Wren pulls the large drop cloth from the stack on the floor and spreads it without asking, which is practical and also makes mewant to tell her something I'm not ready to say yet. We move to the floor together. The stone is cold through the cloth.
I pull her close when she shivers.
We stay like that for a while. Long enough that her breathing evens out and the workshop settles back into its usual quiet — the tick of the task light, the distant sound of the road, nothing else. I pull my shirt over and put it across her shoulders without discussion. She works one arm through a sleeve and leaves the other loose and doesn't thank me, which I prefer.
At some point, she sits up and finds the rest of her clothes. Doesn't put them all on, just gets to a point where she's comfortable, and then stays sitting with her knees pulled up, looking at the Jamie stone in the corner. The cloth is folded back. The quartz vein catches the light.
"What will the inscription say?" she asks.
"Haven't decided. Something short." I sit up beside her. "He wasn't a man for speeches."
She nods. Keeps looking at it.
I get up and pour water from the thermos into the lid and hand it to her. She drinks. Hands it back. I drink. We sit on the drop cloth on the cold stone floor and neither of us is in a hurry to be somewhere else.
Then she lies back and looks at the ceiling, and I lie down beside her, and after a long moment:
"I've been designing memorial gardens for six years." To the ceiling, not to me. "My brother died when I was twenty-four. He was nineteen. Cancer — four months from diagnosis." A pause. "After he died I didn't know what to do with it. So I started designing spaces for other people's grief because it turned out to be the only thing that made mine feel useful." "My brother died when I was twenty-four. He was nineteen. Cancer — four months from diagnosis."
A pause. I wait. She needs to get this out.
"After he died I didn't know what to do with it. So I started designing spaces for other people's grief because it turned out to be the only thing that made mine feel useful."
I don't say anything. She's not telling me this because she needs a response. She's telling me because she's decided to.
"He was funny," she says. "He laughed at everything. He used to send me voice messages instead of texts because he said texts didn't capture tone, and he was worried I'd think he was serious when he wasn't."
"What was his name?" I ask.
"Daniel."
I nod.
She turns back to the ceiling. After a moment: "He would have liked you. He liked people who meant what they said."
The workshop is very quiet. Outside the window the quarry is dark and the stone face of the hillside is invisible, just mass and weight and the feeling of a thing that's been there longer than any of us.
Daniel. I'll carve that. I don't know when, and I don't tell her. But I'll carve that.
five
Ivy
MyassistantPriyawouldn’tcall before eight unless the building is metaphorically on fire, and today she's calling at six and her voice is flat in the specific way it gets when she's managing something she can't fix. That’s how I know it’s bad.
"Kevin's leaving," she says.
Kevin Lau. My business partner of four years, the person who handles the Vancouver client relationships while I'm in the field. "When?"
"He gave notice yesterday. He's going to the competing firm." A pause. "He took the Burnaby hospice project with him."
I stand in my room at the Silver Lodge with the window showing me the early morning mountains and I do the math. Burnaby was twenty percent of this year's projected revenue. The other two projects in our current queue are running four weeks behind because of permitting delays Kevin was supposed to be managing. Without Kevin handling intake, I'm the onlyperson who can do client-facing work, which means I need to go back.
Or I need to hand the Silver Ridge project off. Finish the design package, send a junior designer to execute, go back to my real life.
I tell Priya I'll call her back. Then I pull on my boots and go to the site.
The hill at six in the morning is in the particular silence of a place that hasn't started its day yet. I walk the path line and I make myself think it through properly. I could hand the Silver Ridge execution to a junior designer. The planting plan is nearly done. The design is approved. She'd just be here to oversee installation. There is a real and legitimate version of my life in which I get in the car this morning and drive back to Vancouver.
