Chapter 5: Ashes and Architecture
Time, it turns out, is the ultimate architect. It tears down rotten structures and allows new, beautiful things to be built in their place.
Six months later, the sterile, chemical smell of bleach and boiled vegetables permeated Richard’s shared room in a heavily subsidized, state-funded hospice center on the outskirts of the city. Because the forensic audit had proven he had hidden marital assets and committed profound financial infidelity, the judge had awarded me the lion’s share of the estate. Stripped of his wealth, fired from his firm due to his inability to work, and with his assets seized to repay the trust, Richard had nothing left.
He lay in a narrow, mechanical bed, his body reduced to a skeletal frame. His skin was the color of old parchment. With trembling, bruised fingers, he clutched a cheap, plastic prepaid phone, dialing a number for the hundredth time that week.
He was calling Amber, the twenty-four-year-old marketing assistant who was supposed to be his ticket to a new life. But Amber had vanished the exact moment the credit cards stopped working and the promised trip to Paris evaporated into thin air.
The phone pressed against his ear yielded the same automated response it always did: a sharp, trilling disconnected tone. There would be no Paris. There would be no European redemption. There was only the low hum of the flickering fluorescent lights, the smell of ammonia, and the agonizing, morphine-resistant pain in his abdomen. He was dying exactly as he had lived his entire life beneath the polished veneer: utterly, terrifyingly alone.
Across the city, the atmosphere could not have been more different.
Brilliant, golden sunlight streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows of my newly leased architectural studio in the West Loop. I stood before a massive, angled drafting table, surrounded by rolls of blueprints and material swatches.
“If we cantilever the deck over the ravine, we preserve the root system of the old oak,” my senior designer, a brilliant woman named Elena, suggested, pointing at the CAD drawing on the monitor.
I laughed, a genuine, chest-deep sound that felt like music. “It’s bold. I love it. Let’s run the structural physics on it this afternoon.”
I caught my reflection in the glass partition of my office. The heavy, dark bags under my eyes were long gone. My skin glowed with health and vitality. I had reclaimed my maiden name, Samantha Cole, and with the capital from the divorce, I had resurrected my firm, Cole & Associates. I was wearing a simple, elegant navy dress, moving through the bustling studio with a lightness and purpose I hadn’t felt in a decade. I was surrounded by genuine, creative people, breathing air that was finally, entirely my own.
My assistant, a bright-eyed grad student, walked in and placed the daily stack of mail on the corner of my drafting table.
“Mostly vendor catalogs, Sam,” she said brightly. “But there’s one weird letter in there.”
I flipped through the stack. At the bottom was a cheap, thin white envelope. The return address was stamped with the logo of the state hospice care facility. The handwriting on the front was shaky, desperate, and barely legible, but I recognized the aggressive slant of the letters.
I picked it up. In the center, heavily underlined in blue ink, were the words: URGENT: Richard’s Final Words. Please Read.
I stood there for a moment, holding the thin paper. I felt the weight of it in my hands. A year ago, a letter from Richard would have sent my heart into palpitations. I would have opened it frantically, desperate for his approval, terrified of his anger, or foolishly hopeful for his apology.
I looked down at the envelope. I felt absolutely nothing. No curiosity about his dying apologies. No desire for closure. The closure had been the day I walked out of that house.
Without breaking my conversation with Elena about the cantilevered deck, without even a flicker of hesitation, I held the letter over the whirring, steel blades of my industrial paper shredder and let it drop.
