Chapter 15: Review Day

On Friday at nine the whole studio stood around the long model wall.

Forty people held coffee and looked at the Fairmount corner entrance, which Eli had built in basswood and paper.

Godfrey stood at the head of the group in a navy bow tie, smiling at nothing.

Craig leaned on a pillar with his arms folded and his phone in his breast pocket.

Declan stood three feet from Eli, in the charcoal suit, with a red pen in his hand.

"Eli's section first," Godfrey said. "Declan, you'll respond as co-lead."

Eli had slept four hours in two nights.

He walked the studio through the garden door, the long reading hall and the light on the children's wing.

He had never presented better in his life.

Then Declan uncapped the pen.

"The door doesn't work," he said, in his level voice.

The room went quiet.

"The garden turn eats eleven percent of the floor plate."

"The reading hall is a corridor with ambition."

"And the whole scheme rests on a feeling, which is not a structure."

He said it without a flicker.

He said it like a judge reading a sentence.

"Say it's weak. Say it. Make it hurt. I'm so sorry. That door is the best thing in this building."

Eli kept his face still.

"The budget collapses by the second plate," Declan went on. "I would not put my name on it."

Somebody coughed.

Craig let out a long, delighted breath.

"Warm and forgettable," Declan finished, quietly. "Which is where we began."

Forty people looked at Eli.

He had known what was coming since Tuesday night.

Declan had thought it at him in the dark, on purpose, so that Eli would have two days to build.

Eli put his hands in his pockets.

"You're right," he said.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Kissed My Rival, Hear His Mind from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.