Page 48 of Suite 7

“You’ve absolutely got a face.” He’s almost smiling. “What was it this time?”

“I’m not discussing Vera.”

“I didn’t say Vera. I said Smackdown.” The almost-smile becomes an actual one.

My phone beeps and lights up on the desk between us.

We both look at it. Marcel raises an eyebrow.

“Client?” he says.

“Possibly.”

“You usually have it on silent when you’re working.”

“I forgot.”

Marcel settles back and laces his fingers behind his head. He’s got the look he gets right before he says something calculated to enjoy my reaction to.

“I remember when Vera called one of your buildings a glass box with ambitions above its station.” He tilts his head. “And you responded by saying her client’s rebrand looked like it was designed by someone who’d googled the word contemporary and stopped there.”

“That tagline was genuinely⁠—”

“You did it at Sloane’s birthday dinner.” Marcel’s expression is perfectly neutral. “With eight people at the table.”

“She started it.”

“She always starts it.” He waves a hand. “That’s the thing about Vera — she knows exactly where to push. She goes straight for your work, every time. Calls it cold, calls it soulless, calls it structurally impressive but spiritually empty.”

“She is deliberately provocative,” I say.

“She is,” Marcel agrees easily. “And you take it every time. That’s the interesting part.”

He looks at me steadily. “Because you don’t take it from anyone else. I’ve watched you shut down clients, partners, city planning committees: you have the most effective conversational off-switch I’ve ever seen. Complete, polite, absolute disengagement.”

“But with Vera you never disengage. She says your work has no soul and you spend forty-five minutes proving it does.”

“Because she’s wrong.”

“Because it matters what she thinks.” He says it simply, without emphasis. “You don’t argue with people whose opinions don’t matter to you. You’ve never once explained your design philosophy to anyone who questioned it. Except her.”

He picks up his coffee. “Every single time. She calls a building a glass box and you dedicate the rest of the evening to making her understand why she’s wrong.”

He pauses. “You did it at Sloane’s birthday dinner. At that fancy gallery opening, and at the charity auction last November where she asked if the windows on one of your designed building could be more window and you spent twenty minutes talking explaining your load-bearing structural philosophy.”

“She was⁠—”

“You knew she was doing it on purpose,” Marcel says.

I stare outside.

“For someone who doesn’t care about her opinion,” Marcel says, “you have a remarkably detailed memory of every single one she’s ever expressed.”

A silence sits between us that is doing more work than either of us is saying.

“I had a scene Saturday night,” I say. “Dominic matched me with someone. New member, first experience.”

The shift in Marcel is immediate but subtle: the ease remains, but his attention sharpens. He’s always been like this about Eclipse: genuinely respectful, curious without being intrusive, interested without making it into something it isn’t.