Chapter 7: The Ballroom

"Nobody taught me," I said. "I stood in the Edgewater Hotel lobby in 1999 and watched where people stopped."

Luke kept looking at the sketch.

"Where did they stop?"

"On the landing. They wanted to look down at who was coming in."

"So you put the landing where they could."

"Yes."

He tapped the paper once more.

"The rail's wrong. Too heavy. It'd block the view you just built."

"I know. I was twenty-two."

"Fix it."

Then he walked back to his desk.

Paige stared at me.

That was the first week.

By the second week I'd moved out of the Sand Dollar.

I rented a one-bedroom over a laundromat on Thirtieth Avenue.

Six hundred a month.

It smelled like dryer sheets all day and all night.

I didn't mind.

Nobody else had a key.

I worked from eight to seven.

I learned their software on a laptop Claudette lent me.

I learned which mills lied about lead times and which ones lied about colors.

I redrew my lobby rail four times.

On the fourth one, Luke nodded and walked away.

Nobody from my family called.

Caleb texted once, at two in the morning.

"Are you ok?"

"I'm safe," I wrote back.

Three dots.

Then nothing.

The Harbor Grand pitch was on a Thursday.

The Harbor Grand was a 1920s hotel on the Gulfport waterfront.

Hurricane Katrina had gutted it.

It had sat empty for years with plywood on the windows.

Now a man named Walt Haskell had bought it and was bringing it back.

The ballroom and lobby were the prize.

Four firms were bidding.

Claudette took Paige, Luke and me.

"You carry boards and keep your mouth shut," Paige told me in the elevator.

"Understood."

The meeting was in a trailer on the hotel lot.

Walt Haskell was sixty-three, sunburned, in a fishing shirt and boat shoes.

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