"So, the deck still reads as the primary gesture."
"Exactly."
He worked for a few minutes, and I watched the solution take shape under his hand. He drew with the same precision he'd had in college: clean lines, no wasted marks, every stroke intentional. When he finished, he slid the trace paper toward me.
"Better?"
I studied it. "Better. But the glass connector needs to be set back three feet from the stone. Otherwise, the old foundation looks like it's being swallowed instead of honored."
He made the adjustment without questioning it. That was how it was with Finn. He didn't need me to explain my reasoning. He trusted my vision.
"You're good at this," he said. Not a compliment. The same register he'd used to tell me where the coffee was.
"I know."
"Do you?" He set the pencil down and met my gaze. "Because I've watched you spend seven years making Callum Hart look like a genius, and I'm not sure you do know. Or maybe you've just never let yourself."
I didn't answer right away. The city lights flickered through the windows, and somewhere below us a car horn sounded, muted and distant. In the quiet of the studio, the normal rules of deflection seemed to fall away.
"You remember the Cantilever Competition," I said finally. "Junior year."
"I remember."
Callum presented my design as his own. He stood up in front of the whole department and walked through my load calculations, my material specs, my connection details... and he never said my name once. And I let him. I sat in the back row and told myself it didn't matter who got the credit, as long as the work was good."
Finn didn't look away. "I remember that too. I remember sitting three rows behind you and watching you watch him. You were the only person in that room who knew the design inside out, and you were letting him take it apart piece by piece like he'd built it himself."
"You never said anything."
It wasn't my place. You were with him." He paused, his gaze steady. "But I noticed. I've been noticing for a decade, Holland. The way he takes your work and calls it his." I flinched, a tiny motion, but he saw it. "The way he takes your ideas and presents them like they occurred to him in the shower. The way he stands in front of rooms full of people and accepts credit for a vision you built from the ground up."
I felt something shift in my chest, not a collapse but a release. A knot in my spine I'd carried for years finally gave way. "You saw it."
"I saw it."
"Before I was ready to see it myself."
"Yes."
He didn't move toward me. He stayed on his side of the drafting table, the trace paper still between us, his hands resting flat on the board. It wasn't a performance of patience. He was simply patient.
"I sent him a message tonight," I said. "I reminded him he was served. In writing. No room for negotiation."
Finn's expression didn't change. "How do you feel?"
"Clear. Which is not what I expected."
"What did you expect?"
"Grief. Guilt. Some kind of collapse." My gaze fell to the elevation, to the glass connector he'd drawn, by the way it let the old and the new stand side by side without forcing either to apologize. "I did my grieving already. I've been doing it for years without calling it that.
"What are you calling it now?"
I met his eyes. "The end of something. The beginning of something else. I don't know yet. I don't want to name it before I've lived it."
He nodded slowly. "That's fair."
"I didn't come here tonight because I need you to fix this. I didn't come here because I need a rescue. I need you to understand that."
