RIVAL FOUNDATIONS

Under the Painted Stars

The site visit to the Whitmore was scheduled for a Wednesday morning, and Sienna had been inside the building exactly once since her father took her there as a child, a brief walkthrough with the previous owners two years ago that hadn't prepared her for what it felt like to stand in the lobby now, hard hat on, construction lights strung along the walls, and look up at the dome.

Water damage had taken a toll on the mural. Whole sections of the night sky had bled and faded, gold leaf stars flaking away from decades of neglect, but enough of it remained, enough of the original composition survived, that Sienna felt her throat tighten the way it had when she was eleven years old and had no idea yet that this building would end up meaning something entirely different to her as an adult.

"It's something, isn't it," Damian said, beside her, his own head tilted back to take in the dome. Foster and the rest of the engineering team had spread out through the lobby with equipment, leaving the two of them momentarily alone near the center of the space.

"My father brought me here when I was eleven," Sienna said, before she'd decided to share it. "There was a show. I don't even remember what it was anymore. I remember the ceiling. I remember thinking someone had thrown a handful of stars up there and just let them land."

"I've never actually been inside before today," Damian admitted. "I grew up ten minutes from here and I've walked past it a hundred times, and I never once went in, because by the time I was old enough to care about buildings like this, it was already boarded up."

They walked the lobby slowly, Foster's team working around them, and Sienna found herself narrating details without quite meaning to, the original terrazzo flooring under decades of grime, the brass fixtures that had somehow survived intact, the plaster detailing along the mezzanine railing that Foster's team had wanted to replace and that she'd fought to save.

"You really do know this building better than anyone in this project," Damian said, watching her run a hand along the railing, careful of the places where the plaster had crumbled. "I don't mean that as a strategic observation. I mean it as an actual fact I'm only now fully understanding."

"It's what I was raised to do," she said. "My father used to say a building tells you what it needs if you're willing to actually listen instead of just imposing whatever you already had planned for it."

"That's a good way to think about it."

"He was a good architect. A better one than most people gave him credit for, because he ran a small firm and small firms don't get the same attention big ones do, no matter how good the work is."

They ended up, eventually, in the theater's old backstage area, away from the noise of the engineering survey, standing near a stairwell that led down toward what had once been the orchestra pit. Damian was quiet for a moment, looking around at the decayed grandeur of the space, and when he spoke again, his voice had a different quality to it, less careful, more like he was thinking out loud.

"Can I tell you something I haven't really told anyone outside my own head?"

"Okay."

"Growing up as my father's son wasn't what people assume it was. Everyone imagines it as this life of total advantage, and financially, sure, it was. But there wasn't a lot of room in it for actually being a person. Everything was preparation. Every conversation at dinner was a negotiation lesson whether I wanted it to be or not. I don't think my father ever once asked me what I wanted to do with my life, because it was never a real question. There was only one answer that was ever going to be acceptable."

"That sounds lonely," Sienna said, and meant it.

"It was, though I didn't have the vocabulary for that until pretty recently. I spent my twenties being exactly what he wanted, closing deals the way he taught me to close them, and telling myself the emptiness I felt afterward was just what success was supposed to feel like, because nobody in my life had ever modeled anything different for me."

"What changed?"

"A lot of small things, honestly. And one big one. There was a deal, about two years ago, where I watched my father destroy a family business over something that could have been resolved fairly, if he'd been willing to leave even a little bit of money on the table for the sake of not ruining someone's life. I watched the whole thing happen and I felt sick about it in a way I hadn't let myself feel sick about anything in years, and I think that was the first time I actually let myself ask whether I wanted to keep being the kind of person who could watch something like that and not intervene."

"Is that why you took over the company?"

"Partly. Mostly it was that, and then finding out, more recently, exactly what happened to your father's firm, and realizing I'd been carrying an uneasy feeling about that deal for years without ever actually looking at it directly. I think some part of me always suspected it was worse than I let myself examine."

Sienna found herself telling him, then, without entirely planning to, about the eight months between the riverfront deal collapsing and her father's heart attack. About watching a man who had never once in her life seemed anything less than certain of himself start second guessing decisions he'd made decades earlier, start staying later and later at the office not because there was work to do but because he didn't know how to be at home with what had happened. About the morning she'd gotten the call, and the strange, awful clarity of standing in his office afterward, at his desk, understanding that some deaths happen all at once and some happen slowly enough that you can watch them coming and still not be able to stop them.

"I'm sorry," Damian said, quietly, once she'd finished. "I know I already said that, about the deal itself. This is different. I'm sorry for what it did to you, watching that happen to him."

"Thank you," she said, and found that she meant it, and found too that something had shifted in the space between them, standing in the old backstage of a theater neither of them had grown up in but both of them had somehow been shaped by, without either of them fully understanding how it had happened.

They stood there a moment longer than either conversation strictly required, close enough that Sienna was aware of it in a way she didn't examine too closely, and then Foster's voice called from the lobby, asking for Damian's input on something structural, and the moment folded itself back into the ordinary business of the day, though neither of them quite forgot it had happened.