Chapter Fifteen
Lucy
The frost had gotten to the lumber before I did.
At ten past six on a Tuesday in October, the stack of fir studs behind the new Truckee fire station was furred white, every board of it, as if somebody had sifted powdered sugar over the whole pile and walked away.
I pressed my bare palm flat on the top stud and held it there until it burned.
I’d started doing that in September. It was a quick way to find out whether I was awake.
Juniper had already trotted off to inspect the porta-potty, which she regarded as her personal property.
In July this lot had been a square of ash and twisted rebar.
Now there was a slab, and the north wall was framed and sheathed, and the apparatus bay stood open to the sky like a mouth waiting for a word.
The crew didn’t roll in until seven. That gave me one hour alone with the building, and I’d come to think of that hour as the only part of my day nobody else had a claim on.
I had my clipboard, a thermos of my mother’s coffee, which could strip paint, and Owen’s thirty-foot tape with OWEN written down the side in orange paint pen, because I’d stolen four of his since high school and he’d stopped being gracious about it.
I was hooking the tape over the bottom plate when I heard the truck. I knew it before I turned. Everybody in Truckee drives a truck. Only one of them was clean.
Rhys got out in a white oxford shirt and jeans.
No jacket. My phone said twenty-six degrees.
He shut the door and stood beside it with his hands jammed in his pockets and his breath going up in short gray puffs, and he looked at the building instead of at me, which was either strategy or the first smart thing he’d done since June.
Juniper abandoned the porta-potty and went to him at her stiff old-lady trot, tail going like a windshield wiper. He crouched and took her whole face in his hands.
“Hey, Juni. Hey, beautiful.”
“Traitor,” I told her.
He stood up. “Owen said you’d be here at six.”
“Owen talks too much.”
“Owen said if I showed up before seven he’d put a nail gun through my tires.” He glanced at his tires as if checking. “Then he told me which gate to use. I think he’s conflicted.”
“Where’s your jacket?”
“Incline.” He blinked, like he’d only just noticed. “I left at four-thirty. I wasn’t thinking about jackets.”
“What were you thinking about?”
He looked at me then. His eyes were red at the rims, and he hadn’t shaved, and he had the scraped-raw look he used to get after a red-eye from New York, back when I waited up.
“Can I help?” he said.
Not can we talk. Not let me explain. I’d been braced for both. I’d rehearsed my answers in the shower. I didn’t have one for this.
Cilla would have told me to get in my car. Cilla, on the phone Sunday night, had said, Lucy, he is the CEO of the company we are about to make very unhappy, and you are not to be alone with him without a witness. I looked around. Juniper was sitting on his boot.
I held out the end of the tape.
He took it like I’d handed him a live wire. “What do I do?”
“Hold the dumb end.”
“The dumb end.”
“The hook. You put it where I tell you and you don’t move it until I say. It’s the easiest job on a building site. Nobody can mess it up.”
“People have said that about me before.” He almost smiled. “They were usually wrong.”
“Bottom plate. Corner. Hook it on the outside edge.”
He crouched and hooked it, and I walked the tape along the north wall to the first rough opening, the case clicking in my hand.
Forty-one and a half to the jack stud. I wrote it down.
The drawing said forty-one and a half. I loved when the drawing and the wood agreed.
It was one of the only things in my life that had been doing what I told it.
“Next one,” I said. “Don’t let go.”
“I’m not letting go.”
He shuffled along the plate after me, bent over, his shirt pulling tight across his shoulders. He was shivering. I didn’t offer him my canvas coat. I want that on the record.
“Dev called me,” he said to the floor. “Thursday.”
“I know. Cilla said the deal’s paused.”
“He asked me if I knew my wife owned my design.” He laughed once, not really a laugh. “I didn’t have an answer. I sat in my truck in the HQ garage for an hour and I didn’t have an answer.”
“Seventy-three and a quarter.” I wrote it down. “Keep going.”
“There’s more, Luce.”
“There’s always more with you. You’re a man of more.”
