Chapter Forty
Lucy
Owen was still on his back under the reception desk at seven in the morning, with a flashlight in his teeth, when I came in through the lobby doors.
“You said it was finished,” I said.
“It is finished.” He spat out the flashlight. “I’m admiring it.”
“From underneath?”
“Best angle.” He slid out on the moving blanket and sat up, sawdust in his beard, grinning like he was twelve. “C’mere. Get down here. I want you to see something before the suits show up.”
I was fourteen weeks pregnant and wearing a dress I’d bought specifically because it did not show that, and I was not getting down on the floor of a hotel lobby.
“I’m not lying on the floor in this dress, Owen.”
“It’s a clean floor. I cleaned it.”
“No.”
He rolled his eyes and handed me his phone with the flashlight on, and I bent at the waist as far as I was willing to go and aimed it up under the lip of the desk.
Burned into the raw walnut on the underside, where no guest would ever see it, was his shop stamp. PER L. HART SKETCH.
“Every piece,” Owen said. “Every piece in this building. Under the shelves, back of the headboards, bottom of the library ladder. Nobody’s ever going to see them.” He shrugged, suddenly shy. “I’ll know.”
I stood up too fast and had to put my hand on the desk. I told myself it was the baby. It was not entirely the baby.
“Hey,” he said, alarmed. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. You’re an idiot. Come here.”
He came, and I hugged him, sawdust and all, and he patted my back twice, awkward and exactly right.
* * *
Sterling House opened its doors at ten o’clock on a Thursday in October, in fog so thick you couldn’t see the top of the building from the sidewalk.
I had drawn that building in Moleskine #22 and #27 before anyone had a name for it, and again last winter when it was finally, legally, mine to draw.
At ten-fifteen I stood in the doorway of the library and watched the light come in through the tall north windows and fall across the long table in one even sheet, like milk. North light here.
“It’s exactly where you said it’d be,” Rhys said beside me.
“It’s where the building put it. I just wrote it down.”
“Nobody else wrote it down.”
He was in a gray suit and he was not on the program. His name was nowhere in the building. He was holding my coat, my bag and a glass of ginger ale, and he handed me the glass and I drank half of it in one go.
“You don’t miss it?” I asked. “Not even a little? This was supposed to be yours.”
“It was never mine. That was the whole problem.” He took the empty glass back. “I’d rather hold your coat.”
Juniper was asleep on the window seat by the library fire. I’d designed that low wide cushion for exactly one purpose, and the purpose was gray all the way up her muzzle now, and she’d found it in under a minute. A woman in a trench coat stopped to look at her.
“Is she part of the hotel?”
“She’s part of the design,” I said. “Dogs are allowed. It’s in the license.”
“She thinks she owns the place,” Rhys said.
“She’s the only one here who isn’t pretending.”
* * *
Jonah gave the speech. He’d been running Sterling House since January and had grown into it, and he stood at the foot of the lobby stair in a suit he kept tugging at, reading from a much-rewritten piece of paper.
He thanked Summit Ridge, and Dev, who stood at the back smiling at his shoes. He thanked the crew and the staff by name, all forty-one of them, which took four minutes and which nobody minded. Then he looked up from the paper.
“And one more,” he said. “Everybody who walks into this building is going to walk into rooms that Lucy Hart drew. Every one of them. She drew them for ten years before anybody put her name on anything, and my brother and I were a big part of why nobody did. So I’m not going to thank her.
She doesn’t need my thanks. I’m just going to tell you her name, because that’s what you do. ” He turned. “Lucy Hart. Hart & Pine.”
Two hundred people turned around to look at me.
A year and a half ago, I’d have wanted the floor to open up.
“Let them look,” Rhys said, very low, behind me. “You’re allowed.”
I let them look. I lifted my glass to Jonah. He grinned at me like a kid who’d landed a jump, and afterward he pushed through the crowd to me, red to the ears.
“Was that okay? I cut the part about the ski school.”
“It was perfect, Jonah.”
“I practiced it on Mom. She said I talked too fast.”
“You didn’t.”
My mother was crying, of course.
