Chapter 19 — Keep the Shop, Nora

He set the photograph back down on the table, gently, as though it were fragile, and he looked at the red dress inside the glass case one last time, and he swallowed hard.

“My developers,” he said quietly, and his voice was entirely without hostility now, “will re-route the tower foundation around this lot.

The historical footprint remains untouched.” It was, I understood, an enormous concession, a redesign that would cost his firm a great deal, undertaken not for profit but for something he could not have named an hour earlier.

He turned, and walked toward the door, and stopped at the threshold without turning back.