She lasted eleven minutes.
She knew because she watched the clock — the big industrial one on the wall, salvaged from a warehouse sale two years ago. She had never once regretted that purchase. She kept her eyes on it. Her pencil moved, her breathing stayed even.
She made it to eleven minutes before she pushed back from the drawing table and walked to Simone's desk.
"Close the door," she said.
Simone looked up. She read Liana's face in approximately half a second, closed her laptop, and got up to close the door herself.
They sat across from each other at the small meeting table by the window. It was the one with the coffee-ring stain that Liana had decided to call character.
Outside, Hartwell City moved through its Tuesday. Inside, the studio felt quieter than usual. It was the way rooms did when something large was being held very carefully.
"Cole Industries," Liana said.
Simone's expression did the specific thing it did when she already knew something and was waiting to see if you'd figured it out yet.
"The Blackwell Centre."
"They want a partnership."
"They want acquisition."
Simone opened her laptop again and turned it toward Liana. A financial news article, dated three weeks ago, filled the screen.
Cole Industries Eyeing Hartwell Commercial Corridor in Major Expansion Push.
"I've been watching this for a month. I didn't want to say anything until there was something concrete."
Liana read the first paragraph. Then the second.
"You should have told me."
"You would have started catastrophizing."
"I would have been prepared."
"Same thing, in your case."
Simone closed the laptop again.
"The Blackwell contract is ours until the end of the build. They can't take it — legally. But they can make themselves the most attractive partner for the next phase. If they get their foot in the door on phase two before we do—"
"We lose the momentum," Liana sat back. "And the referrals. And the portfolio entry."
"And possibly two of the firms that have been circling us for their own projects, who are watching how this plays out."
Simone folded her hands on the table. The gesture meant she was moving into business manager mode, which Liana appreciated. Business mode was clean. In business mode, she could manage.
"So, what do you want to do?"
What she wanted to do was fairly specific. It involved a different set of choices than were currently available to her.
"We respond professionally. Invite a preliminary meeting. On our terms, on our timeline, at our studio. We don't go to Cole Tower. We don't accommodate their schedule. We make them come to us, and we make them wait a reasonable number of days to do it."
"How many days is reasonable?"
"Four."
"Not five?"
"Five reads as avoidant. Four reads as busy."
Simone wrote something down.
"And the tone of the response?"
Liana thought about the signature line at the bottom of the email. The particular way those two words — Adrian Cole — sat in her chest. They rested somewhere between the scar tissue and the place she'd learned to stop examining.
"Professional," she said. "Concise. I want the email to be so neutral that they can't tell if we're eager for this or trying to keep our distance."
She paused.
"It's not personal—just business."
Simone looked at her for a moment. Just a moment. The kind that contained a whole conversation neither of them was going to have right now, because they both knew the shape of it and neither of them needed to.
"I'll draft it," Simone said.
"I'll write it myself."
"Liana—"
"I'll write it myself."
She stood up.
"I need it to sound routine, like this is just another business matter. If I write it, I can make sure it doesn't sound important to us."
Simone didn't argue. She was smart enough not to argue.
"I'll review it before you send it."
"You always do."
The email took her forty minutes to write.
Forty minutes for four sentences.
She wrote eleven drafts, none of which were quite right — too warm, too cold, too formal, too casual. One draft inadvertently sounded sarcastic in a way that was true but inadvisable.
She finally arrived at something that occupied the narrow strip of language that was neither a door open nor a door shut. Just a door that acknowledged the existence of doors.
Dear Mr. Cole,
Thank you for your message regarding the Blackwell Centre portfolio. HART Studio would be open to an initial conversation. Please have your team contact us to arrange a meeting at our Mercer Street offices at your earliest availability.
Regards,
Liana Hart
Founder & Creative Director, HART Studio
She read it three times.
Simone read it once, made one small change — your earliest availability became a mutually convenient time, which was better — and handed it back.
"It's good," Simone said.
"It's adequate."
"For this specific email, adequate is the goal."
Liana hit send before she could read it again.
Then she closed the laptop and went back to the drawing table.
She did not think about it for the rest of the afternoon.
She worked.
She solved the brownstone's lighting problem. It turned out to involve a wall she could move and a skylight that would cost more than the client expected, but less than they'd ultimately regret not having.
She took two contractor calls.
She approved a materials order for the Henderson east wing.
She did not think about it.
She was extremely good at not thinking about things.
The Hartwell Montessori pickup line moved the way it always did — slowly, cheerfully, with the particular organized chaos of twenty small people being returned to their respective adults.
Liana stood near the gate in the September afternoon, which had the quality of late-year sun, warm on the face but cool in the shadows, and waited.
Ethan came out third. He was carrying a drawing and wearing his backpack sideways, his current preferred configuration, and he had paint on his hands that had migrated to his cheek, suggesting an eventful afternoon.
"How was school?" Liana asked.
"Good."
He fell into step beside her, the drawing tucked under his arm.
"We did birds today."
"What kind?"
"The kind that migrate." He said it with authority. "They go south in winter because it's warmer. Like us going to Nana Ruth's."
