Sloane pointed at me. “Don’t make that face. You’re allowed to have backup.”
“I know.”
“Knowing backup exists isn’t the same as actually being willing to use it, Holland.”
“I’ll text him when I’m on my way.”
“Good.”
I looked around the guest room. The legal pad on the desk. The duffel bag half-unpacked near the closet. The morning light on the floor. It was not my home. Not really. But it was the firstplace in weeks where I had woken up without feeling like the walls were measuring my stress points.
Maybe that was enough for now.
I picked up the seating chart again and saved a copy to my private drive. Then I saved another to a folder labeled GALA.
The word looked almost ridiculous on the screen. Gala. As if this was still about champagne and speeches and gold foil programs.
It wasn’t.
It was a pressure test.
Callum had built a beautiful structure on top of a lie, and for seven years, I had been the foundation holding it up. The hidden support. The buried beam. The part nobody noticed because the whole point of a good foundation was that it disappeared.
But a foundation could develop a hairline fracture, invisible until it wasn't.
A foundation could settle, slowly, silently, degree by degree.
A foundation could give way all at once and leave the whole house telling the truth about where it had been weakest from the start.
I looked at the legal pad one more time.
Get the documents.
Stop letting them isolate me from my own history.
Walk into the gala with proof.
Then I picked up my coffee and drank, letting the bitterness fortify me.
Tomorrow, I would go back to the condo.
Tomorrow, I would open the drawers Callum had ignored, pull out the papers he had counted on me forgetting, and carry the truth out in my own hands. He could seat me at table seven if he wanted. By the time the gala came, everyone would know who built the house.
Chapter Sixteen
HOLLAND
The lock gavethe way it always had. I'd been bracing for something different—some physical acknowledgment of the eighteen days—but the mechanism didn't care. I'd driven past once before pulling in. His car was gone, the driveway empty—exactly as I'd needed. Inside, the kitchen under-cabinet lights were on, that same amber strip across the quartz that I used to find when I came home late. He'd never turned them off in seven years. I used to find it endearing. I left the foyer dark and stood for a moment in the entryway. The house had the particular stillness of a space that had been alone for a while. Fourteen days since the text. Since I'd chosen a number—10:52—that I would probably always remember, the way you remember the exact temperature of a room where something happened. I wasn't here to undo any of it. I was here for what belonged to me, for the work I had let become invisible, and I needed it back before Saturday night.
The condo smelled the same – lemon cleaner and the faint cedar note of the candles Callum bought in bulk because he thought they made the place feel expensive. I'd lit them dutifully for three years, filling rooms with a scent that now registered as nothing but stage dressing. The whole house was stage dressing. That was the point.
I walked through the living room without stopping. The sectional I'd picked out. The coffee table books I'd arranged—monographs on mid-century lakefront architecture, a volume on cantilevered structures I'd bought junior year and never stopped referencing. Every line in this room—the edge of the sofa, the weight of the books, the room's very proportions—was mine. And all of it had been absorbed, rendered into background scenery for a life that wasn't.
Callum's office door was closed. I opened it.
The room was a mess in the particular way of a man who'd been operating without support for two weeks. Papers stacked in uneven towers. A coffee mug with a skin of old liquid across the bottom. The leather chair was shoved back at an angle, as if he'd left in a hurry. Sloane had mentioned something at dinner last night – a Morrison deadline blown, the clients calling David directly, Laura scrambling to contain a situation she didn't have the technical knowledge to fix. The boathouse revisions were nine days past deadline now, and without my structural calculations, nobody at Crestline could move the project forward.
I didn't feel satisfaction. I felt confirmation.
