Chapter Sixteen
Rhys
I found the stair on the way to the elevator.
Third from the end. A switchback stair with a wide landing. A window seat under a tall window, a boot bench with cubbies underneath. A little kid in a red hat, knees up, nose to the glass, watching snow come down.
Our second lodge. The photographer had taken it the winter we opened. I’d picked that picture for the wall myself, because the kid made people smile.
“Morning, Mr. Sterling.” The receptionist was holding out a coffee she’d already made for me, because she always did. “You’re early. Is everything okay?”
“Is Margot in?”
“Since six-thirty.” She hesitated. “Do you want a jacket? We have fleeces in the—”
“No. Thank you.”
I took the stairs instead of the elevator. I needed the two floors to get my hands to stop shaking, and they didn’t.
Margot’s office is the corner one on the lake side, the one I gave her in 2019 because she’d earned it and because I didn’t want it.
She was at her standing desk with two monitors and a headset, reading something with a pen in her teeth.
She saw me through the glass and held up one finger. I opened the door anyway.
She took the pen out of her mouth and the headset off. “I’ll call you back,” she said to someone, and hung up. Then she looked at my shirt, my jeans, my face. “Where have you been?”
“Truckee.”
Something moved behind her eyes and was gone. Margot has the best poker face I’ve ever seen, and I’ve sat across from casino men.
“Okay,” she said. “Sit down. You look like hell.”
“I’m fine standing.”
“Then I’ll sit.” She came around the desk and leaned against the front of it and crossed her arms, and we were three feet apart. “Dev called you.”
“Thursday.”
“And you went to see her.”
“I went to hold a tape measure.” I heard how that sounded. I didn’t care. “Margot. The deck. The fourteen drawings on the design pages. They’re Lucy’s. They’re out of her notebooks, with her dates on them.”
“I know where they’re from.”
“You put your name on them.”
“I put a direction on them.” She said it the way she walks me through a P&L, patient, a little slower than necessary.
“Rhys. Those notebooks were sitting in plastic tubs in your mudroom closet. Under a water heater. I had them scanned in 2023 because a pipe was going to burst someday, and every one of those drawings was going to turn into pulp, and nobody on earth would ever have seen them.”
“They were on two shelves in her study. I counted them into a box myself. So you saved them.”
“Yes. Frankly, yes.”
“By labeling them M. Kline.”
“By turning them into a brand that a private-equity firm will pay four hundred million dollars for.” Her voice didn’t rise.
It never does. “Lucy had ten years to do something with those drawings. She didn’t.
She didn’t want to. She sat at your dining table and drew beautiful rooms and handed them over and went back to her watercolors.
Lucy never wanted credit. I gave her work a future. ”
I stood there with that. The lake was very blue behind her. A seaplane was coming in low over the water toward the marina, and I watched it land, because I couldn’t look at her.
“Did you ever ask her?” I said. “If she wanted it?”
“Did you?”
It went in clean. She knew it would. She watched it go in.
“Everybody knew they were hers,” Margot said, more gently. “Everybody in this building knew Lucy drew the rooms. Nobody cared, Rhys. Including you. I’m the only one who did anything with it.”
“The exhibit on your contract,” I said. “The four percent. Design co-founder.”
“You signed it.”
“I didn’t read it.”
“That’s not my fault.” She uncrossed her arms and pushed off the desk. “I put it in front of you. It was clearly marked. You had it for two days. You initialed every page.”
“I trusted you.”
“And I have never once let you down.” That, finally, had some heat in it.
“Ten years. I built the systems. I built the operating model. I hired every general manager on that wall downstairs. I’ve been on every call at midnight when a boiler blew or a guest fell down the stairs, while you were out selling the story. I’ve earned a piece of something.”
“You have,” I said. “Not that piece.”
I went back to my own office and shut the door. It’s mostly glass, too. I didn’t care about that either.
Dev picked up on the second ring. He was in a car. I could hear a turn signal.
“Rhys. Tell me you have good news.”
“I have true news. I don’t know if it’s good.”
