Mara had learned to recognize decisions already made by the way Simon presented them as questions.
“Brushed, right?”
Between two fingers he held the small metal ring the jeweler had lent them to choose a finish. It was not gold, just a plated brass sample, convincing enough to fool the eye at three meters. Beneath the studio’s white light, the matte surface swallowed reflections. On Simon’s screen behind his hand, their engagement photograph was still the wallpaper: Mara in a coat too light for the March wind, her forehead against his cheek, the Charles River blurred behind them.
She set her drawing tube on the conference table.
“Are you asking, or telling me what I chose?”
Simon looked down at the ring.
“Testing a hypothesis.”
“You’ve just invented a more exhausting way to say ‘asking.’”
At the far end of the table, Priya Nanduri stifled a laugh behind her cup. Simon gave her the patient look of someone intending to take methodical revenge later.
Eight of them stood around the model of the Atlas Building, a former brick warehouse in Fort Point whose narrow windows currently overlooked a parking lot, a delivery lane, and a patch of gray sky. In six months, if the project finally stopped mutating, it was to become a cultural center with two rehearsal rooms, a café, and a three-hundred-seat auditorium. For now, it was chiefly a four-story conflict between allowable loads, evacuation standards, and the client’s desire to retain “the industrial soul” without keeping any of industry’s constraints.
Mara slid the sample wedding band toward herself with a fingernail.
“Polished inside, brushed outside.”
Simon smiled too quickly.
“Exactly what I told Hollis.”
She looked up.
“Before asking me?”
“After twenty-two months, I’m beginning to have some data.”
“Twenty-two months of data don’t amount to permanent consent.”
End of excerpt. Discover the other stories in this universe.