Chapter 5: Day One

On my first morning at Ashworth Studio, I found four pounds fifty in coins on my new desk.

I hadn't put it there.

A sticky note was stuck to the pile: Sandwich, paid. Desk, as agreed. R.

I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep my face straight.

The studio was one long room above a printer's shop, with twelve people at twelve tables and a model of a library on a trestle.

Rafe introduced me to all of them in one sentence.

"This is Willa Prescott, our new senior principal. If she says a beam is wrong, check the beam."

Nobody laughed.

Nobody was supposed to.

At ten, a client's architect came in with a problem.

The new library's reading hall had a roof span that wouldn't hold without columns, and the client had said no columns.

Everyone stared at the model.

I walked over, picked up a pencil and drew two lines on the tracing paper.

"Don't bury the columns," I said. "Put them outside the glass, and let the roof hang from them."

The room was silent for a moment.

Rafe looked at the drawing.

Then he looked at me, and his whole face eased.

"Check the beam," he said to the room.

By eleven I had a desk, a team and a sheet of drawings that were mine.

For the first time in six years, nobody had asked me to be quieter.

At eleven fifteen, my phone buzzed on the desk.

Fourteen missed calls.

All of them were Clark.

I turned the phone over and read the texts without opening them.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Held Her Son the Night I Lost Ours from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.