Page 77 of Love By Design

He didn’t agree, but he didn’t protest. Silas toweled himself off and wore my clothes like they were his, and then he followed me into the dining room. I pulled out a chair for him, and he sat down with another wet inhale. Detouring into the kitchen, I poured myself another glass of wine and got a water bottle for Silas. I took both to the table and set them down.

“Drink,” I said, and he begrudgingly twisted the cap off and took a sip. I narrowed my eyes, and he took a regular-sized swallow. “Wait here.”

After a quick stop in my home office and then my living room, I was back. I dropped the newest issue ofLA Design Digeston the table in front of him and a legal pad and pen on top of that.

“Transcribe the article.”

“What?”

He looked up at me, eyes wide and confused. I sat down in the seat opposite him and took a drink of wine. We were both going to be there for a while.

“Transcribe it. Copy it. Write it down.”

I could see the protest in him, but he swallowed it back and flipped open the magazine. It took over an hour for him to get through the whole thing, two bottles of water, and the rest of my glass of wine. Finally, he made an exhausted sound and dropped the pen on the table.

“There.”

I pulled a red pen out of my pocket and slid it across the table and into his hand.

“Now annotate it.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

I arched a brow. “Annotate it.”

He probably didn’t realize it, but he hadn’t cried in almosttwenty minutes, and if the set of his brow was any indicator, he’d gotten himself through the worst of it. Silas and I both knew he came over looking for pain. He wanted the emotional reset that came from being hit hard enough to catapult his brain right into subspace, but I saw immediately on his arrival that wasn’t what he needed. Silas needed to recenter around himself and remember he was better than Stanley had made him feel, and he had to do that on his own, not by my hand.

Forty-five minutes later, Silas capped the pen and shoved the paper and magazine toward me.

“Annotated,” he said.

I’d read the article enough times to know the ins and outs of it, but I was genuinely curious about the notes he’d make in the margins. Silas’s notes quoted government-funded studies about energy and waste, and psychology journals and their opinions on the importance of introducing green spaces into urban areas. He made notes about a percentage he wished he had triple-checked before committing it to the final draft, and even a few lines about things he’d learned since the initial submission. In all, the annotation proved what I—and Stanley—had known all along.

Silas was ahead of his time.

The only difference was I’d recognized it as a benefit, and Stanley had seen it as a threat until it was too late for him to backtrack. He’d done the damage and, for whatever reason, blamed his own downfall on Silas’s brilliance, then fired him to boot. There was no logic behind it, only the machinations of an old and desperate man. He’d acted that way once before, when he was much, much younger. It was such a blip in my memory, and I filed it away in favor of reading the final bits of Silas’s notes, which ended just as intelligently as they’d started.

“Why did you decide to pursue architecture?” I asked.

He sucked his teeth at me then said, “My dad.”

No new tears fell.

“Why did you continue with architecture?”

“Because I loved it.”

“Past tense?”

Silas scrunched his nose. “I love it.”

I stabbed my finger against the first page of his transcription. “You’re too good at this to walk away from it.”

“I never said I wanted to,” he protested.

“But you thought about it. I could hear it in your voice when you called.”

“How co?—”