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“I chose beige deliberately.”
“Nobody chooses beige deliberately. Beige chooses you, one safe decision at a time, until you look up one day and the whole building agrees with itself.” Romily sat back on her heels, gesturing at the sketches, the ceiling, the whole vast indifferent volume of the room. “This is going to move. It’s going to change with the light. People are going to stop and look up, which nobody does, because there’s nothing up there worth stopping for.”
“That’s a very confident theory about my guests’ behavior, Ms. Devlin.”
“It’s not a theory. I’ve watched them walk through here for four days straight, notebook in hand. Nobody looks up. Nobody has a reason to. I’m giving them one.”
“You could just say you like it.”
“I could.” Elena didn’t. She crossed her arms and looked a while longer instead, jaw working through several opinions she wasn’t ready to voice for the record.
“The design team hasn’t approved the final panel count.”
“They will.”
“You seem confident.”
“I don’t do this for a living to be wrong about it. Also, Norden already approved the concept himself, so the design team’s opinion is a formality at this point, and we both know it.”
“That’s a bold assumption about how corporate approval works.”
“It’s not an assumption. He told me directly. In his office. At close range.”
“You keep doing that.”
“Doing what.”
“Saying his first name like you’ve known him longer than four days.”
“I’m efficient with syllables. It’s a professional habit.” Romily kept her pencil moving across the page, though it slowed on the next line more than the angle strictly required. “Would you prefer ‘Mr. Sharpe’? I can perform formality if it makes the paperwork easier.”
“I’d prefer you clear things with me before you clear them with him. That’s not an unreasonable request from the person who runs this building day to day.”
“Noted. Logged. Ignored, probably, but noted for the official record.”
Elena didn’t have a response for that. She made a note instead, hard enough that Romily heard the pen through two layers of expensive paper.
Two figures showed up at the mezzanine rail while she worked, and the atrium — some quirk of the architecture she’d clocked on day one and never fully trusted — carried their voices down in fragments clear enough to catch.
One of them she didn’t recognize. Dark-haired, restless the way men got when sitting still counted as a personal insult, both forearms braced on the rail like he’d already decided the floor show below beat anything happening on his own level. His voice carried best, pitched to project whether he meant it to or not — a voice that had never needed to repeat itself and had gotten comfortable assuming it wouldn’t have to.
“—going to break every protocol in this building,” he said, delighted about it, the way a person got delighted about weather they found entertaining rather than threatening.
The second voice came through in fragments only. One word. “Yes.”
“And?”
The answer didn’t carry. The atrium kept that part to itself. She didn’t need it. She knew who was standing there even from three stories down — the stillness, the way he took up more room than his actual size accounted for.
The stranger laughed, clapped Norden once on the shoulder like a man delivering a verdict, and pitched his next line loud enough that it landed clean. “I like her. Keep her.”
Norden’s answer didn’t carry. The two of them drifted off along the rail, footsteps fading toward the business of running a hotel this size.
Romily didn’t wave. She picked her pencil up and kept working, which read as the only sane response available to a woman being discussed from thirty feet up by a man she hadn’t officially met. She did, however, redraw the same line four times without once improving it, which she chose to blame on the pencil and not even slightly on the audience.
By mid-afternoon she’d moved from paper to scaffolding, translating sketch into structure one measurement at a time, the tedious middle part of any commission that never made it into a portfolio and mattered more than any of the parts that did.
Three meters up, notebook wedged against her hip, she reached for the next brace and missed it by an inch — weight already committed before her hand closed on empty air instead of steel. The scaffold rocked. She grabbed the nearest upright and rode it out, boots skidding half a rung before they caught, pencil back on the page before the adrenaline finished arriving. She’d done worse to herself reaching for a coffee cup.