"Nana Ruth lives forty minutes away."
"Still south, though."
She couldn't actually argue with that.
"What's the drawing?"
He held it up without breaking stride. It was a bird in flight — recognizable as a bird primarily because of its confident wings and the word BIRD written underneath it in Ethan's large, certain handwriting.
The bird had grey eyes.
Liana noticed, and then decided not to notice, the way she had gotten very practiced at deciding not to notice things.
"That's a good bird," she said.
Ethan looked at it critically.
"The wings are a bit wrong. Ms. Devereux said they're more like this."
He demonstrated with his arms, which meant the drawing briefly became a flight risk. Liana caught it.
"I'll hold this."
"You can look at it more if you want."
"I'm looking."
He seemed satisfied with that.
They walked the four blocks home the way they always did, Ethan, providing a continuous narration of events, observations, and questions that required answers of varying complexity.
Did birds ever get lost when they migrated?
Why was the sky that color right now specifically?
If a building were very old, did it remember being new?
"I don't know," she said to the last one.
"Maybe buildings are like people," Ethan said. "They forget the beginning parts."
She looked down at him.
He was watching a pigeon on a ledge above them with total concentration, having already moved on from his own observation, entirely unaware of what he'd just said.
She kept walking.
Dinner was pasta, which Ethan required to be shaped like something specific — tonight, stars, because he'd used up his argument capital on choosing stars over wheels and was clearly proud of having won.
He ate with determination and talked about the bird project, the boy in his class named Marcus, who could do a perfect pigeon impression, and whether dinosaurs would have had opinions about the weather if they were alive today.
Liana listened and answered.
She kept her hands busy with the dishes and let the ordinary weight of the evening settle over her the way it always did.
It was the reliable, solid weight of this life she'd built, which was good.
Genuinely, un-ironically good.
She knew that.
She'd known that for a while now.
She also knew that knowing things were good didn't mean nothing else lived beneath.
"Mom," Ethan said.
"Mm."
"Are you sad today?"
She turned from the sink.
He was watching her with those grey eyes — pale and careful and seeing more than five-year-olds were supposed to see.
She'd been navigating that particular talent of his since he was three.
"No," she said. "Just thinking."
"About work?"
"Yes."
He considered this the way he considered most things: seriously and briefly.
"Simone says you think about work too much."
"Simone talks too much."
"She says that too."
He slid off his chair.
"Can I have a story tonight?"
"You can have two pages."
"Four."
"Three."
He looked at her with the expression of someone who had just won something he hadn't expected to win.
"Okay. Three."
She dried her hands and followed him down the hall.
He was asleep by eight-fifteen.
That was typical after a day with enough birds and birds' opinions about the weather.
Liana stood in the doorway of his room for a moment in the dark, the way she had every night since she'd first brought him home.
It was a habit that had started as vigilance and become something else entirely, something she didn't have a precise word for.
Maybe gratitude.
The kind that didn't need an audience.
She pulled his door halfway closed and went to her own room.
The drawer was on the left side of the nightstand.
She didn't think about it consciously — didn't decide to open it.
She just did, the way you sometimes touched a scar, not because it hurt, but because it was yours.
The necklace was where it always was.
The thin silver chain, the small open circle pendant, the clasp she'd done and undone so many times five years ago that she could still feel the shape of it in her fingers.
She didn't take it out.
She just looked at it for a moment.
It's a promise that nothing is finished yet.
She closed the drawer.
She got ready for bed.
She turned off the light.
She lay in the dark in the apartment she'd chosen herself in the city she'd rebuilt herself in, and she listened to the quiet for exactly the amount of time it took to confirm that the quiet was fine, that she was fine, that this — the studio, Ethan, the life — was fine.
It was fine.
Her phone lit up on the nightstand.
Unknown number.
She stared at it for one ring.
Two rings.
She answered before she could talk herself out of it.
That was the thing about five years of carefully not doing something — eventually, the carefulness got tired.
"Ms. Hart."
She knew the voice before the sentence finished.
She'd known it would be him the moment she saw Unknown on the screen, some part of her that was still too fluent in him for comfort.
She said nothing.
"I wanted to make sure the email reached you."
A pause.
His pauses had always meant more than most people's words.
"And that you were the one who received it."
"I received it," she said. "My response was sent this afternoon."
"I know."
Another pause.
Shorter.
"I read it."
She kept her voice level.
She was very good at the level.
"Then I'm not sure what the purpose of this call is, Mr. Cole."
The title landed the way she'd intended — clean, professional, a closed door presented as though it had always been closed.
There was a silence.
Then he said, "I'll be at the meeting."
"That's your prerogative."
"I thought you should know."
She held the phone in the dark and kept her breathing exactly as steady as before she answered, then said,
"Good night, Mr. Cole,"
and ended the call.
She set the phone down.
She looked at the ceiling.
Alright, she thought again.
Flatter this time.
Less like a strategy and more like a fact.
She was just finishing the process of accepting.
He wasn't going to send someone else.
She was going to have to do this herself.