I thought about the drafting table dragged down the stairs and scraped along the corner. I thought about the boxes in the rain and the champagne emojis. I thought about my eight-year-old self’s bedroom becoming Dylan’s office. And I thought about my grandmother, whose photos I’d rescued from that house, and who’d once told me that you cannot set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.
I didn’t help. Not out of revenge — out of arithmetic. They had told me, clearly and publicly, exactly how much they valued what I gave them: nothing. I simply believed them, and stopped giving it.
Chapter 5: The Life I Built at That Table
That was two years ago.
I finished the Mercer headquarters. It’s built now — a real building, in the real world, that exists because of hundreds of nights at a drafting table my family threw down a staircase. I drive past it sometimes. My name isn’t on the front of it, drafters’ names rarely are, but I know which lines are mine, every one, and there is a particular pride in having designed something solid and lasting out of the exact work the people who raised me called worthless.
Daniel Mercer became a real professional champion of mine, and referred me to other clients, and my practice has more than doubled. I bought my own home — small, mine, no one else’s name on it, no one else’s crisis draining it. I put my grandmother’s photos on the mantel and my chipped blue mug in the kitchen and my drafting table, repaired, in a room with good light and a door that locks, and I work there in peace for the first time in my adult life.
My family and I are not in contact. Dylan, last I heard, never fully recovered the career he torched. My parents lost the house eventually, which grieves me less than it once would have, because it was never really our house — it was my house, that I let them live in, until they decided I was dead weight and made me believe them. You can’t lose a home you were only ever allowed to pay for.
