The Evolution of Man (The Trust Fund Duet 2)

A long pause and then with exasperation he says, “Harper.”

“Okay.” I close my eyes tight. “Okay. I’ll tell you. But I don’t even fully understand it myself. I just know that there are only two things I care about—my mother and this library. I can’t lose both of them.” I already lost my father. I already lost Christopher and Sutton. People leave, but I can at least save the building. I can at least have smooth wood and concrete.

He looks away again, this time toward the wall. “Even if I agree to take on this project, even if I try to save the building, you understand there’s a chance it won’t work. Hell, we shouldn’t even be standing here without support beams and hard hats. This whole thing could come crashing down on our heads.”

I can’t help my squeal of delight. “So you’ll take the job!”

“I didn’t say that.”

That makes me hop around and clap. “You’re totally going to do it. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You don’t know how much this means to me.”

He looks grim. “I think I actually might.”

I stretch up on my toes and kiss his cheek. “I knew I could count on you. Everyone was like, no one would be crazy enough to take on this project.” I use my best asshole-contractor voice. “And I was like, you know who’d be crazy enough?”

“Sutton Mayfair.”

“That’s right, Sutton Mayfair.”

He turns serious. “How’s your mother?”

My stomach knots the way it always does when I think of her. “They say she has six months to live. I don’t understand how they calculate that. A hundred and eighty days.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather spend the time with her? The library will be here when you’re ready to work on it. You don’t have to do this now.”

There’s a shudder, and then a rain of dusty concrete falls on us. Sutton pushes me under the circular library desk. The feel of his hands on something so innocuous as my arms, and suddenly I’m flashing back to the time he bent me over the desk. So much has changed since then. I thought I might be able to save my mother with impossible treatments.

I still had hope.

I’m not sure the library really would be here in six months, if we didn’t do this now. The building is dying. My mother is dying. There’s only one hundred and eighty days left.

“I’m not going to be the one drilling holes in the floors,” I say softly. “That will be you and whoever you’re working with. I only want to save the wall. If I can do that, if I can fix that terrible crack with my own two hands—”

I break off and stare at my hands, the nails cracked from the woodwork I’ve been testing out. My palms rough and calloused from years of painting. These are not delicate hands.

“I have to do something,” I whisper, and it’s like a confessional under that circular desk. “I have to fix something, and I think I might be the one running out of time.”

There’s an enigma among painters. Let’s say an artist studies and practices for twenty-five years of her life. Then she spends two hours painting a masterpiece. So did it take her two hours to create it? Or twenty-five years?

I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that sculpting a wall three stories high would take my entire life. There are splinters in my palm, open cuts on my fingers, and a deep purple bruise on my thumb caused by a rogue mallet. The block of oak looks more like a child’s forgotten pile of Play-Doh than the angular bison I’m trying to re-create.

A pigeon flies across the open space, landing on an old green dust-covered lamp. The whole building seems to shift and sigh, as if its alive. As if it’s hurting.

Sutton spent the past week with structural engineers and contractors who told him the same thing they told me—the library is broken beyond repair. While it stands now, the essence of the building is too weak to hold forever. And once construction begins, with its banging and its jostling, the whole thing might come down. It’s a hazard. An accident waiting to happen.

Which is why I didn’t tell Sutton that

I was coming today.

He drove to his ranch today to work with Gold Rush. That’s the name of the white-beige horse with fear and defiance in her eyes. If he’s gone too long, he would lose her trust. That’s what he told me last night when he called. He also told me that the library is a hopeless cause.

I study the grain of the wood, the way it fought the trowel.

There are woodworkers more qualified than me. Really any of them are more qualified than me. I’ve done basic sculpture as part of my degree and even used small wood pieces in some of my mixed media work. Nothing on this scale, but I can’t give up the project. Even as much as I trust Sutton to save the building, as much as I hope he actually will, the wall has to be mine.

Maybe it’s becoming an obsession.

As much of an obsession as the shiny mall had been to Christopher.