this was not a Tuesday afternoon salvage job, that I was going to take my time, and I walked through the collapsed barn for two hours selecting beams one by one.
Megan helped me design the house. Megan Chen had been my closest friend since we were twenty-three and at the same firm, thrown together by circumstance and kept together by the discovery that we were both people who argued about things not to win but because we wanted the decisions to be right.
She had been part of Holt Ridge since the beginning in the informal way of someone who is not on the payroll but who is present at every decision, who comes over on weeknights and looks at plans and tells you when something is wrong.
She had opinions about the greenhouse. Significant opinions, researched and articulated and arrived at over weeks of looking at passive solar structures in mountain climates, and she was right about all of them, and we argued about it for a month anyway because that was how we worked, and the
