"What's he going to do? Sue me? He's already suing the city."
"I'm just saying." She touched his arm. "Go make your toast. Then go home, and call me the minute that baby comes."
The toast was at nine-thirty. The Preservation Foundation's director introduced him as "the man who taught this building how to stand up straight again," which got a laugh. Julian walked to the little stage below the musicians' gallery and looked out at the faces and the rosettes, and for a moment he thought, as he always did at the start of anything public, of his grandfather.
Amos Ashby had been a bricklayer in Jackson Ward, the neighborhood they used to call the Harlem of the South. He had laid brick for Black-owned banks and theaters and insurance companies on Second Street, and he had watched in 1956 as the state cut the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike straight through the middle of it, seven hundred homes gone, churches gone, the whole commercial heart of Black Richmond rent in half by a ditch full of traffic. Julian had been born after that, but he had grown up hearing his grandfather say a sentence he still said to himself before every hard meeting: They can knock it down in a week. It takes a hundred years to put it back. So you'd better build it right the first time, and you'd better speak up for it every time.
"Good evening," Julian said into the microphone. "I want to say a word about plaster."
He talked for six minutes. He talked about the foreman's pencil on the crate lid, and about the plasterer in Lynchburg, and about the masons who had laid the hotel's walls in 1895, some of whom, he said, had almost certainly been Black men who would not have been allowed through its front door. He did not mention the tower. He did not have to. When he said, at the end, "A building is a promise one generation makes to the next. The least we can do is not break it for a view," the room applauded for a long time, and Julian saw, at the high-top table, Hollis Brandt set down his glass very carefully, the way a man sets down something he would rather throw.
He came off the stage into a press of handshakes. Somebody's wife told him about her grandmother's house in the Fan. Somebody from the governor's office gave him a card. He was laughing at something the director said when his phone buzzed in his breast pocket, and he looked at the screen and saw his wife's face, and the room went quiet in his head.
"Corinne?"
"Julian." Her voice was steady, and that frightened him more than if it hadn't been. "Her water broke an hour ago. We're at VCU. She's moving fast. They're saying it could be a couple of hours, could be less. The baby's heart rate dipped twice and came back up, and they've got her on the monitors, and the doctor says it's fine, it's fine, but—"
"I'm coming."
"She's asking for you. She keeps asking if Daddy's coming."