Where the Walls Come Down
Clara Voss has a reputation: the structural engineer who doesn't miss a crack, doesn't flinch from a load-bearing failure, and doesn't let a single person in past the fourth wall of her apartment. So when Alderman Briggs slots her into the Ashworth Municipal Planning Hall's emergency retrofit committee, directly across the table from Mayor Rowan Calloway, she calculates the risk. It's manageable. Professional. Temporary. Rowan Calloway runs the city the way he runs a campaign: every move accounted for, every vulnerability wall'd off. His chief of staff, Dana, knows the drill. His father Gerald built the old city; his brother Silas tore it down; and Rowan is the one keeping what's left from collapsing on everyone else. He hasn't let anyone see him not in control since his mother, June, stopped breathing in a hospital room he wasn't in. The retrofit is the fuse. A condemned glass-and-steel structure, six months to save it or lose it. Clara and Rowan are in the same room, staring at the same blueprints, arguing over load paths while the rain hammers the walls they're trying to reinforce. And then the walls start coming down, not just the building's, but the ones they built around their own hearts. Felix Duarte sees it first. Maren sees it second. And Gerald, from the back of every committee meeting, watches with the flat, knowing look of a man who buried his own walls in the city's foundation. When the structural report comes back and Clara realizes the building can't be saved the way they planned, she has a choice: tear out the load-bearing truth and rebuild what they have, or walk away and let the whole structure come down with it. Rowan is already standing in the rain with his coat off and his guard down. He's waiting to see if she'll build the wall back up, or stay in the open with him. Either way, the walls are coming down.