Page 64 of His Wall

I called her.

She answered on the second ring.

"Are you home?"

"Yes."

"Can you come over?"

A breath. A second.

"I know what that sounds like, Claire. I am not asking for that. I just don't want to be alone right now and you are the only person I want to call."

A longer pause.

"Send me the address."

She came in thirty minutes.

She had on jeans, a black T-shirt, her hair pulled back at the nape — the running version of her, dressed for going out late on a Monday because someone had asked her to. She stood in my doorway with her bag on her shoulder and her gray eyes on my face and clocked the apartment behind me in two seconds — the records on the shelf along the far wall, the sketches on my desk I had not had time to put away, the glass of whiskey on the kitchen counter I had poured an hour ago and barely touched.

"You have a lot of records, Julian."

"You have a lot of opinions about them."

The corner of her mouth moved.

She walked in. I closed the door. She crossed to the desk where the sketches were spread on the corner. She did not touch them at first. She looked. Then she picked one up — the twelve-story building with too many windows — and held it carefully at the corners.

"This is beautiful."

"It's a building that doesn't exist."

"That doesn't mean it's not beautiful."

I leaned against the kitchen counter.

She turned the page in her hand. She set it down. She picked up the bridge.

"You always draw too many windows."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

She set the bridge down. She turned to face me with her hand still on the corner of the desk.

"Tell me about the beginning, Julian. The Vanguard. What was it like in the early days."

Her voice was light. Her gray eyes were on the sketches.

I answered. The studio in Murray Hill. The legal pads on the floor. The forty hours I had been awake when the regulatory bond went through. The first office above the deli on Lexington.

She picked up another sketch.

"Did you build it alone?"