Page 50 of The Exit Strategy

Nana Mae sips her tea. “You want to fix that?” She nods in Junie’s direction. “You’re going to have to show her something real.”

“I showed her real yesterday.” Calling her my fiancée felt real. Kissing her head, that was real. Telling her about my parents was real. Holding her to me as though she belonged there, that was fucking real.

It’s as real as I can get without ruining her life.

Isn’t it?

“That wasn’t real, Cole. That was reactive.” Nana Mae sets her mug down. “Show her something you normally hide. Something you don’t show everyone else. That’s what Papa did. That’s how he showed me who he was in a way that finally made me listen.”

I don’t respond because the only things I hide are things that would hurt her more.

Show her something you normally hide.

I handlethe freeze-out until eleven p.m.

Today was a masterclass in avoidance. Junie worked in the conference room. I worked in my downstairs office, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. We occupied the same house without once being in the same room, which shouldn’t be possible in a building I designed for open sightlines, but she managed it with precise efficiency.

She communicated exclusively through email. Three of them. All formatted with headers and bullet points and her signature block that reads Juniper Mercer—Financial Consultant.

I never even gave her a fucking title, so she created one herself.

And she didn’t sign it. Not even Juniper. She gave me a cold credential, a title, and a woman I don’t recognize and don’t want to know.

I want my Viper back—even if I don’t deserve her.

Now the house is quiet. Nana Mae took off after breakfast, but Junie’s light is on across the driveway. She’s probably still working too.

If things were different, we could be working side by side. If things were…

They’re not different though. Things are this way because of choices I made.

And now I’m staring at the Meridian Architectural Design Award website—the award that Nana Mae entered on my behalf. The same one Paula Van Holten’s firm has won three years running. The same one my work won when I was twenty-three and the world hadn’t yet taught me that talent is something people take from you when you’re not paying attention.

Nana Mae even forged my signature, which is ironic given the Devin situation, and she submitted a portfolio I didn’t approve containing work I’ve never shared withanyone—Viper’s childhood home. The only design from happier times that wasn’t used as collateral—because the collateral was already constructed.

She also left the confirmation email printed out on my drafting table with a Post-it note that said: Stop hiding and fight for what you deserve.

Stop hiding. As if it’s that simple. Every time my work has entered the world, it’s come back wearing someone else’s name.

But Nana’s note does what they always do—it burrows and festers. So at eleven p.m. on a Sunday, I pull the file drawer open and toss my old designs across the drafting table for the first time in six years.

Stop hiding.How can I stop hiding designs that now bear someone else’s name? I stare at them with a mix of emotions that are too intertwined to decipher. Then I open the archival tube.

The smell hits me first. Vellum and graphite and the particular mustiness of paper that’s been stored in the dark too long. Then, as I roll them out, I remember the lines themselves—clean, deliberate, drawn by a version of me who still believed the work could speak for itself.

And it did—just with someone else’s voice.

There’s the coastal library I designed for my senior thesis. Cantilevered reading rooms suspended over a tidal pool, floor-to-ceiling glass angled to track the sun’s arc so the light moved across the interior like a slow hand. My thesis advisor called it “impossibly ambitious,” and then spent three weeks helping me engineer the load calculations to prove it wasn’t.

There’s the veterans’ memorial I drafted during my first summer after college—the dark age, as I’ve come to call it.That period between what I lost and what I gained here with The Haven.

I designed this memorial with an open-air corridor, so the wind played different tones depending on the season. The building literally sings. It’s the first piece I ever designed that I had a true, personal connection to, and it’s the first piece that disappeared from my portfolio and reappeared under a different name.

I run my thumb along the edge of that blueprint and feel the old wound pulse. It’s not sharp anymore. It’s duller. The kind of ache that’s settled into the bone and become part of the architecture of me.

Gently, I flip through the designs like pages of a novel. Each chapter of my life, showcased in blueprints.

All of it mine. All drawn by my hands, in this style—the angular lines that soften at transition points, the obsessive attention to how light enters a space, the way I design buildings around the people who’ll use them instead of the people who’ll photograph them.