Page 53 of The Exit Strategy

She nods as though she remembers.

“The memorial was…”

“Your summer project,” she says quietly, stealing the air straight from my lungs in the process. “You called it the Whisper of Souls Memorial. It’s the one you designed to honor your father—the one that sings.”

Adrenaline spikes in my nervous system. She described the memorial the exact way I’ve always thought of it. No one else has ever said that.

Even the firm that accepted it called it “innovative acoustic integration” and “marketable.”

Junie called it what it is. An honor, the only way I knew how to do it.

“The wind corridors are shaped to produce harmonicresonance based on air speed and direction,” I say, and realize with a jolt that I’m talking about my work the way I used to before it became a casualty of war. Before it became something to mourn instead of celebrate. “Different seasons have different prevailing winds. The building plays different notes.”

“What does it play in winter?”

Nobody ever asked me that. And I didn’t get to oversee construction, so I wasn’t afforded the opportunity to explain the positioning. It ended up, in my estimation, a lackluster build because they never understood the design.

“Something low,” I say. My voice has gone to a place where I can’t retrieve it. “A minor key.” I worked with musicians at the Berklee College of Music for an entire month on it. “The winter winds, if the building was positioned correctly, would come from the northeast, so the corridors there would be wider, making the tone drop. It’s…mournful but not sad. Like remembering someone you loved.”

At least, that was how the music professor had explained it to me back then.

Junie’s quiet for a long time. The drafting lamp throws warm light across the table between us, making the room feel smaller than it is.

“You designed a memorial that grieves the loss of life with you.”

Fuck me. I can’t speak. I physically cannot form words because she just described in one sentence what I spent three months trying to articulate in my design statement. And she did it standing barefoot in my office at midnight without even trying.

She moves along the table while I try to find my breath. The community center. The floating greenhouse. The adaptive housing project. She doesn’t rush as she studies each one with the same careful attention she brings to herspreadsheets. It’s meticulous focus I’ve never seen anyone else apply to my work.

“Why aren’t you doing this?” she asks.

The question is quiet but lands in a minefield.

“Doing what?” I scratch at my jaw to hide the way my throat works.

“This,” she says more emphatically. “You’re running a retirement community and fixing gutters and arguing with Stanley. But that’s notwhoyou are. You’re Cole Whittaker, architect. You design buildings that make people experience an answer without ever recognizing there was a question. Why are you spending your life replacing porch lights?”

The words scream in my head with the desperation of six lost years.Because I traded my career for my family and then lost them both anyway.

“The Haven needed me,” I say instead.

“The Haven needs a property manager. This—” She taps the air above the library. “This needs an architect.”

The distinction slices through me with a precision I wasn’t prepared for. The thing I do versus the thing I am. She’s here, drawing a line between survival and purpose, and she has no idea how deep that cut goes.

“It’s complicated.” I didn’t mean to growl at her. I don’t mean the harshness that she hears, but she reacts to the sound accordingly.

It’s complicated. Fuck. The same words I’ve used about Devin, about Natalie, about every truth I can’t afford to tell her.

Her jaw tightens as she files the deflection the way she catalogues Devin’s vendor discrepancies. And I hate that I’m forced into the same category as a thief and liar.

But isn’t that what they’ve turned me into?

Then her eyes fill with the one thing I never wanted tofind there—heartache. But she doesn’t push. Instead, she lowers her gaze—it feels as though she’s cut out my heart with the motion—then she moves to the edge of the table where the veterans’ memorial blueprint curls up at the corner.

“What happened to this one? Was it ever built?”

“No,” I lie.