Chapter 5

Theo's message came at 8:14 a.m.

“Reid mentioned you're working in the Cole Global building. I have a consultation there Tuesday. Lunch after?”

Isla read it on the subway, one hand on the overhead rail.

She smiled and typed back.

Tuesday works.

I'll find you, he replied.

I'll be on the fourteenth floor.

I design buildings. I don't get lost.

She laughed out loud that the he man beside her shifted slightly.

She put her phone away still smiling and finished her coffee and thought that Theo Winslow was genuinely the easiest person she'd met since moving to New York. No performance. No agenda. Just — easy. Like breathing.

She hadn't realised how much she'd missed easy until she found it again.

The twenty second floor was empty when she arrived.

She liked it like this. Before her team. Before the noise. Just her and the space and the particular silence of a room that hadn't become anything yet.

She was standing in the centre of the floor, arms crossed, head tilted, thinking about the north wall — about the structural column at the midpoint that three people before her had apparently treated as a problem — when the elevator opened.

She turned expecting her team.

Zachary walked in.

There was a man beside him she didn't recognise — polished, warm smile, the kind of easy confidence that filled a room without pushing anyone out of it.

He was mid-sentence when they came in and Zachary was listening with the particular stillness he gave things he was actually paying attention to.

Then Zachary saw her.

He stopped talking.

Not visibly. Not in a way the other man noticed. Just — a half beat. A fraction of a pause before he continued walking.

Isla noticed.

She filed it away without examining it and looked back at her tape measure.

"Ms. Simmons." His voice was even. "I didn't know you'd be here this morning."

"Walkthrough is at ten. I wanted the measurements first."

"Of course." He glanced at the tape measure in her hand. Something crossed his face — brief, gone immediately. He looked at the man beside him. "Dorian. This is Isla Simmons. She's handling the installation."

Dorian Voss crossed the floor with his hand already extended and his smile already warm. "Isla. Dorian Voss. Old friend of Zachary's." He looked around the empty space. "I've been telling him for years this building needed something on the walls. He never listens."

"The walls were fine," Zachary said.

"The walls were depressing." Dorian looked at Isla directly. "Tell him."

She considered it. "They were a little depressing."

"Thank you." Dorian spread his hands at Zachary like she'd settled something long standing.

Zachary's jaw moved slightly.

Isla looked back at her measurements.

"The fourteenth floor installation," Dorian said. "I saw it on the way up. The east wall — that asymmetry was yours?"

"All of it was mine."

"It's remarkable. Genuinely."

"How long have you been designing?"

"Since I was old enough to rearrange my mother's furniture without permission."

Dorian laughed. "And before Hartwell Creative?"

"Freelance. Before that, Ireland."

"County Clare," Zachary said.

She looked at him.

He was looking at the north wall.

She hadn't told him County Clare specifically. She'd said Ireland. She was almost certain she'd only said Ireland.

She let it pass. Filed it.

"Beautiful country," Dorian said. "The light there is extraordinary."

"It is," she agreed. She kept her voice pleasant and her eyes moving and her attention on the room the way she always did when something felt slightly off without being nameable.

Dorian Voss was warm and charming and attentive in all the right ways at all the right moments.

That was the thing about him.

All the right ways. All the right moments.

Like a timing that had been practiced.

She smiled at him and looked at her boards.

"I should get the layout set before the coordinator arrives," she said. "But it was lovely to meet you."

"And you." Dorian looked at Zachary. "Thursday dinner. Diana has the details."

"I know."

"Good." He looked once more at Isla — warm, easy, completely readable. "I hope we run into each other again."

"I'm sure we will," she said. "It's a big building but the elevators are small."

He laughed again and crossed back to the elevator.

The doors closed.

The floor went quiet.

Isla pulled the layout boards from her portfolio and set them against the wall.

Zachary stood with his hands in his pockets looking at the north wall. Not at her. At the wall.

"The column," he said.

"I know about the column."

"Three architects—"

"Couldn't solve it." She set the last board down and stood back. "I'm not an architect."

He looked at her then.

She pointed. "The column becomes the dividing point. Two sections. Distinct but connected. The interruption becomes intentional." She paused. "The wall stops fighting itself."

He looked at the board. At the column. Back at the board.

He said nothing for a long moment.

"You figured that out from measurements," he said.

"I figured that out from standing here this morning in the quiet." She looked at him. "Spaces tell you what they need if you listen before you start talking."

Something shifted in his expression.

