"I don't know yet. Part of me wants to burn the whole thing down. The other part—" I stopped. "The other part just wants to walk away and never think about Crestline again."
"Both of those are reasonable."
"They're not the same thing."
No," he said. "Not even close."
I looked at the drafting table, at the sketch he'd been working on when I woke up. It was a roofline, clean and low and modern, with a cantilevered overhang that reminded me of something I couldn't quite place. "What is that?"
"Nothing yet. Just an idea."
"For a client?"
"For me. For the studio. Theo's been on me about expanding the portfolio and I've been putting it off." He shrugged. "It's a good time to try something new."
I stood up and walked over to the table, still holding the coffee mug. The sketch was more than an idea. The proportions were right, the sight lines were carefully considered, and the waythe roofline intersected with the vertical plane of the glass – I knew that move. I'd seen it before. I'd drawn it before, ten years ago, in a studio on campus with three hours on the clock and Finn Morrow across the room doing the same assignment.
"That's the cantilever from junior year," I said.
"It's a version of it."
"You kept it."
He came up beside me, close enough that I could smell the soap on his skin and the faint trace of coffee on his breath. "I kept everything you ever drew that semester. I had a folder. Theo used to give me shit about it."
"Why?"
"Because you were the only person in that program who was better than me, and I couldn't decide if I wanted to beat you or hire you."
I turned to look at him. His eyes were on the sketch, not on me, and his expression was unreadable in the way it always was when he was thinking about something he wasn't ready to say out loud.
"You never told me that," I said.
"It didn't seem like the kind of thing you tell someone who was already taken."
"I wasn't taken. Not then."
"You were on your way to being taken. Callum was already—" He stopped. "It doesn't matter. It was a long time ago."
I set the coffee mug down on the edge of the drafting table. "Finn."
He looked at me then, his eyes behind the glasses the same steady green I remembered. For years I had held that color at a careful distance, afraid that looking too closely would force me to admit what was missing in Callum’s gaze.
"The clients have been calling," I said. "Since the gala. The Morrisons. The Thompsons. Three others I haven't gotten back to yet. They all want to know if I'm starting something new."
"Are you?"
"I think I have to. Not because I need the money. Because I need—" I searched for the word and couldn't find it. "I need to build something that has my name on it from the beginning. Not something I funded and designed only to let someone else put their name on it."
Finn leaned against the drafting table and crossed his arms. "What kind of something?"
"There's a historic restoration project I've been wanting to do for two years. An old theater in Evanston. The foundation's failing and the original plasterwork is intact but nobody's touched it since the twenties. Callum said it wasn't worth the investment."
"Callum was wrong about a lot of things."
"He was wrong about everything that mattered." I looked at the sketch again, at the clean lines and the careful proportions. "I don't have a studio. I don't have a team. I don't have?—"
"You have me."
