Chapter 7 - The New Horizon
Six months later, the cherry blossoms along Lake Washington were in full, explosive bloom.
The Pier 54 redevelopment had opened three weeks ahead of schedule. The city council had held a ribbon-cutting ceremony on the new timber boardwalk, and Frank Henderson had stood before sixty municipal officials and declared that Vanessa Cole was the finest structural mind the Pacific Northwest had seen in thirty years.
He had also formally transferred twenty percent of the firm’s equity to my name, renaming the practice Henderson, Cole & Partners.
My commercial building on Fourth and Main had secured a five-year lease renewal with our primary tenant—a local organic grocer—at a twelve-percent rate increase. The property was flourishing, completely unencumbered, its title resting safely within the irrevocable family trust Nathaniel and I had created.
My parents had sold their Green Lake home in a distressed short sale to satisfy their mounting legal debts and credit card judgments.
They had moved into a two-bedroom rental condo in an aging retirement community in Kenmore. My father spent his mornings complaining about HOA fees on neighborhood web forums; my mother had stopped going to church after the pastor’s wife gently suggested that she step down from the hospitality committee.
They did not call me.
The legal boundary lines Evelyn Ross had drawn were three feet thick and lined with barbed wire. Every six weeks, an automated financial reporting statement from the credit bureau arrived in my inbox, confirming that my identity and accounts remained completely detached from the Cole family ledger.
As for Bailey, the reports came through an unexpected channel.
Every third Sunday, my property manager in Tacoma, a gruff retired contractor named Carl, would send me his routine maintenance summary. At the bottom of the page, in his messy, handwritten notes, there was always a single line:
Unit 2B (B. Cole): Rent paid on the first. Common hallways vacuumed every Friday. She planted three pots of yellow pansies by the front entryway yesterday. Doing fine.
Bailey hadn't called me, and she hadn't asked for a dollar.
Two months after moving to Tacoma, she had sent a single white postcard to my office address. There was no return address and no request for a phone call. Just two sentences written in her loose, loopy script:
May you like
The pansies look pretty by the mailboxes. I bought them with my own overtime pay.
I had tucked the postcard into the corner of the framed blueprints on my office wall, right next to the municipal design awards. It was the only piece of my sister I kept near my work.