POV: Celeste
The city office puts me on hold for eleven minutes and then tells me the private trust structure that filed the property claim is not something they can discuss over the phone, and I need to come in person with documentation, and the next available appointment is in three weeks.
Three weeks. I have thirty days total.
I hang up and stand behind the counter and look at the wall across from me until the shapes of the portfolio frames stop being something I am actually seeing and become just something my eyes are resting on.
Petra comes in from the back. She reads my face. She puts the kettle on without asking.
"The city cannot tell me anything," I say.
"What about a lawyer?"
"I called two this morning. Both said initial consultations are five hundred minimum."
She does not say anything to that. She makes the tea and puts it next to my hand and goes back to setting up her station for the afternoon. That is what I need from her right now. Not solutions. Just the ordinary sound of someone else moving through the same space.
I open the sketchbook. I do not draw anything useful. I draw the window frame. The angle of it. I have been drawing that window my whole life without meaning to, it shows up in the margins of everything, a quiet repeated line that does not mean anything except that it is the first thing I learned to look at.
My phone buzzes. Unknown number.
I let it ring. It stops. Then it rings again, same number.
I pick up.
"Ms. Wade." A man's voice. Measured, professional, the kind of careful that has been practiced until it sounds natural. "My name is Marcus Steele. I am legal counsel for Steele Development."
My hand tightens on the phone.
"I am also Rock's brother," he says, "and I want to be clear about that upfront because I think you deserve to know who you are talking to."
I do not say anything. I am listening for the thing underneath the words, the real direction, because I have learned that when a lawyer calls and opens with something that sounds like honesty, the next sentence is the one that matters.
"There is a provision in the city's small business ordinance," he says, "that provides heritage protection grounds for businesses operating continuously for twenty or more years in a qualifying zone. Wade and Ink qualifies. If you file under that provision before the thirty-day window closes, the back fees get frozen pending a review that typically takes sixty to ninety days."
I stand very still.
"Why are you telling me this?"
A pause. Short but real. "Because the error in the city's reclassification was on their end and you should not lose your building over a filing mistake."
"Your firm filed a claim on my building this morning."
"I know."
"So your brother is trying to take it and you are calling to tell me how to slow that down."
Another pause, longer. "I am telling you about a legal option you have a right to know about. What you do with it is your decision."
I look at Petra across the room. She has gone still, just slightly, the way she does when she is listening without wanting me to know she is listening.
"What does your brother know about this call?" I say.
Marcus does not answer right away, and in that space I understand that Rock either asked him to make it or he is making it without telling him, and both of those possibilities mean something different and I do not know which one I am inside of.
"File before Friday," he says. "City hall, office 114, ask for the heritage review intake form."
He hangs up.
I put the phone down on the counter. I pick up the tea. My hands are not fully steady and I am angry about that, not at them, just at the situation that has made them that way.
Petra says: "What was that?"
"His lawyer."
"Rock Steele's lawyer."
"His brother."
She absorbs that. "What did he want?"
"He told me how to freeze the city fees."
She looks at me for a long moment. "Are you going to do it?"
I do not answer, because the answer is yes, obviously yes, I would be choosing against myself not to do it, but the yes sits uncomfortably because it came from his side of this and I do not know what it costs yet. I do not know what it is for.
I know what Derek was for. Every kind gesture, every question about my work, every afternoon he spent sitting in this shop asking about my father's techniques and watching me sketch. All of it was for something. All of it was building toward a moment I did not see coming because I was too busy believing I finally had someone who just wanted to understand me.
I close the sketchbook.
"I am going to file," I say. "I would be an idiot not to." I look at Petra. "But I need you to be here for the rest of the afternoon because I have to go do something first."
She nods without asking what.
I get my coat and walk out and turn left on Meridian, away from city hall, toward the glass tower that you can see from six blocks away on a clear day, the one that makes everything around it feel like it is being assessed for replacement value.
I am not going up there. I am not that person, the one who walks into a man's building because he got inside her head for a minute. I know that about myself.
I stop at the corner.
The building is right there. Forty-two floors of glass and the kind of architecture that says the person inside has stopped needing anyone's approval.
I stand on the corner for ninety seconds.
Then my phone buzzes with a text from an unknown number. No message. Just an image attachment. I open it.
It is a photograph. Old, slightly blurred, the kind taken at a distance. My father standing outside the shop, younger, maybe fifteen years ago, next to a man I recognize from old articles about the Chicago housing restructuring project that took half this block.
The man beside my father is Victor Crane.