"Leave it," Nia said. "Sticky notes are not the enemy. Secrecy is."
Solomon snorted. "Frame that. Put it in the handbook."
They stood together for a minute in the room where the first hard night had happened — takeout bag, blue shirt on a screen, yellow lie, Solomon in the doorway asking if everything was okay. Everything had not been okay. Everything was not okay now in the childish sense of finished. But everything was speakable, and speakable had turned out to be the threshold that mattered.
Xavier touched Nia's shoulder. "Go do the work."
"Keep the firm," she said.
"Keep telling me the truth," he said.
"Keep wanting me full size," she said.
"I will try," he said. "On the days I fail, I will say so before I invent a crime scene."
Solomon opened the door to the stairwell. "If you two keep making vows in my office, I am going to start charging rent on the emotion."
They laughed, surprised by how available laughter had become again. Nia kissed Xavier once more, briefly, in daylight. Then she left for the airport with her carry-on and a notebook full of chalk lines and corrections.
Xavier stood at the east windows after she was gone and watched the cranes. Solomon joined him with two coffees.
"You okay," Solomon asked, the same question from the first night, transformed by months.
Xavier considered. "No," he said. "And yes. And working."
Solomon nodded. "That is an adult answer. I will take it."
Below them, the river moved. Above them, the old warehouse beams held. On the high wooden table, the blank sticky notes waited for messages that could be read by anyone who walked in — client schedules, supply lists, the ordinary logistics of a practice that had decided, at cost, to live in the open.
Xavier sipped his coffee. He thought of Accra waking toward Nia's afternoon. He thought of October, and a wedding postponed into a season they would have to earn. He thought of a yellow square that had once said Please do not disturb, and of all the disturbances that had followed, necessary as weather.
He did not forgive the note. He did not need to, not today.
He went to his desk, opened the Red Hook files, and began the day's work beside the crooked-no-longer H, in a loft that still smelled of coffee and warm brick, where love had learned — slowly, incompletely, without spectacle — to speak before it hid.