Chapter 73 An Apology

Chapter 73 An Apology

I go back to the working room.

Not because Daniel told me to, even though he did tell me to.

I choose to go back because the alternative is sitting in a warm café with an empty espresso cup thinking about two syllables in a voice I have been overthinking about for months on end now and I have reached the limit of what I can productively do with that information in a public space.

Or anywhere, really.

So I go back to the working room.

Roe is surprisingly there when I arrive.

He is sits at the table lodged into a corner with his notebook open and his pen down and his hands flat on the table in front of him.

He looks at me when I come in.

"I'm sorry." he says. Before I have the chance to close the door, put my notebook down or say a single word.
"What I said was not what I meant. I actually meant to say something else, not what came out and I should have thought about the words before I used them and I did not and I am sorry."

I look at him.

"I know." I say.

"You know I'm sorry or you know what I meant?" he says.

"Both." I say. "You were trying to help but your words were wrong. That's just that."

He exhales with relief.

"Where did you go?" he says.

"For a walk." I shrug.

"A walk." he says, his tone the one of a man who suspects the walk involved more than plain walking.

"A walk." I confirm. "And an espresso."

He looks at me.

"With anyone?" he says.

"Roe." I say.

"Right." he grins at me.
"Yes. Of course, just a walk, all by yourself. Completely alone." He picks up his pen. "Where is Callum?"

"I don't know." I say. "And right now I don't want to talk about him."

Roe looks at the whiteboard.

His finger traces Nadia's scratched out capital letters and his own words underneath them with the word garden underlined.

I sit down and open my notebook.

The next briefing starts at nine the next morning and I have already been in the working room for two hours.

Not because I could not sleep, though I could not sleep, but because somewhere between the café and the hotel room and the ceiling and the Paris night and two syllables in a voice I was not going to think about, the brief arrived in my head before it arrived in the envelope.

Not the specifics.

The feeling of it.

What Quintessentialism asks for is not a design.

It asks for an understanding.

Of what something is before you touch it or build it.

You have to know what it is.

And you have to be willing to take away everything that it is not.
....... .
I sit at the desk in my hotel room at seven in the morning with my notebook and I write, what is the most essential thing a space can be, and I sit with that question until the answer comes, not from architecture training or from competition instinct or from anything I learned in a formal setting, but from the knowledge of a woman who is rebuilding herself from the inside out.

A space is most essentially itself when it knows what it does not need.

Not what it has.

What it does not need.

The removal is the design.

I write that down and underline it.

The brief, when it arrives, is for a public reading room in a community centre in Lyon.

Not a library.

A reading room.

The distinction matters if I should think that this could be a clue to what is needed for the next stage.

It is large enough to hold just few people and I understand now as to why we couldn't use it earlier when a lot of architects were still in the competition
I read the brief three times.

My fingers trace the three words in my notebook.
Limitless peace.
Presence.
Permission.

And then I start to draw.

Roe arrives at two hours later with eye bags dangling like jewellery from his eyes.

He drops his jacket on the chair and stretches his neck to look at my drawing.
He looks at it for a long time.

"Sera." he calls

"Roe." I reply without looking up

"What is this?." he asks

"What else? It's the concept for the next stage." I shrug.

"We are supposed to work on it together, Sera." Roe says.

I glance up for a second then return my attention back to my drawing immediately.

"You saw what happened and you know whose side you chose."

Roe scoffs, "Really?"

I say nothing.

He taps his index finger on the table twice to get my attention.

"What?!"