“Yes.”
“Good news?”
“Someone wants to meet me about a project.”
“Because of your work?”
“Because of my work.”
Sloane smiled then. Not the sharp smile she used when someone underestimated her. Not the polite smile she used at donor lunches. A real one, warm and proud and so much like our mother’s that I had to look away.
“Look at that,” she said. “A door.”
I thought about Finn saying the same thing in his studio. Not an escape plan. A door.
For years, Callum had told me the door was his. His company. His clients. His rooms. His future. He’d let me stand inside as long as I kept the lights on and didn’t ask whose name was on the deed.
But this door had my name on it.
I picked up the pen again.
Under the list of what was mine, I wrote a second heading.
What I do next.
The first line came easily.
Get the documents.
The second took longer.
Stop letting them control the story.
By the time I wrote the third, my hand was steady.
Walk into the gala with proof.
Sloane read it over my shoulder and didn’t say anything for a long moment.
Then she asked, “Are you planning to confront him there?”
“I don’t know.”
It was the truth, but an incomplete one. The final plans weren’t drawn, but I knew the building’s core structure. I could feel its load-bearing points: my name, my work, the story corrected in public. The exact approach, the load path—thatwas still shifting. I was still calculating the precise point where pressure would make the false structure crack.
“I’m not interested in making a scene for its own sake,” I said.
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
“I want it clean. Documented. Impossible to dismiss. I want to build a case, not just make a scene.”
“That does.”
I glanced at the seating chart again. Table seven. A deliberate distance between me and my clients.
“They’re going to make me a footnote,” I said.
Sloane met my eyes. “Then don’t let them.”
