Page 50 of On His Mind

He thinks about it long enough that I know I’m getting a real answer.

“There’s not much to say.”

I huff a small laugh. That was not a real answer at all. “So your brain’s blank.”

He grins — actually grins, quick, gone — and everything about it tells me it’s the exact opposite. That his head is a loud room, he’s never once let anybody in.

“Okay.” I stack my sketchbook and my laptop onto the nightstand. “I’m going to sleep.”

He’s still there on the screen.

“Text me,” I tell him.

He nods. I end the call.

The phone buzzes in my hand before I’ve set it down.

Percy: I’m texting you.

I laugh into my empty room.

Percy: Thanks for the company.

Percy: Good night, Penelope.

Me: Try to get some sleep.

He doesn’t text back that night. Or the next. Or the next.

And now that I know, I can’t unknow it. Every night that week, I turn off my lamp and lie in the dark and think about a boy three miles from here who is not asleep. I wonder what he’s reading, and whether the house is cold, and whether anyone in his life has ever asked him a single one of these questions. I wonder if he’s alright.

On Friday, I turn in my part of the Ashfield project.

I’ve been at it for two weeks. Nine days of it in the studio until midnight, then here at my table until two, and the drawings that came out the other end are the best work I’ve ever done. I know they are. I don’t need anyone to tell me. Somewhere around the sixth day, I found the ground floor’s real problem — the entry was fighting the corner instead of using it —, and I moved it,which nobody asked me to do, which was not in the redlines, and the whole building finally worked.

Oliver takes the set from me and lays it flat on the long table by the windows. Then he reads it. He puts both hands on the table and reads it the way an architect reads drawings, sheet by sheet, and the office noise goes on somewhere far away. I stand there with my hands at my sides and my heart doing something undignified.

“You moved the entry.”

“Yes.”

“To the chamfer.” He follows it with one finger. “So the corner does the work instead of the façade. And you gained—” he stops, counts something, “—you gained the whole east bay for retail because you didn’t have to hold that lobby.”

“Yes.”

He straightens up and looks at me. “That’s it. That’s the one that gets built.”

I can’t get a word out. Nobody has ever been right about my work out loud, in a room, to my face. Adler says good and moves on. My mother says lovely, darling. This man just read nine days of my thinking off a sheet of paper and named the exact decision I made and told me why it works, and for one full breath, my guard is not up, and I feel the enormous warmth of being acknowledged. The one that comes when somebody sees the actual work, and it is the best professional moment of my life.

Then he says, “Which is why I want you on Chicago.”

The room comes back.

“It’s a two-year build. Ground-up. You’d start as a junior after graduation, but I want your hands on it from now — summers, breaks. Nobody your age gets a two-year project.” He’s smiling, and he means every word, and he’s giving me something extraordinary. “It’ll be finished the spring you graduate.”

Two years. The spring I graduate. Everything from this moment until the day I walk across a stage, already drawn, in a city I never chose, on a set of sheets a man handed me because he read my work and liked what he saw.

“This is what I meant,” he says. “At dinner. A career and a life.”