Dad stood behind her, staring at the floor. I recognized the look on his face from the night Logan had walked out of dinner: a man hoping somebody else would find a way to make the discomfort stop. He looked frightened. Their home really was at risk.
Logan moved closer. “You got the contract, Hannah. You won. What else do you want?”
He spoke as though we’d been competing for a trophy. I thought about the rehabilitation rooms, the patients who would use them, the plans I’d made long before he knew West Bridge existed. I hadn’t set out to beat him. I’d set out to design a place that might help someone.
I invited them inside. Not because I was agreeing to anything, but because I wanted them to hear what I had heard. I turned on my television and played the security recording. The room filled with the scrape of buckets, my mother’s voice telling Logan to make the model impossible to repair, and his answer about the investors finding out.
Mom’s face went pale. “That was taken out of context,” she whispered.
“No,” I said. “I have the entire context.”
I laid Logan’s proposal on the table beside the papers Dad had brought. My floor plans were there, my name erased. They could see the work Logan had claimed and the lie they wanted me to put in writing. Nobody could honestly call this a misunderstanding anymore.
Dad finally looked at the proposal. He seemed smaller than he had across all those family dinners, when he could wave away my career with a sentence. I wanted him to say he hadn’t known, or that he was sorry, or even to ask what the destruction had cost me. But what he wanted most in that moment was still a way out of the trouble.
“I didn’t ruin your company, Logan,” I said. “I stopped holding it together.”