Robert would take me along in the backseat of his car, sitting quietly while his driver navigated through downtown streets to half-finished towers of scaffolding and cranes. I wore a hard hat that was slightly too big and steel-toed boots that were slightly too heavy and followed him up temporary staircases that smelled of dust and metal.
We walked through future lobbies, future offices, future conference rooms where people would someday lie, bargain, break down. Robert didn’t explain his decisions to the grown men around him, but he explained them to me on the drive home, using words like “leverage,” “sightline,” “flow.”
He let me sit in the corner of his board meetings, a silent sentinel taking notes. While executives argued about budgets and deadlines, I made two lists: what they said, and what they really meant. By the time I was sixteen, I could tell when someone was lying by the way they rearranged their papers.
Slowly, almost without me noticing, the ache for my parents’ attention faded.
It wasn’t that I stopped seeing their lives. My phone still buzzed with updates: photos from Aspen, captions from the Bahamas, staged candids at fancy restaurants where the lighting was perfect and the food looked art-directed. Sometimes Mom sent me a text that read, Hope you’re studying hard! or Look at the girls in their ski gear—they’re naturals! as if we were part of the same story.
Once, when I was fifteen, she called.
I stared at her name on the screen for a long time before answering.
“Hi, Mom,” I said.
“Alyssa! Sweetheart!” Her voice was bright, too bright. There was noise in the background—music, clinking glasses, laughter. “How is… school? Are you… liking your new hobby?”
“Hobby?” I repeated.
Robert glanced up from his desk across the room, eyebrow raised. I put a hand over the speaker.
“Your uncle told us you’re doing… buildings,” she said. “That’s cute. Do you still dance? You were so cute in your tutu at four. I have the photos somewhere…”
“I was never in dance,” I said. “That was Ashley.”
Silence.
“Well,” she said, awkwardness creeping in, “you girls all blur together in my head sometimes. Anyway, we’re thinking of doing a big family Christmas this year, what do you think? The four of us and you, of course. Maybe we fly somewhere warm. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
I had learned enough by then to hear the rest of the unspoken sentence: If Robert pays for it.
“I’m busy,” I said.
“Busy?” She laughed like I’d told a joke. “You’re fourteen. What could you possibly be busy with?”
I looked at the heap of structural drawings on my desk, the math homework, the sketch of a community center I was designing for a school competition.
“Building things,” I said. “Goodbye, Mom.”
I hung up before she could answer.
That was the first time I realized I didn’t need their approval to fill a room.
The second time was when I turned sixteen and discovered that my flimsy card table desk was a bigger problem than my lack of social life.
The desk wobbled every time I erased a line hard enough. My drafting lamp flickered. I had outgrown my borrowed space. My diagrams were spilling onto the floor, into stacks of paper held together by paper clips and desperation.
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