Sure it is.
A pause follows. It stretches long enough that I assume they've finally let me off the hook.
Nadia
Data point: you're smiling at your phone.
I freeze, looking up from the screen. My face is doing exactly what she just typed.
I refuse to dignify that with a response.
The apartment is quiet. My laptop is still open to our email chain, his last message anchored at the top.
I close the laptop, burying the Board presentation inside it. Six AM, coffee, and the connectivity section—I will fix it in the morning. After tossing the takeout container into the recycling, I turn off the kitchen light.
The phone sits on the table, its screen glowing in the dark.
I leave it there.
Face-up.
Just in case he writes again
Chapter twelve
Tom
Sam has completely taken over the room.
She’s been here for hours before I arrive. I can tell by the coffee cups, two of them, both empty, rings on the table where she's shoved them aside to make room for the site plans.
The blueprints are spread edge to edge, her color-coded annotations running down every single margin. Her laptop is open at the far end of the long table, a high-resolution image glaring on the screen.
Her wall of printed frames is meticulously taped in sequence along the corkboard—east boundary, view corridor, waterfront pedestrian flow—and she has numbered every single one of them in the top right corner with a stark red marker.
Her system. Her room.
I set my camera bag down at the near end of the table. She glances up once, gives me a sharp, acknowledging nod, and immediately looks back at her screen.
"The connectivity sequence is off," she says. "The eastern boundary shot needs to come before the view corridor, not after."
I pull my laptop and tablet from my bag, waking them both up. "I know. I flagged it this afternoon."
"I'm restructuring from slide nine."
"Okay."
She's already back to typing.
I find slide nine on my tablet and start pulling alternate frames. I expect her to dictate what she wants, but she doesn't.
An hour in, Sam is building the complicated transition between slides eleven and twelve. She hasn't asked for the view corridor frame yet. I queue it up anyway, sliding the tablet slightly toward her.
She glances at my screen, then back at hers, and drags the frame into place without a word. She just keeps typing.
Neither of us says anything else about it. I go back to the frames.
That's how the next two hours go.
