Chapter 12: Her Name Before Mine

The package came on Monday by courier, in a battered cardboard tube with a return address in Maine.

Margaret signed for it herself and carried it up to the drafting room with both hands.

"Conrad's old draftsman," she said. "He retired the year after the opening and moved to a lake and stopped answering letters."

"You wrote to him?"

"I wrote to him Thursday night, after your husband left. He called me Friday and cried for ten minutes. Then he went to his attic."

She laid the tube across the table and pulled the end cap off.

Harrison was already standing there.

He had come straight from the NICU in his grey sweater, with Ada's bracelet tied round his wrist on a thread.

He had been there every morning and every night for eight days, and he had left his phone at the desk every time.

Margaret slid out a roll of thick tracing paper, tied with red tape.

She weighed down the corners with a stapler, a mug and a box of erasers.

The sheet underneath was a floor plan.

I knew every line of it.

I had drawn it at the end of the long table at Merrick Design in the winter I was twenty-five.

There had been a space heater at my feet.

In the title block, in the little box at the bottom right corner, the draftsman had lettered four short words.

Drawn by: L. Hollingshead.

Under it, a date.

It was a year and four months before the opening of the library.

Harrison read it.

Then he moved to the next sheet, and the next.

Section. Elevation. Roof framing. Reading room, detail of clerestory.

Drawn by: L. Hollingshead. Drawn by: L. Hollingshead. Drawn by: L.F.

There were forty-one sheets, and each one carried my initials in the corner, in the same careful capitals.

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