Every Vow But One

POV: Leo

Seven Days Before-

The city is always busy and bright, even at night. Leo had known this for eleven years, ever since he moved to Manhattan with two rolling suitcases. A certain level of arrogance in a 23-year-old who graduated at the top of his class in architectural design. But over time, he came to see it differently-not as a failure because he didn't know enough, but because the structure was in bad shape. The city could hold a lot of weight. It held the weight of eight million lives at once, and that much weight needed to be lit up all the time.

At twelve-forty in the morning, he sat at his drafting table with a mechanical pencil and a cup of coffee that had gone cold at eleven. He kept reaching for it, just like he did with things he was used to but didn't change what he expected from them.

Seven days.

The project he was working on was a community arts center in the South Bronx. It was his third pro bono project in two years, and David thought it was great, while his accountant thought it was a pattern. The building's old foundation, which was a former industrial warehouse from 1923 with load-bearing walls that had been partially damaged by a bad renovation in the 1980s, was a structural problem. Leo had spent three weeks figuring out what could be saved and what had to be thrown away. As it usually was, the answer was more than people wanted to hear and less than they were afraid of.

He drew a straight line across the page, erased it, and then drew another one.

Not a thing from the bedroom. Elara slept like she did everything else: all the way through, with very little movement, as if she were saving her energy for the work even while she was sleeping. He had watched her sleep about nine hundred times in the past four years, and he still thought it was interesting. Not how soft it is. The discipline and the fact that she always looked like she knew where she was, even when she was still sleeping.

He didn't go in. He had come to the table at eleven because the other option was to lie next to her in the dark with his eyes open, making a list of reasons he couldn't name.

Seven days was not, in and of itself, a number that should have made me feel this awake. He had completed complicated builds in six weeks. He had dealt with problems with permits, not having enough materials, and clients who changed their minds in the third month of a twelve-month project. He was not, by any reasonable standard, a man who fell apart when the deadline came.

He painted the east wall of the arts center. He looked over the load calculations again, even though he had already done so twice. He turned the pencil in his fingers, which was