CHAPTER 1
SILAS
Marshall Covington had gray hair around his temples. It wasn’t something I’d noticed until he sat down across from me and my father under the glaring fluorescent lights of the conference room, but the salt was definitely salting. Reclining back in my chair, I turned my attention away from him to stare out the window. The sunlight and the blue sky were preferable to the too-bright artificial light, but it was only four in the afternoon, and I had at least three hours of work left to do after we wrapped up this meeting that most assuredly should have been an email.
Marshall Covington owned an architectural design firm.
And so did my father.
One was better than the other, but Marshall was yet to realize he was outmatched. If not by my father’s talent and reach, then by mine. I was more than twenty years their junior, with fresh ideas and a solid understanding of concepts that hadn’t even existed when the two of them had gone into business.
My dad had been one of Marshall’s professors in design school, or that was the story I’d been told. Marshall was capable, but he was arrogant and rude. He’d left critical feedbackon the graduate survey about my dad’s teaching, and the grudge had never died down. Things had only gotten worse once my dad left teaching and opened his design firm. Marshall was getting himself established, and the two of them had run neck and neck against each other, rising up through the ranks in the city, putting newer firms out of business before they even got started.
Both men were sickeningly competent and capable. But they were both getting old.
I would turn twenty-five in three days, which would mark twenty-five days and nine months that my father had been preparing for me to follow in his footsteps. My mom, before she passed, had been the only thing that gave Stanley Ayres a work/life balance. She’d been gone for just shy of seven years. After she died, he walked away from teaching—something he’d been doing part-time for years—and threw himself headfirst into the firm. It was only after my mom’s passing that the competition between my father and Marshall really started to take off.
It had always been there, but it quickly became so much worse. A grumbled name around the dinner table, a contract lost here and there, but after we put my mom into the ground, my father’s focus shifted from her to Marshall. I was even an afterthought in most cases, which was a relief…sometimes. He’d put so much pressure on me for all of my life to be smarter, to be better, to be more innovative…sometimes I just wanted a break.
Three months back, a new bid request was circulated for a massive commercial and residential project tucked against the hillside just off the Cahuenga Pass. It was worth millions of dollars, and my father threw us both into the bid process without even taking a breath first. The prep had been tedious, the estimation some of the hardest I’d ever tried to manage, and we were down to the wire.
Two firms in the running.
Ayres and Covington.
“I’m not walking away from this,” Marshall said to my father with a definitive pronunciation in his words that made it clear to me he was done with the conversation. There was no further argument to be had. I swallowed hard and turned my attention away from the sidewalk and back to my father’s rival.
He was dressed for a Friday, navy slacks and a crisp white button-up, no tie. The top button of the shirt was undone, revealing a tan throat that fanned out into a muscular chest. I imagined Marshall had a work/life balance, with muscles like the ones he kept so neatly hidden beneath the starched seams of his shirt. As he spoke, he popped his cuffs undone and rolled his sleeves up toward his elbows, revealing more tan skin, more muscles, these dusted with dark brown hair untouched by the gray that had already begun to wisp over his ears.
My father, on the other hand, had gone gray long ago. Gray hair to match his gray suit, and a complete lack of interest in anything that would have broken up the familiar monotony of his life.
My father had called Marshall down in an attempt to smooth-talk him out of the running entirely, which had been a flawed plan from the start. I’d told him the offense would make him look weak. It would let Marshall know we weren’t as surefooted with the bid as we should have been, but since my mother passed, he listened to reason less and less.
And to me—evenless.
My father was going to run Ayres Design into the ground before he even handed me the keys. Winning this project was probably the only thing that would ensure I had a business to inherit, but neither of the two men in the room with me was going to budge on their morals—or their ideas.
“You’re going to lose it then,” my father warned.
Marshall made a lilting noise in the back of his throat, andI sat up straight, folding my hands together on the cool mahogany table, hoping to look like the attentive and talented son everyone knew I was.
Marshall glanced at me, his blue eyes flashing with amusement.
“You can come work for me, you know,” he said, and to my left, my father made an indignant sound. “I read the article you published inLA Design Digestabout using solar panels to power water purification in tandem with greywater and rainwater collection systems.”
Marshall’s tongue darted out, worrying a spot in the corner of his lower lip.
“And?” I prompted.
“It was brilliant,” he said simply.
“It’s a cost most won’t be willing to pay,” my father interjected. “It’s not practical or necessary.”
Marshall bit the inside of his cheek. I saw how it hollowed, how he swallowed back whatever he wanted to say next, and I found myself learning forward, desperate to hear another word of praise—or argument—from the man my father had spent three decades making an enemy of.
“Like I said.” He stood up and cracked both his thumbs before sliding his left hand into his pocket. I stood up immediately after him, another ingrained trigger. The meeting was over, time to smile and shake hands, time to say goodbye, time to get back to work.
Marshall threw a quick glance at me—fleeting, dismissive—and I fought the urge to sink back down into the chair beside my father. Instead, I stuck my hand out to initiate the shake.
