Rain had soaked the shoulders of the navy coat dark enough to almost look black. A bead of water slid from the man’s cuff and hit the courthouse tile between Gregory’s shoes. The leather folder in his hand had a deep blue seal pressed into the corner. Gregory saw it before he saw the man’s face. Ashley’s nails dug into his sleeve hard enough to wrinkle the fabric. Dana went still beside me. Somewhere behind us, a clerk laughed at something down the hall, and the sound died the second the man said, very clearly, ‘Gregory Hale, you’ve been served in your individual and professional capacity.’
Gregory had not always looked like a man who needed rooms to bend around him.
The first time I met him, he was standing over a chipboard model in our second-year architecture studio with graphite on the side of his hand and a coffee stain on his cuff. Everyone else was trying to sound brilliant. Gregory was funny. Careful. Interested in the same things I was interested in then—public spaces, old brick buildings, how cities remembered the people who built them. He stayed late the week before juries to help me recut basswood pieces after my first model collapsed. At two in the morning we ate vending-machine crackers on the floor and argued about whether glass made everything feel temporary.
