FAZER LOGINClara's POVI stood at the hills one morning and counted.Not deliberately. It was not a planned accounting. I was standing at the wall in the early morning with coffee and the hills being the hills and the count happened naturally.Fifteen years since I came back.The number was larger than I could hold all at once. Fifteen years was longer than most marriages. Longer than Eleanor had been alive. Twice as long as the marriage I had walked away from.In fifteen years I had built a foundation that now had seven sites and operated internationally and had a CEO who was better at it than I had been. I had sat on the board of a company and helped clean it of the rot it had accumulated and helped put in place structures that made the rot less likely to return. I had been part of bringing the people responsible for my mother's death into account. I had found my mother's letter and understood what she was trying to do and finished it for her.I had married a man who took my face in both hands
Clara's POVThe revised community space proposal was selected on Eleanor's second submission.She had brought the cost within budget without changing a single structural element. She had renegotiated the materials specifications to use locally sourced alternatives that were equally suitable and less expensive. She had found the savings without compromising the design.She was thirteen years old.The planning authority called to notify her formally and asked if they were speaking to Eleanor Luther."Yes," she said.“We would like to schedule a meeting to discuss the project timeline," they said."I am available on Saturdays and the occasional weekday after school," she said. "I will need an adult professional to act as my point of contact for the formal process. My uncle Adrian Luther of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council has agreed to serve in that role.""Of course," they said.She came to find me after the call.“It was selected," she said."I know," I said. "I heard."“Yo
Clara's POVEleanor turned thirteen on a Friday.She received her gifts with the same methodical attention she gave everything. She had a list of what she wanted and had made it available to the relevant people six weeks in advance, which she said prevented waste and misallocation of resources. The list was specific and cross-referenced with her current project requirements.Edmund had not followed the list.He gave her a hand-bound notebook. He had made it himself over three weeks, cutting and binding the pages with the careful precision he applied to practical tasks. On the cover he had written, in his dense handwriting: Eleanor's Building Projects. For all of them.She opened it and looked at it for a long moment.“How many pages?" she said."Two hundred," he said. "I counted.""That is a lot of buildings," she said."Yes," he said.She looked at it again. Then she looked at him."Thank you, Edmund," she said. "This is correct."He grinned.After the birthday dinner I found Eleanor
Clara's POVI read those sentences twice.Then I put the draft down on the table and looked at the garden through the window.Arrived.I sat with the word for a while.Not finished. Arrived. There was a difference that mattered enormously. Finished suggested you had reached the end of something. Arrived suggested you had reached a place you could stand in and build from.I thought about what had been built from this place.Rosa ran the foundation into its next decade. Seven hundred women a month. An international model carrying my mother's name. A daughter who was designing things at twelve that grown engineers approved of. A son who had published a research paper at nine. A brother-in-law on the National Infrastructure Advisory Council. A sister making beautiful spaces for people to live in. A husband who had built a library and retired with the same grace he brought to everything. A boy who had once said please die soon who had grown into a young man who flagged structural failures
Silas's POVEdmund was nine when he submitted his first written piece.He had written a short paper on the relationship between soil drainage patterns and historical flooding records in the region near the family home. He had cross-referenced his three years of investigation notebooks with the local council's historical weather records, which he had found through the council's public archive and had spent two months analyzing.He submitted it to a junior science journal that accepted papers from young researchers.He did not tell us until after the submission.He told Clara first. She came to find me in the study.“Edmund submitted a research paper," she said.I put down what I was reading. "Which journal?"She told me. I looked it up. It was a legitimate publication with a peer review process for papers from researchers under fourteen."He is nine," I said.“Yes," she said.“He submitted without telling us," I said.“Yes," she said. "Eleanor knew. She helped him with the formatting."
Clara's POVLuke came home for Christmas at twenty-one.He drove himself which was still a thing I had to consciously adjust to, Luke behind the wheel of a car, Luke who had been a newborn I held in a hospital ward with a divorce document in the other hand.He arrived with a bag and the look of someone who was genuinely glad to be exactly where they were.He came to the family home on the second day.He walked the grounds with Eleanor who gave him a full update on the wall repair and the drainage findings and the current state of her documentation project, now in its third year and its seventh notebook.He listened with full attention. He asked good questions. He was twenty-one and she was twelve and they talked about structural engineering for forty-five minutes while Edmund showed him the soil notebooks.At dinner he sat between Eleanor and Edmund and the conversation never left the table in the way that conversations at that table never left the table, everyone present, everyone en
Clara's POVAs we all stepped out of the school building into the parking lot everyone headed to their own respective cars the officers went into their own cop car and Nick was heading toward his which look like luxury on the surface but you needed a million difference fixes because of one major re
Silas POV"Good morning, Mr. Luther." Her voice was more lukewarm than the coffee she handed to me, easing out like an automated response from a machine rather than my enthusiastic secretary."Morning, Miss Moore. How was your night?""Fine, sir. And yours?""Well..."I kept up with the small talk
Clara's POVAs I stared out to windscreen the sky was a cocktail of Orange and the other colors sending the message that it will soon be night time, I was in Mr Luther's car after a brief argument of him telling me to go back home and rest but I said I wanted to return back to the office and at lea
Nick's POVI had told myself I would not need to use the tracking device that I planted in Cassie's phone but as the day Drew into night and she had not showed up I was forced to do it after giving her several calls only to be sent to the vacuum of unanswered calls eventually I twist her to some su