He took it. He kept the hook on the plate and took it.
“In August I was at Summit’s office in the city, and they walked me through the whole Sterling House deck.
The design pages had a label on them. Design Direction—M.
Kline. I looked at the drawings and something felt wrong.
I asked Margot about it in the elevator. ”
My pencil stopped.
“What did she say?”
“That the team built on the Sterling aesthetic. That we all shaped it.” He stared at the tape running between us, a thin yellow line across the frost. “I let it go.”
“You looked at my drawings with her name on them,” I said, “and it felt wrong, and you let it go.”
“I didn’t know they were yours.”
“Rhys.” I turned around. “That’s worse. Do you hear that? That’s not the defense you think it is.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“I know it now.” He was still crouched on the slab, holding the dumb end, looking up at me. “There’s a contract, too. Margot’s. In May I signed her new agreement. It gives her four percent of Sterling House as design co-founder. The title was in an exhibit at the back.”
“And you didn’t read the exhibit.”
“I didn’t read the exhibit.”
“Why not?”
He opened his mouth. I watched him look for something better than the truth and not find it, and I almost respected him for giving up.
“Because Margot handles everything,” he said.
The sun had come over the ridge by then. It hit the top of the sheathing, and the frost started coming off the lumber pile in a thin smoke, like the whole stack was breathing out.
“She does,” I said. “She handled me, too. She handled me for ten years and I let her, because it was easier than making you look.”
“Dev also told me about the folder.” His voice had gone low. “The scans in the archive. Margot’s assistant uploaded them. The folder’s called ‘LH Moleskines.’”
“I know what it’s called. Cilla’s asking for the upload records.”
“She knew, Lucy. She knew exactly whose they were.”
“Everybody knew whose they were.” I reeled the tape in a foot, so it went slack between us. “That was never the problem. Nobody forgot I drew them. Nobody thought it mattered.”
He had nothing for that. He looked down at the hook, still on its mark, his knuckles white on the metal.
“You can let go now,” I said.
He didn’t, for a second. Then he did, and the tape snapped home into the case with a hiss and a click, and he stood up slowly, like a man twice his age, and put his cold hands under his arms.
Out on the road, a pickup went by with a ladder rack and slowed down to look at us. Truckee is a small town. By lunch, the hardware store would know that the Sterling guy had been out at the fire station at dawn in his shirtsleeves, holding the tape for his wife.
I went to my car. I had my tote bag on the passenger seat, and in the tote bag, wrapped in a flannel pillowcase, were two of my notebooks.
Cilla had told me not to let the originals out of my sight, so I’d started carrying them in rotation, two at a time, like a woman walking very expensive dogs. Today it was #14 and #19.
I took out #14.
Black cover, soft at the corners, a coffee ring on the back from a morning in the old Incline condo. I opened it to a page I’d marked with a strip of blue painter’s tape and walked back across the slab and put it in his hands.
It was a stair. A switchback stair with a wide landing, and on the landing a window seat under a tall window, and under the window seat a boot bench with cubbies.
I’d drawn a little kid sitting on the cushion with her knees up, looking out at snow.
In the margin, in my handwriting: Kids will sit here to watch it come down.
Make the sill low enough. The date in the top corner said Feb. 11, 2017.
“That stair is in one of your lodges,” I said. “Which one?”
He looked down at it. I watched his thumb move along the edge of the page, careful, the way you’d touch something you were afraid would tear.
“Glenbrook,” he said.
“No.”
He looked again, harder. His lips moved a little, like he was walking the halls in his head. He had stood in every one of those buildings with a microphone. He had cut four ribbons with four pairs of giant scissors. He’d given the tour to bankers and journalists and a senator’s wife.
The frost kept smoking off the lumber. Juniper leaned her whole old weight against his leg.
“The one at—” He stopped. He shut his mouth. He looked at the little girl on the window seat for a long time, and his throat moved, and when he finally lifted his eyes to mine, they were wet.
“I don’t know,” he said.