Between Guilt and Touch - He Has to Rebuild Her Studio. First, He Has to Win Back Her Trust. ebook

Cover

Between Guilt and Touch

He Has to Rebuild Her Studio. First, He Has to Win Back Her Trust.

Laura Bellini

ROMANS

Table of contents

Title page

INTRO

Chapter 1 - Things That Can't Be Dried Out

Chapter 2 - Terms of Access

Chapter 3 - The Weight That Wasn't on the Schedule

Chapter 4 - What Was Left Between Us

Chapter 5 - A Temporary Place

Chapter 6 - A Crack Beneath the Paint

Chapter 7 - Card Number Seven

Chapter 8 - More Than Repair

Chapter 9 - The Price of Honesty

Chapter 10 - The Document That Shouldn't Exist

Chapter 11 - Everything He Didn't Tell Me

Chapter 12 - No Draft Version

Chapter 13 - On My Own Terms

Chapter 14 - Someone Else's Signature

Chapter 15 - What I Want

Chapter 16 - I'm Not Asking You to Stay

Chapter 17 - The Full Version

Chapter 18 - What Remains After the Truth

Chapter 19 - The Last Gap

Chapter 20 - Light by the Window

Landmarks

Cover

Title page

Table of contents

Start of content

INTRO

I heard the first crack at 6:43, while I was trying to decide whether the thin gold line around the rim of the cup was finally even enough, or whether I had simply convinced myself it was because I had been awake for eleven hours.

I set down my brush and looked toward the ceiling. Something was always creaking in the old factory. Pipes sighed, wooden beams responded to changes in temperature, and the heavy windows trembled when the first trams rolled along the street a few hundred meters away. After five years of running my studio, I had learned to recognize most of those sounds.

This one was different.

Short. Dry. Definitely too close.

I got up from the table.

"Not today," I told the building, as though old brick might appreciate an argument involving deadlines.

Twelve porcelain cups from the beginning of the last century stood on the table in front of me, each worth more than my first car. The museum had been waiting for them for three months. If I finished the conservation work by Friday, I would get another commission - larger, longer, and well paid enough that I could stop checking my bank balance every time I needed to order materials.

For the first time in a long while, I had a chance to move from my studio somehow staying afloat to my studio actually working.

That was why I had slept maybe two hours that night.

That was why I was there before seven.

And that was why, when the first dust fell from the ceiling, instead of leaving immediately, I moved the porcelain to the center of the table and covered it with a soft cloth.

The second crack left no room for negotiation.

A thin fissure appeared above the shelving unit where I kept my pigments.

I knew that crack.

Except yesterday it had been maybe twenty centimeters long, and Jakub Wysocki had told me it was superficial.

I also remembered exactly how he had said it.

Calmly.

Confidently.

Looking straight into my eyes like a man who had spent his entire career earning money because people trusted his judgment.

"You can work here safely, Lena."

Six words.

I should not have remembered them.

The crack moved sideways.

I stepped back.

"Oh, no."

This time I did not try to save the cups. I grabbed my phone and the bag lying beside the door and ran across the studio.

I was already in the corridor when something crashed behind me.

A cloud of dust struck me. I coughed, turning my head away, and then I heard something much worse than breaking plaster.

Water.

At first, individual drops striking the metal table.

A moment later, a rush.

I took two steps back before common sense caught up with my body.

Water was pouring through a hole in the ceiling.

Onto my tables.

Onto the shelves.

Onto the wooden crates containing my documentation.

Onto the covered porcelain cups.

"Damn it."

I started toward the main shutoff valve by the back room, but another crack stopped me. Plaster crumbled above the passageway.

At the same moment, the phone vibrated in my hand.

I did not have time to look at the screen.

"Lena!"

The voice came from the stairwell.

I knew it as well as I knew the crack in my ceiling.

Jakub appeared in the doorway a few seconds later, wearing a dark jacket thrown over his shirt, his hair wet from the morning rain. He must have come straight from home.

I had no idea why that information even registered in my mind.

I was furious, my studio was turning into a swimming pool, and somehow I still noticed that he had not had time to fasten the cuff of his left sleeve.

