sleep. It’s been gnawing at him, this act. Even that won’t stop him. That determination of his is going to break more than the building. It’s going to break him, one of these days.
Once upon a time it broke me.
“That’s it? You tell me it’s wrong and then you leave?”
I look back at my Cleopatra with her sad eyes. She looks resolved to her fate. It’s the best art I’ve ever created. Maybe stronger because I knew it would be destroyed.
Medusa had been different. She’d been angry. Christopher had looked at all that fury and understood it. No, he’d felt it too. The hurt she felt had wrapped itself around him until he felt what she did. If he can understand her then maybe he can understand Cleopatra. It’s not rage she feels, though. It’s determination in the face of unbeatable odds.
“You could stop,” I tell him, one last attempt.
A protest may be a voice, but it’s up to him whether he listens. Up to him whether he lets her strength wrap around him. Up to him whether he looks down at me with admiration in his eyes and kisses me like the world could end around us.
He turns and speaks to the men in the construction crew. Take the day off, he could be telling them. Instead one man gets into the big yellow vehicle with a crane and a wrecking ball that’s taller than me attached. Part of me despairs that Sutton isn’t here with me.
That was him choosing you over money, in case the grand gesture wasn’t clear.
He should be standing beside me, holding me. It’s too personal, my relationship with this library. My relationship with Christopher. As if he’s going to plunge that wrecking ball through my heart, instead of the freshly painted face of an ancient Egyptian ruler.
The construction workers move the crowd back, clearing space for them to work.
It’s a random construction worker who climbs into the yellow machinery as the crowd boos and shouts. A mover of levers and knobs. It’s Christopher who gestures with his hand. Begin, says that hand. From the moment he was bent over his textbook in that cabin, it’s been leading to this moment. This moment when he would destroy everything.
A crane extends higher and higher, beyond anything else in sight. Taller than any of the buildings around us, including the library. It brushes up against gray clouds.
My stomach pitches forward. The crowd falls silent as the crane pivots and pulls the ball away from the library. Cleopatra’s eyes watch it swing toward her, steady, steady, steady.
The crash might as well be a physical blow. It crushes my lungs and slams into my gut. I’m left reeling, unable to breathe or think or feel anything but pain. Concrete and metal buckle around the ball, which suspends for a moment inside. As it moves away, it leaves a crater so much bigger than its size. Broken wood and brick. Shards of glass.
Cleopatra is gone. Only the shell of her is left—only the outer edges of her sleek black hair, the bottom of her chin. A work that took a whole night to create, gone in a second. It took longer than one night to paint like that. It took my whole life to dream of something more than business and money and power.
It’s only by slow degrees that I realize hands hold my arms. They’re keeping me back, behind the barricade, which means I must have tried to run forward. I didn’t mean to. It wasn’t conscious thought. Survival. That’s what it felt like.
The crane pulls back and swings again. Only a little more destruction this time.
It will take much longer to reach the inner sanctum with the wood counter and the carved wall and the bookshelves. I’m not sure I can watch that long.
The wrecking ball breaks me a little bit every time it swings.
A car pulls up at the perimeter, noticeable only because it’s sleek and black and long. A limo, like the kind Daddy used. For a wild second, made uncertain from lack of sleep, I expect to see him step out. He would stop this. Except I’m not sure the real Daddy would have. He probably would have invested with Christopher. Only in my daydreams would he help save it.
It’s not Daddy who steps out of the limo, of course. Sunlight limns golden hair. Wrinkles shadow a white dress shirt. The crowd parts for Sutton Mayfair as easily as breathing. He has a way of