A pause. The turn signal stopped. “Go ahead.”
So I told him. All of it, in order, the way I’ve never told anybody anything.
That every room in every Sterling lodge came out of my wife’s sketchbooks.
That she was never on the payroll, never had a contract, never signed a single piece of paper.
That I’d seen the Design Direction label in his conference room in August and felt it snag and asked one question in an elevator and let it drop.
That I had signed Margot’s agreement without reading the exhibit.
That at six-thirty this morning I hadn’t known which lodge had a window seat on the stair landing.
When I finished, the car had stopped. I could hear him breathing.
“You understand what you’re telling me,” Dev said.
“Yes.”
“You’re telling me the core IP of the brand I’m about to buy belongs to somebody who isn’t at the table and hasn’t been paid a dollar.”
“She should be at the table.”
“That’s a lovely sentiment. It’s also a nightmare.” I heard him exhale. “I’m going to need all of this from your counsel. In writing. Dates, documents, anything that shows who drew what and when.”
“You’ll have it.”
“Rhys.” A different voice now. Not the partner. The man. “For what it’s worth, I’d rather hear this from you than from her lawyer. Again.”
“It shouldn’t have come from her lawyer the first time.”
“No,” he agreed. “It shouldn’t have.”
I set the phone down on the desk. When I looked up, Margot was standing in my doorway.
I hadn’t heard the door. She had her phone in her hand, and I understood that Dev had already called her, or someone from Summit had, or she’d simply stood outside the glass and read my lips.
She’d been reading me for ten years. It wouldn’t have been hard.
She closed the door behind her.
“What did you just do?”
“I told Dev the truth.”
“You told Dev your version.” Her face had gone very still and very pale.
“Do you understand what happens now? Summit’s counsel is going to crawl through every file in this building.
The valuation’s going to take a hit. The board is going to hear that the CEO sank his own deal because he felt bad about his marriage. ”
“That’s not why.”
“Isn’t it?” She laughed, short and disbelieving. “Rhys. Look at me. Four hundred million dollars. The launch, the partnership, every person in this building whose equity rides on Sterling House. You’d blow up a four-hundred-million-dollar deal over sketchbooks?”
I thought about the kid in the red hat on the stair landing.
I thought about Lucy on the slab this morning with the tape case clicking in her hand and her pencil stopping when I said M.
Kline. I thought about the place card I’d rescued from a trash bag in June, the lake at dusk, which I still hadn’t been able to leave anywhere for long, so it lived in my wallet.
“They’re not sketchbooks,” I said. “They’re the company.”
She stared at me. Then she turned around and walked out, and she didn’t slam the door.
Margot doesn’t slam doors. She closed it with a soft, final click, and through the glass I watched her walk the length of the office floor without looking left or right, and everyone at their desks looked down at their screens as she passed.
* * *
I called Lucy at nine that night from the end of the floating dock.
The lodge was lit up behind me, forty rooms of gold windows, people eating dinner in a great room she’d drawn on a napkin. The water was black and flat, and it was cold enough that the boards were starting to go white again at the edges.
She picked up on the fourth ring. She didn’t say hello.
“It’s me,” I said.
“I know. Your name comes up.”
Somewhere behind her, Juniper sighed the long, whistling sigh she does when she lies down. I could picture the studio. The drafting lamp. The north window black.
“I talked to Margot,” I said. “And I told Dev everything. The deck, the label, the contract. The stair. All of it.”
Silence. Not the hang-up kind. The listening kind.
“It was your second lodge,” I said. “The stair. It’s on the wall in the lobby at HQ. I walked past it every day for six years.”
“I know,” she said quietly.
I pressed my free hand against the cold railing. I wanted to say a hundred things, and every one of them came out of me the same shape it always does, the shape of a plan, a solution, a man in a good suit walking into a room.
“Luce. I’m going to fix it.”
She was quiet for so long I checked to see if the call had dropped. Out on the lake a loon called, once, that sound like someone laughing and crying at the same time.
“Don’t fix it,” Lucy said. “Say it out loud.”