Callum set his phone face-down on the desk, as if the screen itself were an accusation. Outside, the light was failing. He watched the city dissolve into shadow and did not pick the phone back up.
Chapter Twelve
HOLLAND
The textfrom Callum arrived at 7:42 p.m., and I almost deleted it without reading.
I didn't. I read it. And then I sat on the edge of Sloane's guest bed, staring at the screen until the words stopped swimming.
Come home. You've made your point. This is getting embarrassing for both of us. Let's handle this like adults, not through lawyers and dramatics.
Fourteen days since I'd walked out of the lakefront house. Ten days since Mara filed the petition. Three days since the process server confirmed delivery—Callum, cornered in the lobby of his own building, accepting the papers in front of a security guard who still called me Mrs. Hart.
He still thought this was a negotiation.
The divorce was not final yet. The courts did not move because I was ready for them to. But the end had paperwork now. It had a case number. It had a timestamp. It had left my body and entered the world. Callum couldn't kiss my forehead, call me insecure, or ask me to be reasonable and walk out of the room while I was still talking.
I opened my phone and typed the response I should have sent years ago. No preamble. No softening. No apology for his feelings.
Callum, you were served. The petition was not an opening offer, and I am not returning to the house or to you. Any further communication about personal or legal matters needs to happen through Mara Ellison’s office. If you need to reach me about Crestline business, direct it through official channels.
I read it twice. The cleanest boundary I had ever written him, and it took me less than ninety seconds to compose. I hit send before I could second-guess it, then turned the phone face down on the nightstand.
My hands weren't shaking. My pulse was steady. I'd expected some kind of internal earthquake, but what arrived instead was the unique silence of a room after a window has finally been shut—the moment you realize the draft has been there so long you'd stopped feeling it as cold.
Sloane was at a foundation dinner downtown. The apartment was silent except for the hum of the building's heating system. I sat there for another ten minutes, letting the stillness settle around me, and then I picked up my keys.
Pulling up to the Wabash building, I left the car running for a minute, the engine a low hum in the quiet street. It wasn't rescue I was after. It was ballast. I just needed to stand in a room where the floor felt solid under my feet.
The Wabash studio glowed against the night skyline, the tall windows running floor to ceiling and catching the city lights in long amber streaks across the polished concrete floor. Finn was at his drafting table when I came up, sleeves rolled to his elbows, glasses pushed into his hair, a half-finished elevation spread across the board in front of him.
He looked up when the elevator doors opened, and he didn't ask why I was there. "He nodded once and set down his pencil. "There's coffee in the kitchen. The good kind.
"Theo’s?”
"Theo's. He left a full pot before he went home. I think he was trying to bribe me into leaving at a reasonable hour."
"Did it work?"
"I'm still here, aren't I?"
I poured myself a cup and walked back to the drafting table. The studio was warm, the kind of warmth that came from too many lights left on and too many hours spent in the same square footage. Finn's workspace had a logic to it that only made sense once you looked long enough: material samples stacked in neat towers, project binders lined up by color code, and a wall of pin-up boards covered in sketches, site photos, and annotated elevations. It looked like a mind that had been given permission to spread out.
"What are you working on?" I asked.
He pulled his glasses down and gestured at the board. "Lakefront property in Evanston. Client wants a modern addition on a 1920s Tudor. They want it to feel seamless, but the original structure has a twelve-inch stone foundation and the addition site slopes toward the water at a six-degree grade."
"So seamless is a lie."
"Seamless is a lie they're paying me to make look true." He slid the elevation toward me. "Tell me what you see."
I studied the drawing. The cantilevered deck he'd sketched extended forty feet over the water, supported by a series of steel micropiles driven into the lakebed. The roofline was clean, but the connection point between the old stone and the new steel was too sharp. It would read as an argument instead of a conversation.
"You need a transition element," I said. "Something that acknowledges the shift in material without apologizing for it. A glass connector, maybe. Two stories, full transparency. Let the old house and the new addition both be what they are and let the glass mark where one thing meets another."
Finn was quiet for a moment. Then he picked up his pencil and started sketching on a clean sheet of trace paper laid over the elevation. "Two stories of glass. Steel frame. Keep the sight lines to the lake open."
"And you don't lose the deck cantilever. The glass sits behind it, not in front."
