Part 2

The boardroom on twenty-nine had been dressed for a review: water glᴀsses aligned, the plaster samples set on black felt, Blake’s schedule printed on heavy stock. Clare stood at the head of the table in the gray suit she wore when a room needed to believe her. Blake had taken the chair that used to be Eli’s, jacket unʙuттoned, pen ready.

Professor Henry Talbot came in without a briefcase. He was seventy-one, stooped at the shoulders, and he carried an old canvas tool bag the color of dried clay. The bag’s straps had been resтιтched more than once. He set it on the empty chair nearest the window and did not sit.

His eyes went around the table, past the samples, past Blake, and stopped on the vacant place where a set of field notes should have been.

“Where’s Elijah Reed?”

Clare’s smile arrived on time. “Eli has stepped away from day-to-day operations. Blake Sutton is now leading our preservation division.”

Talbot looked at Blake. The look held no insult and no welcome. He unbuckled the canvas bag. The sound of the brᴀss was small and exact in the quiet. From inside he drew a folded cotton roll, opened it, and laid three chisels on the felt beside Blake’s samples. The handles were dark with oil and years. On the ferrule of the middle one, someone had stamped a mark Eli would have known with his thumb.

“Reed’s mentor sent these ahead of me,” Talbot said. “Told me if I was reviewing Whitmore’s meetinghouse work, I ought to bring the tools the job was promised under. He also told me Elijah still answers his own phone.”

Blake’s pen stilled.

Talbot lifted the top sheet of the revised specification. He read in silence long enough for the ice in the water glᴀsses to shift. When he spoke, he did not raise his voice.

“You’ve cut the brown-coat cure. You’ve cut the hair coat. You’ve called the remaining work equivalent.” He set the page down so the red lines faced Clare. “Equivalent to what?”

“To a schedule we can defend,” Blake said. “The liquidated damages—”

“Are a contract problem,” Talbot said. “This is a wall problem.” He nodded at the samples. “Tap the face.”

No one moved. Talbot tapped it himself, once, with the ʙuтт of the middle chisel. The sound came back thin. He tapped the second sample, the one mixed on Eli’s ratio and cured on Eli’s clock, which had been left in the archives and carried up that morning by a junior who did not know why he had been asked. That one answered with a dull, solid note.

Clare’s hand closed around her pen. The cap was already off.

“Professor, our chief of staff has modeled the exposure. Eighteen days against a penalty that—”

“Mrs. Whitmore.” Talbot’s use of the name was polite and finished. “I spent forty-five years walking into rooms where someone had saved a fortnight and lost a century. I am not here to admire the model.” He looked again at the empty chair. “Elijah wrote me last week. Not to ask for this review. To tell me where the original sequence was filed, in case the building still needed it after he was gone. That is not the letter of a man angling for his office back.”

Blake pushed his schedule forward an inch. “With respect, the division has to be commercially viable. Energy isn’t a defect.”

“No,” Talbot said. “Ignorance is.”

He rolled the chisels back into the cotton, buckled the bag, and left it on the chair. “I’ll walk the scaffold at eight tomorrow. If the brown coat isn’t in that wall at the thickness Reed specified, I will write the review I actually see. The grant committee reads what I write.” His gaze moved to Clare and stayed. “You can bring whoever you like to the scaffold. You cannot bring gravity later.”

After he left, the room held the shape of his bag on the chair. Blake spoke first, low, about optics and a revised revised spec. Clare did not answer him. She was looking at the felt, at the faint oil ring the ferrule had left, at the place where Eli’s name was not on the slide deck stacked at her wrist.

Her phone lit. She did not reach for it.

Across the river, in a workshop that still smelled of lime and cold iron, Eli set the last chisel into the rack. The sign was not hung yet. It leaned where he could see it from the bench, letters clean, chains coiled on the floor like something ready to take weight. His phone buzzed once. A number he knew. He let it buzz out against the wood, wiped the bench with his sleeve, and opened the north window to the weather.