“You too,” I said.
He paused at the door, one hand on the frame. “For what it’s worth, Finn’s been talking about your work since before I met him. Not in a competitive way. In a ‘that’s the standard’ way.” Then he was gone, the door closing with a quiet mechanical snap behind him.
I stared at the door for a moment. “He doesn’t know me.”
“He knows the work,” Finn said. “That’s different.”
I stood up and carried my mug to the small sink near the coffee setup. Rinsed it, set it in the drying rack. It was a small, ordinary action, something to do with my hands while my mind turned over what he’d offered.
A door. Not an escape plan. A door.
“I should go,” I said. “It’s a forty-minute drive back.”
Finn walked me to the elevator. The hallway was narrow, brick on one side, and our footsteps sent small, flat echoes back from the brick walls. He didn’t touch me. He didn’t stand too close. But when I turned to face him, his gaze was on me in a way that felt deliberate.
“You’re not invisible,” he said. “You’re just surrounded by people who benefit from pretending you are.”
I opened my mouth to say something dismissive, something that would let me leave without acknowledging how much that sentence landed. But nothing came out.
“I know you’re not asking for help,” he continued. “I know you’re not looking for someone to rescue you. That’s not what this is. But I want you to know that I see what’s happening. I’ve always seen it. And if you decide to stop letting them rewrite you, you won’t be doing it alone.”
The elevator arrived with a low chime. The doors slid open. I stepped inside, and Finn stayed where he was, one hand on the doorframe.
“Good night, Holland.”
“Good night, Finn.”
The doors closed. My reflection wavered in the brushed steel, washed out by the fluorescent light. Not an escape plan. A door. Not a rescue. A clear view of what respect felt like.
I’d been starving for it and I hadn’t even known.
Chapter Nine
HOLLAND
I was stillon Lake Shore Drive, forty minutes from the city, when my phone lit up. I’d spent the whole drive deciding I wasn’t going back to the office today.
David Okonkwo. Seven years at Crestline, senior project manager, the one person on the Thompson job who’d come to me three weeks ago about the foundation wall instead of looking the other way. His message had no punctuation. Three lines. The kind a man writes after he’s run out of other options.
David Okonkwo
At the Alden estate. Laura’s been here since eight. She told the client she could handle the stair hall but the numbers aren’t working. Can you come?
I pulled over at a gas station on Division and read it twice. The Alden estate was a Gold Coast renovation, a historic limestone mansion with a central stair hall that needed to be opened up without compromising the 1890s structural bones. The span was a challenge. The load calculations were a liability. And Laura had apparently told the client she could handle it.
I hadn’t been in the office for four days. Callum hadn’t asked why. He’d sent a single text, something careful about giving me space. I’d read it as a calculated pause, not concern. He waswaiting for a crisis to pull me back in—a crisis he wouldn’t have to solve himself.
I called David.
“Walk me through it.”
“The stair hall,” he said, the words tight with a morning spent arguing. “She wants to open the sightlines to the back gallery. Twelve-foot span, right through a load-bearing limestone wall.” I didn’t need to see the plans; I could already feel the math. “So she needs a transfer beam the existing footings can’t support.”
“Exactly. She sold it to the client as a design feature. The client loves it. The engineer won’t sign off.”
“Of course the engineer won’t sign off.”
“She’s been down there for two hours, trying to force the numbers. The client is back at one, Holland. He’s expecting a solution.”
