The Weight of Glass
The fluorescent lights of Merrow & Associates hummed their same tired tune as they had for the past four years, but tonight Jake Turner didn't mind the sound. He stood at his drafting table on the eleventh floor, looking down at the model he'd built with his own hands—balsa wood and foam core, a scaled miniature of what might someday be a twelve-story mixed-use building on the corner of Delancey and Ninth. Real. His. Or close enough to his that it made his chest ache with something like pride.
"You're smiling like an idiot," said Marcus Webb, poking his head over the partition that separated their desks. Marcus was the closest thing Jake had to a friend at the firm, a rumpled man in his forties who'd been passed over for partner twice and had made peace with it by finding joy in small things—good coffee, bad puns, other people's victories.
"Ellison signed off on the design today," Jake said. "Final approval. We break ground in March."
"The Delancey project? That's yours?"
"Mine," Jake confirmed, and the word tasted strange and wonderful in his mouth. Three years of grinding through smaller commissions—a dentist's office here, a boutique renovation there—and finally, finally,…