Not the controlled nothing he usually wore. Something underneath it. Something that moved and then was still again immediately — like water disturbed and then smoothed over so fast you'd think you imagined it.

She found him interesting. She'd admitted that to herself on day two and she wasn't going to pretend otherwise — he was the most controlled person she'd ever met and there was something underneath the control that she couldn't see and she was — professionally, architecturally, as a person who designed things — curious about it.

That was all.

"The budget sign-off," she said. "I need it before we order materials."

"You'll have it today."

"Thank you." She picked up her tape measure. "I need to finish these measurements before the coordinator arrives. You're welcome to stay but I'm going to be talking to myself and moving things around."

"I'll stay," he said.

She blinked.

He said it like it was nothing. Like I'll stay was a perfectly ordinary response to what she'd just said.

She looked at him for a second.

"Okay," she said.

She went back to her measurements.

He stood with his hands in his pockets near the north wall and watched her work.

She measured. Marked. Moved. Talked to herself in the low murmur she always fell into when she was working through a layout — half sentences, numbers, the occasional quiet no, not there when something didn't sit right.

She forgot he was there.

Or she almost forgot.

At some point she turned to grab a board and found him two feet closer than he'd been before and something about the proximity — the stillness of him, the way he took up space without announcing it — made her stop talking mid-sentence.

She looked up at him.

He was looking at the board she was holding.

"The spacing on this one," he said. "The gap on the left is wider."

She looked at the board. He was right.

"Good eye," she said.

"You've said everything is intentional."

"That one isn't." She adjusted it. "Thank you."

He said nothing.

But when she looked back at the wall she could feel him looking at her.

She kept her eyes on the wall.

Interesting, she thought. He is genuinely, thoroughly interesting.

She left it exactly there.

Her phone buzzed at 9:47.

Theo.

I lied. I'm already lost. What floor are you on?

She laughed before she could stop it.

Zachary's attention sharpened. She felt it without looking.

Twenty second, she typed. The elevator on the east side. Not the private one.

There's a private elevator?

Don't ask.

Three dots. Then: Now I have questions.

She was still smiling when she put the phone back in her pocket.

The coordinator arrived at ten and the walkthrough began and Zachary excused himself with a brief nod in her direction — professional, clean, nothing she could point at — and crossed to the elevator.

He didn't look back.

She told herself she didn't notice.

Theo arrived at twelve thirty with two coffees.

"The east elevator," he said, handing her a cup. "Not immediately obvious."

"I told you east side."

"You did." He looked around the twenty second floor — at her boards, her marked walls, the organised chaos of an installation in its early stages. "This is going to be something."

"It already is something. It just doesn't look like it yet."

He tilted his head at the north wall. At the column. At the preliminary markings she'd made that morning. "The column as a dividing point." He looked at her. "That's smart."

"Thank you."

"No, I mean—" He looked at it again. "I've walked past that column three times today in meetings and everybody's been treating it like a load-bearing problem." He looked back at her. "You made it a feature."

"It wanted to be a feature."

He stared at her.

"You're going to say spaces talk to you," he said.

"Spaces talk to you if you listen."

"I design buildings," he said. "I've been saying that for years and nobody believes me." He pointed at her. "I'm telling Reid you exist."

She laughed.

They sat on the twenty second floor with their coffees between them and talked for forty five minutes about buildings and light and the particular problem of designing spaces for people who didn't know yet what they needed from them.

He was easy. Warm. He asked questions and waited for the full answer and when she said something he found interesting his whole face showed it without any of it feeling performed.

She thought — not for the first time — that Theo Winslow was exactly the kind of person she'd been hoping New York would give her.

Three floors above on the twenty fifth floor Zachary stood at the window of an empty conference room.

He could see the east side of the building from here.

He wasn't watching for anything.

He heard her laugh from somewhere below — clear, unguarded, the real one — and something moved through him that he had absolutely no plan for.

He stayed at the window for a moment longer.

Then he turned and walked back to his office and sat at his desk and looked at his phone and looked at the calendar and looked at nothing.

Fourteen months remaining.

He opened his laptop.

He did not think about the laugh.

He thought about it for the rest of the afternoon.

At 4:53 p.m. Isla's phone rang.

She looked at the screen.

Connor.

She stared at it through four rings.

Then she sent it to voicemail, put her phone face down on the windowsill and went back to work.

What she didn't know was that three floors up, Zachary's own phone was buzzing with a report he'd requested that morning.

He opened it.

Read the first paragraph.

His expression didn't change.

But his hand — just for a moment — went very still on the desk.