The library opened its doors on a bright spring morning almost exactly one year after the groundbreaking, and Elena stood just inside the entrance, watching the first children run past her toward the reading nooks Adrian had insisted on, their laughter echoing off walls that had, until recently, existed only as sketches in the margins of her old school notebooks.
"It's real," she said quietly, more to herself than to Adrian, who stood beside her with the particular stillness of a man trying not to visibly well up in front of a room full of strangers.
"It's real," he agreed, his voice rough. "You built this, Elena. From nothing but an old dream you'd folded away and a stubborn refusal to let it stay folded forever."
"We built it," she corrected. "I couldn't have done the actual construct
