"I want to move that earlier," she says. "Right before the waterfront."
I shake my head. "I’d keep it here. If you show the plaza first, the reveal dies. They need to feel the walk."
Sam’s pen stops.
She studies the sequence on my tablet, then flips back to her notes.
"Show me."
I drag three frames into a new order. Street. Approach. Then the wide sunlit plaza.
She watches the progression carefully. "Okay," she says finally. "You’re right."
She draws an arrow in her notes and renumbers the list.
No asterisk. No hedge. Just the arrow.
I like when someone just gets it.
We move on.
"This one—" she says, pointing to a frame near the end. "It reads differently than the others. Too quiet."
"Because that block is quiet at seven in the morning," I say. "It’s locals grabbing coffee and walking dogs. People who actually live there."
Sam sets her pen down.
"Investors are going to question it," she says. "To them, energy equals money."
Here it comes.The corporate compromise.
I wait for her to kill the shot.
"But," she says, tapping her finger once against the table, "it shows we aren’t hiding anything. It builds trust."
She studies the image another moment.
"We keep it."
"Good," I say. "We keep it."
For the next few minutes, we don’t hit a single wall.
I pull up the afternoon frames, explaining how the shadows fall differently than her blueprints suggest, and she leans closer, tracking the light across the screen. She leans closer, hershoulder brushing mine as she tracks the light across the screen. Neither of us pulls away
I don’t have to translate what I’m seeing.
I don’t have to defend it.
Somewhere around the fifth minute, breathing in the scent of her vanilla coffee, it hits me that I’m completely in my element.
Collaborating with someone who actually understands what I’m seeing.
My phone suddenly vibrates against the table.
I glance down, see a text from my sister, and flip the phone face-down. I don’t want anything breaking the momentum.
"So the sequence builds west to east," I say, sliding the tablet a little closer to her. "Which means if you open with the transit hub—"
