Chapter 8 - The Clearing of the Shadows
By the third week of April, the crocuses had pushed their way through the damp mulch in the garden behind the West End atelier.
The brownstone smelled of fresh beeswax, linseed oil, and the sharp, green scent of wild freesia that Clara, my lead drafting associate, had placed in the stone urns by the front gallery entrance. The four-story building was alive with the hum of high-end design work: the clicking of drafting styluses on digital tablets, the unrolling of heavy Belgian linen rolls on the cutting tables, and the low, rhythmic voices of clients consulting over structural blueprints.
I walked down the central oak staircase without a cane.
My right leg was still stiff at the knee, and every third step required a conscious, measured balance from the hip, but the bone was whole. The titanium rod inside the marrow was quiet, settled, an unbreakable core around which three centimeters of new cortical bone had successfully fused.
I wore a charcoal wool trouser suit, tailored with enough room in the right leg to clear the light support sleeve I wore for long workdays, and my hair was cut into a sharp, chin-length bob that revealed the high, unyielding lines of my jaw.
In the front parlor, Angela Rossi was sitting on the restored velvet settee, reviewing the final closing binder for the Shadow Pine property.
"The deed transfer cleared the county registry at noon," Angela said, looking up over her spectacles as I entered the room. "The house in New Jersey was sold at private auction to a pediatric surgeon from Summit. After the primary liens were cleared and the legal fees were reimbursed to the trust, the net recovery is eight hundred and forty thousand dollars."
"Send four hundred thousand to the state domestic violence legal defense fund," I said, sitting behind my grandmother’s walnut desk. "And put the balance into the atelier’s apprentice scholarship."
Angela made a small, neat checkmark on the margin of her ledger.
"And the personal effects?" she asked. "The sheriff’s department cleared the garage on Shadow Pine on Monday. They asked what you wanted done with Mark’s tools. And his mother’s furniture from the dining room."
I looked through the tall, arched parlor windows out onto the quiet street, where the spring sun was turning the wet asphalt into a dark, sparkling mirror.
"There is a commercial salvage yard on the river in Newark," I said, my voice completely devoid of inflection. "Tell them to drop two thirty-yard dumpsters in the driveway. Let the scrap dealers have the steel. The rest goes to the municipal incinerator."
"A clean ledger," Angela murmured.
"The only kind that stays balanced, Angela."
A soft chime sounded from the desktop terminal.
A news alert from the New Jersey Law Journal popped up on the secondary display:
STATE V. VANCE & VANCE: CO-DEFENDANTS ENTER NEGOTIATED PLEAS IN ATTEMPTED MURDER AND FINANCIAL FRAUD CONSPIRACY.
Mark Vance sentenced to twenty-two years at New Jersey State Prison, Trenton, with fifteen years of parole ineligibility.
Eleanor Vance sentenced to eleven years at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women; ordered to pay $2.4M in restitution to the Vance Estate.
I didn't open the article. I didn't click the link to see the mugshots—Mark in his orange state-issued jumpsuit, his hair thinning, his face hollowed out by five months of institutional diet; Eleanor stripped of her pearls and her two-inch heels, her chin sunken into the sag of her neck.
I reached out and clicked Clear Notification.
The screen returned to the three-dimensional wireframe of our newest project: the complete restoration of a nineteen-twenties public library in the Bronx, funded entirely by an anonymous grant from the Vance Foundation.
The office door opened, and Clara stepped inside, holding a set of fabric swatches and an architectural ruler.
"Emily?" Clara said. "The client for the library board is here. They want to know if we can preserve the original heart-pine flooring in the reading room, or if the water damage from the roof leak was too severe."
I stood up from the desk, my hands resting flat on the polished leather blotter, feeling the solid, immovable weight of the floorboards beneath my feet.
May you like
"Tell them the wood is sound, Clara," I said, smiling into the morning light. "Pine can take a great deal of weather, provided the foundation doesn't move. We’ll sand off the gray, oil the grain, and let them read on it for another hundred years."
I took the architectural ruler from her hand and walked out into the bright, busy gallery, where the light was clean, the doors were unlocked, and the air belonged entirely to me.
