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I’d wanted that.

For years, I’d wanted my brothers to hand me something heavy without keeping one hand under it. I’d wanted them to see more than the joke, the buckle, the kid brother who could talk his way into a room and needed somebody else to make sure the roof stayed on.

They had handed it over.

Then the room had laughed.

I stood in the dark bunkhouse with my shoulder burning and Ty’s unanswered voicemail sitting in my phone.

Outside, wind moved across the yard and pressed softly against the building. The old boards answered with a low creak.

Chapter 2

Priya

“Move the case six inches left,” I said, crouched on the concrete with a tape measure hooked to the service-door frame. “Not approximately. Six.”

The road case rolled four.

I looked up.

The stagehand looked down at me, one hand still on the black plywood box. He had the thick gloves, steel toes, and blank patience of a man who had been loading trucks since midnight and did not consider fractions of a foot a spiritual concern.

“Two more,” I said.

He moved it two.

“Thank you.”

“You planning to measure every door in the museum?”

“Only the ones I’d like people to escape through.”

That got half a smile. He rolled the case away from the yellow stripe and returned to the dock.

It was six in the morning on Sunday, ninety-six hours into the gala build, and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science had the hollow, overlit feeling of a place awake before it had consented to be. The public galleries beyond our floor sat dark. Here, work lights burned against concrete, aluminum truss knocked softly overhead, and wheels rattled across thresholds in every direction.

The air smelled like dust, hot cable jackets, industrial coffee, and the faint sharpness of fresh-cut greenery waiting to become centerpieces.

I stood and checked my watch.

6:02.

My body supplied the information my watch omitted. Four hours of sleep across two nights. Coffee at 3:40. Half a granola bar yesterday afternoon. A bruise along my right hip from walking into the same road case twice.

None of it was actionable.

I retracted the tape measure and pushed my hair behind one ear. It fell forward again immediately. By the end of a job, even my hair developed oppositional instincts.

The ballroom was halfway between construction site and expensive promise. Thirty-six round tables waited in uneven rows, bare except for folded linens. The main stage stood at the east end beneath a rectangular truss grid. Screens hung dark on either side. Overhead, lighting fixtures pointed in twelve directions while the electricians focused them one at a time.

At the west end, donor registration had begun taking shape under a suspended installation made of translucent panels. It would look weightless by evening.

Nothing suspended was weightless.

I moved on with my clipboard under one arm and the load sheet open on my tablet. The linen shirt I had put on Saturday morning had stopped pretending to be respectable. One cuff carried a gray streak from the freight elevator. The back clung damply between my shoulder blades.

The first room walk took forty-three minutes.