The contract arrived by courier the following morning, all nineteen pages of it.
Mia sat at her kitchen table with a second cup of coffee and read it three times. It was thorough, specific, and in several places frankly unusual. There was a clause about communication windows — all project questions to be submitted in writing before 6 PM, responses to be provided within twenty-four hours. There was a clause about site access, which permitted her and her team entry to the estate Monday through Saturday, 7 AM to 6 PM, but specified that the west wing residential quarters were off-limits without prior written consent. There was a clause about photography.
This was the one that made her pause.
*No photographs of the estate interior or exterior, including but not limited to photographs taken for architectural documentation purposes, shall be shared publicly, published, or distributed to any third party without express written consent of the owner.*
She'd had confidentiality clauses before. They were common, particularly for high-net-worth clients who valued their privacy. But something about the specific language — the preemptive comprehensiveness of it, the way it seemed to anticipate every loophole — suggested this wasn't a standard template. Someone had thought carefully about this.
She signed on page nineteen and called him.
He picked up on the second ring. "Ms. Calloway."
"The photography clause," she said. "I'll need documentation photos for the restoration record. Standard practice, for preservation purposes and for my own professional files. I can agree to no public sharing, but I need the right to take and retain internal documentation."
A pause. "Define 'internal documentation.'"
"My files. My team's files. Nothing that leaves the firm without your written consent. But I need a visual record of every phase — before, during, and after — for quality control and project management."
Another pause, longer this time.
"Amend clause 7.3," he said. "Documentation photography for internal project use is permitted provided all images are watermarked with the date and stored on encrypted systems. No cloud storage."
She wrote this down. "Agreed."
"Anything else?"
There were, in fact, two other clauses she had questions about, but she decided to save them. "Not today."
There was something that might have been the very distant beginning of a surprised reaction in the silence before he responded. "I'll have the amended contract over by end of day."
He hung up.
Mia sat with the phone in her hand for a moment, looking out her kitchen window at the street below. In fourteen years, she had worked with architects, developers, investors, city councillors, and two sitting senators. She had navigated difficult personalities, impossible timelines, and budgets that changed overnight. She had learned to read people quickly, to take the measure of a client in the first twenty minutes and calibrate accordingly.
She had absolutely no idea what to make of Ethan Ashford.
---
She brought two people with her for the first site survey: Jamie, her project manager, who had worked with her for six years and had the patience of stone; and Petra, her structural specialist, who could read a building's bones the way other people read faces.
Ethan Ashford was not there when they arrived. A woman named Mrs. Grayson, who appeared to serve some combination of roles that Mia couldn't quite categorise, met them at the gate and walked them through the exterior access points. She was efficient, spoke only in response to direct questions, and disappeared as soon as the tour was complete.
"Interesting property," Jamie said, when Mrs. Grayson had gone.
"Interesting client," Mia said.
"Haven't met him yet." Jamie was photographing the east wing roofline, the camera making soft clicking sounds in the October silence.
"You'll manage," Mia said.
Petra was crouching near the foundation of the east wing, running her hand along the stonework with a professional tenderness that Mia had always found oddly moving. "The original construction is extraordinary," Petra said. "Whoever built this knew what they were doing. The foundation is solid — better than I expected from the exterior damage. Most of what you're seeing is deferred maintenance, not structural failure." She stood, brushing limestone dust from her palms. "This building wants to stand. It's just been left to fight alone for too long."
Mia looked up at the east wing's compromised roofline, at the collapsed section open to the grey October sky.
Something tightened in her chest — a response she recognised as professional feeling but which she was careful, always, not to examine too closely. Buildings that had been left alone to deteriorate did something to her that she couldn't quite articulate and rarely tried to.
"Let's get it right," she said, and took out her notebook.
The footsteps on the gravel behind her were quiet, but Mia had good ears.
"Ms. Calloway."
She turned. Ethan Ashford was crossing the lawn from the direction of the house, dressed in the same studied indifference as before — dark trousers, a coat this time against the October chill, his hands in his pockets. He looked at Jamie and Petra without surprise, which meant Mrs. Grayson had informed him, and then he looked at the east wing.
Something shifted in his face when he looked at the east wing.
It was there for only a moment — a fraction of a second, a fracture in the neutral surface — and then it was gone. If Mia hadn't been watching closely, she would have missed it entirely.
She filed it away and said nothing.
"I'd like to walk the wing with you," he said. "If that doesn't disrupt your process."
