Chapter Eleven
Rhys
Dev Kapoor slid the deck across the table to me like a man sliding over the keys to a car he’d already bought for himself.
“Sixty-two pages,” he said. “Our investment committee read every one. You know how rare that is? I’ve got partners who don’t read their kids’ report cards.”
Summit Ridge Capital lived on the twenty-second floor of a glass tower on the Embarcadero, with the kind of view that makes you feel you should have worn better shoes. The Bay Bridge ran out the window. It was the last Tuesday in August, and I’d been in that room for two hours nodding at numbers.
Margot sat on my left with her laptop open and her phone face down, which is how you know Margot is taking a room seriously. Two of Dev’s associates sat across from us. On the wall screen, the cover page glowed: STERLING HOUSE. THE MOUNTAIN COMES TO THE CITY.
“I want to walk you through the final version before it goes to the lenders,” Dev said. “You’ve seen pieces. You haven’t seen it all together. Section four is the one I want you to sit with.”
He clicked. The screen went dark for half a second, and then it filled with a room.
It was a library. Tall windows down one side. A rolling ladder on a brass rail. A low, deep window seat under the glass, and a stone hearth at the far end with two leather chairs pulled in close, as if two people had just gotten up and would be right back.
It wasn’t a rendering. Not exactly. It was a drawing—pencil, with a gray wash over it—cleaned up and set on a white page with a lot of air around it. Down in the bottom corner, in the brand’s clean sans-serif, a line of small type.
Design Direction—M. Kline.
“This,” Dev said, “is what sold my committee.”
He clicked. A lobby, with a massive stone hearth and a long bench built into the base of it. Click. A guest room, the bed set into an alcove, a reading lamp on an arm, a window seat piled with pillows. Click. A bar with a curved banquette. Click. A stair.
Every page had the same small line of type in the corner.
“I’ve seen two hundred hotel decks in my career,” Dev said.
“Everybody shows renderings. Nobody shows sketches. These feel like somebody’s hand, you know?
Like a real person stood in the room and imagined sitting there.
My committee looked at that library and every single one of them wanted to live in it.
” He grinned at Margot. “You should be proud.”
“It’s a team effort,” Margot said. “Really.”
One of the associates leaned forward. “Our lenders will ask. Are the originals in-house? For the IP schedule?”
“Everything’s in our archive,” Margot said. “Fully digitized. We’re very organized.”
“Great. Love organized.”
I went back to the library.
It was like hearing a song you know played in the wrong key. Something about the ladder rail. The way the line of it ended with a small flick, like a pencil lifting off the paper a little early. Something about the light, drawn not as light at all but as the paper just left alone.
It looked like Glenbrook.
Of course it did. That was what we were selling—the lodges, brought down the mountain. I’d said that sentence myself, in this room, in April. But it didn’t just look like Glenbrook. It looked like something I’d walked past.
“Rhys?” Dev said. “You with us?”
“Yeah.” I looked up. “Sorry. Yeah. It’s great. It’s beautiful.”
“Beautiful sells,” Dev said happily. He leaned back. “Hey—how’s Lucy? She’s coming to the brand reveal, right? My wife’s dying to meet her. She’s obsessed with Glenbrook.”
“Lucy’s taking a little time,” Margot said, before I could open my mouth. “Up in Truckee. She’s doing a sweet community project.”
“A firehouse,” I said.
Dev laughed. “A firehouse? Good for her.”
“She’s designing it.”
“Love that.” He was already clicking. “Okay. Financials. Brace yourselves, it’s good news.”
* * *
Margot and I rode down alone.
The elevator was mirrored on three sides. A lot of Margots, checking a lot of phones. A lot of me, looking at the floor numbers like they owed me money.
“Those design pages,” I said. “Section four.”
She didn’t look up. “Aren’t they gorgeous? Dev’s thrilled.”
“Who drew them?”
Now she looked up. Her face was pleasant, open, mildly curious. “The renderers worked off our references. Glenbrook, mostly. The library, the great room. It’s all the house style.”
“They don’t look like renderings.”
“That was the brief. Hand-drawn, warm, personal. Investors are sick of computer glass.” She smiled. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“The label says M. Kline.”
Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen.
“Rhys.” She said it gently, the way you’d talk a nervous guest off a ski lift.
“The team built on the Sterling aesthetic, which we all shaped. That’s the whole idea.
It’s a family resemblance. And somebody has to own the design direction for the investors.
Dev needs one name to point at. You want the footer to say committee? ”
It sounded right. Everything Margot said sounded right. That was why I’d kept handing her things for ten years, and why, when she said it, the uneasy thing in my chest sat down and was quiet.
“Fine,” I said. “Sure.”
“You okay?” She tilted her head. “You’ve been weird since June.”
“I’m fine.”
Which we all shaped.
I tried to think of one line in those drawings I had shaped. One window. One chair.
The elevator opened on the lobby. Dev’s associate was waiting there to walk us to lunch, holding the door, talking about a place with a view of the ferry building and a very good halibut.
I let it go.
I want to be exact about that. I didn’t forget. I felt the wrong note, and I held it in my hand for eleven floors, and then the doors opened and there was a man with a reservation, and I set it down and ate the halibut.
* * *
I was supposed to fly back to Reno at five and have the truck driven up later. I didn’t.
I told Margot I had a call, which was a lie, and I took an Uber to the garage where I’d left the truck, and I drove east. The Bay Bridge. The long flat hum of Interstate 80 through Sacramento with the sun behind me.
Jonah called somewhere past Auburn, where the road starts to climb.
“Margot says you bailed on the flight,” he said. “She says you had a call.”
“I did have a call. I’m on it. It’s you.”
“Where are you?”
“Eighty.”
“East or west?”
I didn’t answer. The road bent up into the pines, and the air coming through the vents went cool.
“You’re driving to Truckee,” my brother said.
“I’m driving home. Truckee’s on the way.”
“Truckee’s on the way to Incline the way Idaho’s on the way.” He was quiet for a second. “What happened in the city?”
“Nothing. The deck’s great. Dev loves it.” I watched the mile markers go by. “Jonah. When’s the last time you saw Lucy draw?”
“Christmas,” he said, like it was nothing. “Two years ago. She drew Mom’s kitchen on a paper towel so Mom could figure out where to put the new fridge. Took her about a minute.” A pause. “Why?”
“No reason.”
“Rhys.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said, and hung up on him, which I never do, and drove the rest of the way with the radio off.
It was after ten when I turned onto Owen’s road. The shop was dark, but the upstairs window was lit, one long yellow rectangle floating over the black shape of the building, and I pulled onto the shoulder across the road and killed the lights before I could think about it.
She was there.
She was at the drafting table, turned three-quarters away from me, a desk lamp on its arm pulled down low over the paper.
Her hair was up in a knot with something stuck through it.
She had her phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder, and she was talking to somebody, and while I watched she tipped her head back and laughed.
I couldn’t hear it. But I could see the whole shape of her going loose with it, her free hand coming up to cover her mouth, the way it does when something surprises a laugh out of her.
I didn’t know who she was talking to.
Her mother, maybe. One of her friends from Berkeley—there was one in the city, a lawyer, I’d met her at our wedding and maybe twice since. I sat in the dark across from my wife’s window and understood that I didn’t know who made her laugh anymore. I didn’t know what she ate for lunch.
She was still laughing. She said something, and shook her head, and then her right hand came back down to the paper.
And she drew.
She didn’t stop talking to do it. The pencil just moved, long and easy, like part of the conversation. Then she leaned in and the laugh went out of her face and something else came into it, something private and very calm, and her hand began to move faster, and short, and sure.
I sat there with both hands on the wheel. Headlights swept across the cab and moved on, and she didn’t look up, and I didn’t want her to. I wanted to sit in that dark cab until the sun came up and watch every line.
I tried to remember the last time I’d done that.
Not glanced over her shoulder on the way to a call.
Not asked if the bar plan would be ready by Thursday.
Watched. Sat down and watched my wife draw a room into being, the way I used to at the end of the dock, back when I didn’t know yet what she was making and couldn’t wait to find out.
I went back one year. Then five. Then eight.
I couldn’t find it. I hadn’t watched her draw in years.