
But the thing that really gets me is that she’s barefoot.
Like she just climbed out of the shower and decided to walk across the driveway, which means the stair lights did their job, and now I’m thinking about what else I can fix at her apartment instead of the fact that she’s standing in the one room in my house she was never supposed to see.
“The, ah—the door was open.” She’s staring at the drafting table again. At the designs spread across it like a confession. “I found a discrepancy in the Q2 insurance filing. And…your light was on.”
Her eyes aren’t on the folder—they’re on my blueprints.
I almost spread my arms wide to block her view.
Get her out of here. Guide her to the conference room and lock the door behind you.
That’s the thing about secrets. Once one is exposed, the dominoes begin to fall. And this is not a thread I want her to pull.
Yet I stand frozen. I don’t cover anything, and I don’t really know why. Or—I do. I just don’t want to examine it with her standing in my office, smelling like whatever flowery soap she uses that makes my entire respiratory system malfunction.
Show her something you’d normally hide.
Goddamn it, Nana Mae.
“These aren’t Haven designs,” Junie says. It’s not a question, and the ice from earlier today has cracked. Not fully thawed, but underneath it is the voice she uses when her brain has latched onto something her mouth hasn’t caught up to yet.
“No.” My voice is strained. There’s no way she remembers these designs. She would’ve been in high school when I first started them. “They’re not.”
She takes a step closer. Then another, and the fear—that fear that Natalie instilled—roars to life. If Junie remembers this…what else will she remember?
Junie scans the coastal library spread, and her soft expression is a fist to my sternum.
She understands it. She remembers.
Not the engineering. Not the math. She understands the intent. I see it in the way her gaze follows the lines from the reading alcove over the water, in the way her head tilts to track the light path I designed into the ceiling, in the way her lips part on a breath she doesn’t release.
She’s reading the building the way I designed it. Not as a structure, but as a feeling.
“The light,” she murmurs. Her fingertip hovers over the glass calculation—she doesn’t touch the vellum.
She remembers not to touch the vellum.
“You made it so the light moves through the building. It’s a clock.”
The thorn in my throat triples in size. “It’s a sun path. The reading rooms rotate through direct, diffused, and ambient light over the course of the day. Morning readers get east exposure. Afternoon gets west. The main hall tracks the zenith.”
“So the building tells you what time it is?”
“The building tells you where the sun is.” I set my pencil down because my hand isn’t steady enough to hold it. “There’s a difference.”
Her gaze lifts to mine, and I’m hit with the same disorienting vertigo from the porch—the feeling of being seen past every layer I’ve constructed.
She’s not looking at me like I’m her boss or her older brother’s best friend or the man who left her behind.
She’s looking at me like I’m someone who makes things matter.
It’s how she used to look at me when—
When she was too young, and I was too old, and neither of us knew what was building between us.
“When did you make these?” She’s moved to the veterans’ memorial now. Her fingers trace the air above the corridor design as though she’s seen them before.
“Years ago.” I drop into my chair and let her look because the alternative will probably make her leave.
I don’t want her to leave.
“The library was my senior thesis.”
She nods as though she remembers.
“The memorial was…”
“Your summer project,” she says quietly, stealing the air straight from my lungs in the process. “You called it the Whisper of Souls Memorial. It’s the one you designed to honor your father—the one that sings.”
Adrenaline spikes in my nervous system. She described the memorial the exact way I’ve always thought of it. No one else has ever said that.
Even the firm that accepted it called it “innovative acoustic integration” and “marketable.”
Junie called it what it is. An honor, the only way I knew how to do it.
“The wind corridors are shaped to produce harmonic resonance based on air speed and direction,” I say, and realize with a jolt that I’m talking about my work the way I used to before it became a casualty of war.
Before it became something to mourn instead of celebrate.
“Different seasons have different prevailing winds. The building plays different notes.”
“What does it play in winter?”
Nobody ever asked me that. And I didn’t get to oversee construction, so I wasn’t afforded the opportunity to explain the positioning. It ended up, in my estimation, a lackluster build because they never understood the design.