“I’m not crying,” she told me when I got to her. “It’s the fog. It gets in.”
“We’re indoors, Mom.”
“It gets in anyway.”
Cilla, beside her, was not crying, and was watching me over the rim of her champagne with an expression I knew very well from law school, the one she used when she’d found the clause everyone else had missed.
She came over after, when the crowd broke up.
“Ginger ale,” she said.
“It’s early.”
“Mm-hm.” She looked at my face for one long lawyerly second.
Then she looked at Rhys, who was looking at me, and then back at me, and something in her dry expression went completely soft.
She didn’t ask. She squeezed my wrist once, hard, and said, “Read everything,” which is Cilla for I love you, and went to find Dev.
* * *
At noon they unveiled the plaque.
It wasn’t a big ceremony. It was the general manager and a piece of burgundy cloth over a square of brass on the lobby wall beside the front doors, where anyone coming in off the street would pass it.
The manager pulled the cloth. There was a little patter of applause.
INTERIORS BY LUCY HART — HART & PINE.
Brass letters, set into brass. It would be there when the building was fifty years old. It would be there when I was.
I didn’t touch it. I thought I would.
“You’re not going to touch it?” Rhys asked.
“No.” People were passing on the sidewalk in the fog, not even glancing in. I found I didn’t mind. “It doesn’t need anybody to read it. It just needs to be true.”
A little boy in a raincoat stopped in the doorway, holding his father’s hand, and read it out loud, the way kids who have just learned to read will read everything.
“Interiors—by—Lucy—Hart.” He looked up at his dad. “Who’s Lucy Hart?”
“I don’t know, bud. The lady who designed it, I guess.”
The boy considered this and then looked across the lobby, straight at me, as if he could tell.
“Is that her?”
Rhys, beside me, didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. I bent down, as far as I was willing to go these days, and said, “That’s me.”
* * *
That night we stayed in 407, a corner room on the north side. It had a window seat, and a desk with Owen’s stamp under it, and a watercolor of the lake at dusk over the bed, printed small and signed in the corner. There was one in every room. Nobody was going to sweep them up.
Juniper was asleep on the window seat within a minute. Rhys took off his shoes and lay back across the bed and let out a breath like he’d been holding it since January.
“You were perfect,” he said at the ceiling.
“I stood there and drank ginger ale.”
“You were perfect at it.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed. There was a small, firm curve under my dress that nobody at the opening had seen. We’d told my mother, and the fern lady in Sacramento, and no one else.
“Cilla knows,” I said.
“Cilla knew before you did.” He reached over and put his hand on my back, low, where it ached. “How are you? Really.”
“Fourteen weeks.” I said it slowly, because I still wanted to hear it. “We’re past it, Rhys. Past the week. Past the one after.”
“I know. I was on the floor.”
He had been. The night we passed it, he’d sat down on the floor of the loft with his back against my drafting table and his hand on my knee and stayed there until I fell asleep, exactly like he’d promised on the dock.
I reached into my bag and took out a notebook. A new one, black, with No. 34 on the first page in my own hand.
“I drew something,” I said. “I want you to see it before anybody else.”
He sat up.
I opened it to the page. It was a plan, and an elevation, and a watercolor, all on the same spread, the way I draw when I’m happy.
The small room off our bedroom at the owner’s house at Glenbrook.
The one with the north window. The one we had closed the door on in 2020 and filled with boxes and never talked about again.
“That’s the box room,” he said quietly.
“It was.”
In the drawing, the boxes were gone. There was a rocking chair by the window where the light came in.
There was a crib under the slope of the ceiling with a note in the margin in my small capitals: Owen — walnut?
ask him. There was a shelf at a height a child could reach.
And in the corner, in pencil: L.H. & R.S. (holds the tape).
He didn’t say anything for a long time. He put his thumb very gently on the edge of the page, beside the window, as if he could feel the light there.
“Luce,” he said finally, and his voice wasn’t steady at all.
I leaned against his shoulder. Out the window, the fog was lifting off the city and the lights were coming on, one building at a time, rooms full of people I would never meet.
“For ten years I drew rooms for other people to be happy in,” I said. “This one I drew for us.”