He Held Her Son the Night I Lost Ours novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Entry Thirty-One

Rafe's POV

I had kept it from her for two years and three weeks, and I decided to stop at nine o'clock on Monday night.

She was alone in the studio, at her desk, drawing nothing.

The model of the library sat pushed to one side.

I carried the rolled sheet from my glass office and set it flat in front of her, under the lamp.

"What's this?" she said.

"Look at the corner."

She bent over it.

It was a courthouse in elevation, a long low building with a stone podium and a glass hall that opened onto a square.

I knew every line of it.

At the lower right, in small neat capitals, it said W. PRESCOTT, ROTTERDAM COMPETITION, ENTRY 31.

She went completely still.

"Where did you get this?"

"I saw the entries at a jury exhibition two years ago. The city built nothing, and no one remembers who placed. I took a photograph of yours, and I had it printed at the size of a door."

"That's mine."

"Yes."

"It's been on your wall."

"Since the week I saw it." I made myself look at her. "Over my desk. You've walked past it every day for three weeks."

She looked up at the glass office.

The wall behind my desk was white, with a pale rectangle where the paper had hung until Friday.

"I took it down on Friday," I said. "I thought you'd see it. I couldn't decide whether I wanted you to."

"Rafe."

"When you applied for this job, I read your name on the list and cleared you through the shortlist myself before lunch. You didn't know. I let you walk into the studio thinking you had won a fair fight with forty strangers."

I waited for it to land.

I had practiced saying it for days, and none of the versions I'd practiced was any good.

She straightened slowly.

"Did I win it?"

"You did."

"Or did you just give it to me?"

"I got you into the room," I said. "Nobody else gave you anything after that. Not the library roof. Not the foundation. Not my staff, who'd have eaten you alive if you hadn't earned it in the first hour."

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