She ran a quick public search. Seven years old. Delaware registration. No projects outside Halstead Coastal.
The chief executive on paper was a man named Cyrus Holloway.
She did not recognize the name. She made a note of it in pencil on a sticky note in handwriting only she would read. The building emptied around her. The cleaning crew came through on the floor above.
The harbor outside her office window turned from gray to black.
She did not call anyone that night. She printed the reports, slid them into an unmarked file, and locked them in the bottom drawer of her desk. She kept the key on the same ring as the key to her father's old office, which she had never given up. She drove home with the radio off.
She thought about Porter only once on the drive, and she thought about what he had said in the hallway.
People who feel safe do not talk that way. She had heard a great many sentences in her life from a great many men who were paid well to be persuasive. That one was going to outlast all of them. Porter came home at 8:00.
Hazel was at the kitchen table drawing in colored pencil.
A dolphin, a beach, three people on the sand, two grown, one small. He did not ask her about it. He kissed the top of her head, made grilled cheese and tomato soup, and read to her from The Little Prince before bed, the chapter about the rose. After she fell asleep, he stood at the window for a long time looking down the empty length of Tradd Street, and for the first time in 4 years, he did not see Annelise in every corner of the dark.
Wednesday of the following week was a teacher in-service day, and Hazel's school was closed. Porter brought her to the site. It was safe enough on the front steps, interesting enough for a child who had asked him for a year to take her to a real construction. He set up a folding chair on the second floor portico above the entrance, gave her pencils and a large sheet of drawing paper, and pointed at the columns.
She stayed there for over an hour, counting the flutes on each column with the patience of someone who had been raised to look closely.
At 11:20, Marlowe arrived to walk the site. She saw Hazel before she saw Porter, a small girl in a blue jacket with two braids, so absorbed in her drawing that she did not register footsteps. Marlowe came around the column and crouched down to the child's eye level. "That is a beautiful column. Do you know what it is called?"
Hazel looked up.
She studied Marlowe for a careful second, the way her father studied wood. Then she smiled. "Daddy says it is Doric, the simple kind, the strongest kind." "Your daddy is right."
Hazel turned over her drawing pad. On the other side was a different picture, a beach, a leaping dolphin in the distance, three people in the foreground holding hands, two grown, one small. "That is me and daddy and someone," Hazel said. "I have not met her yet, but I think I will."
Marlowe did not say anything for a moment. She thanked the child and handed the drawing back carefully, the way she would have handed back a document she had no right to keep.
Inside the house, she met Porter at the foot of the central staircase. Both of them knew she had seen the drawing. Both of them knew because Porter had seen her through the window. Neither mentioned it.
They worked for 40 minutes walking the second floor where Porter showed her three new core bore holes he had discovered the morning before 12 mm in diameter, 40 cm deep, drilled into specific load-bearing walls.
Someone had been at the site after hours. She made a note of the locations. She did not tell him what she was thinking.
Before she left, Porter said, "Hazel draws what she hopes for. Sometimes that turns out to be very close to what comes next." Marlowe did not answer. She rested her hand on the old door frame for 1 second and then walked out into the sun.