Chapter 10: Please Don't Do This to Her

They discharged me on a Friday, and Ada stayed.

Leaving that hospital without my daughter was the second worst thing I had ever done.

Margaret drove me back to the studio at dusk and did not say one word the whole way.

At seven, there was a knock.

"He asked if he could come by," Margaret said from the stairs. "Terms and all."

"I told him fifteen minutes in the drafting room, under my supervision."

"Supervision."

"I'll be sitting on a stool with a ruler."

I came down slowly, holding the rail with one hand and my stitches with the other.

Harrison stood in the middle of the big room under the work lights, in a plain grey sweater, with no phone in his hands.

He had a paper bag from the bakery on the corner.

"Soup crackers," he said. "The nurse said you had to eat salt."

"Thank you."

He put the bag down on a drafting table and did not touch anything else.

"You asked to see the drawings," I said.

"I did."

"I don't have the drawings. Merrick Design has them. I signed them over the day I left the firm."

"Then what do you have?"

I looked at Margaret.

She was already pulling open the bottom drawer of the flat file.

From it she drew a long board in a brown paper sleeve, and she laid it on the table under the lights.

It was my thesis, eight years old, in pencil and ink.

A Public Reading Room. L. Hollingshead, thesis.

In the center of the sheet, the roof curved up from the side walls in one long arc.

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