Chapter 10: The Gull Wing

Dexter had wiped four months of work off the server and forgotten that I draw on paper first.

The green notebooks sat in my tote bag, soft at the corners, with every line of the roof in them in pencil.

Jorie and I had redrawn the boards on butcher paper at her kitchen table, three nights running.

On Thursday at ten o'clock I carried them into the Lake Room on the nineteenth floor, rolled in a tube.

It was a glass conference room with a view of the water, and five people sat at the long table in front of a screen.

Four of them were from the city's lakefront commission.

The fifth was the chair, a white-haired woman with an engineer's hands.

Dexter was already at the screen.

He wore the cream turtleneck and a clean smile, and he had one hand on the remote.

Ottilie stood beside him, holding boards to the easel in a pink skirt suit, pretty and glassy-eyed.

"So that's our concept," Dexter was saying.

"A roofline that lifts at the lake edge like a gull's wing, and a deep porch under it, open to the water.

"I call it Shelter."

He clicked, and my roof filled the screen.

My section drawing, my gull wing, with the long beam that carried the roof out over the porch.

I stood in the doorway with the tube under my arm.

Nobody had noticed me yet.

At the back of the room, in the corner chair, sat a broad man in a charcoal suit with his hands folded between his knees.

His face looked like he hadn't slept since New York.

He had told me he would come as a visitor, recused, a husband with no vote.

He kept his eyes on the screen and didn't look at me.

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