He stopped when he saw the hole.

And for a moment, he said nothing.

That was enough.

"You said it was safe."

He looked at me.

The last time I had seen that expression was six months earlier, when I first showed him the crack above the window. He had walked over to the wall, touched the plaster, taken photographs and measurements, brought in instruments whose names I never remembered.

Then he had asked me out for coffee, and for two hours we talked about everything except the building.

That was the beginning of my mistake.

We had not kissed.

We had not even held hands.

And yet, within a few weeks, I had somehow learned what coffee he ordered when he was tired, why he did not answer his father's calls, and that whenever he was uncertain about something, he rubbed his thumb along the edge of his watch.

He was doing it now.

"Let's get out of here," he said.

"You told me I could work."

"Lena."

"Yesterday. You were standing right here, and you told me I could stay."

"I know what I said."

It hurt more than it should have.

He did not raise his voice.

He never did.

Jakub was one of those people who became even calmer in a crisis, until you started wondering whether the problem existed only inside your own head.

I pointed toward the studio.

"This is your version of safe?"

His gaze shifted past me.

Then stopped.

I turned.

Water was still running from the ceiling, but Jakub was not looking at it.

He was staring at the wall beside the back room.

At the steel support his crew had installed there three weeks earlier.

Yesterday, there had been a red tamper seal beside the clamp.

I had photographed it by accident while taking a picture of a new shelf for my sister. Jakub had explained that the seal made it possible to tell whether anyone had disturbed the fitting while work was being carried out on the floor above.

Now it was gone.

"What?" I asked.

Jakub stepped inside.

I caught his sleeve.

"You just said not to go in there."

He looked at my hand and then at me.

For a fraction of a second, I was standing too close.

I felt the chill of rain on his jacket and the familiar scent of his soap, which I had spent the last several months trying very hard not to remember.

I pulled my hand away.

"Don't go in," I repeated.

This time, he listened.

He took out his phone and snapped several photographs from the doorway.

"Where's the seal?" I asked.

He did not answer immediately.

"It should be here."

"I know."

I looked at him.

"Then where is it?"

Quick footsteps sounded in the corridor. Someone from the construction crew was calling Jakub's name, but he kept staring at the support.

For the first time since I had known him, I saw something on his face that he could not hide.

Not surprise.

Fear.

"Who had access to the studio last night?" he asked.

"No one."

"Who has a key?"

"Me. The building owner. You."

At last, he looked me in the eyes.

Rain tapped against the tall windows in the stairwell. Behind us, water was destroying five years of my life, and suddenly I stopped thinking about porcelain, paperwork, and money.

Because Jakub had not asked whether someone could have come in.

He had asked who had access.

"What are you hiding from me?" I said.

The muscles in his jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.

"Right now, we need to secure the building."

"That's not an answer."

"I know."

That word again.

Just as quiet.

Just as inadequate.

I looked past his shoulder at the construction worker who had just appeared on the half-landing. Then at the hole in my studio ceiling.

At the missing seal.

At Jakub.

Yesterday, all I had wanted was to finish twelve cups and send the client photographs before noon.

Now I knew two things.

My studio was not safe.

And the man I had believed knew more about that than he wanted to tell me.

Chapter 1 - Things That Can't Be Dried Out

The fire department ordered us out of the building seven minutes later. In those seven minutes, Jakub managed to call his crew three times, the building administrator once, shut off the water supply together with the man he had once introduced to me as Marek, and argue with someone on the phone so calmly that I only realized it was an argument when he said, "If you go in there before the structural expert does, I'll call building control myself."

I stood on the half-landing with my bag pressed against my stomach and watched water creep out from beneath the door of my studio.

It wasn't a great wave. Just a layer a few millimeters deep, finding the lowest point in the floor and slowly making its way toward the stairs. The rational part of me knew that most of my equipment stood above floor level and that porcelain handled water better than documentation, wood, and paper. The other part could see only five years of work turning into a thin gray stream.

"Please go downstairs," the firefighter repeated.

"I need to get the crate by the shelving unit on the left. There are museum pieces in it."

"You can't go back inside."

"They're historic objects."

"So are you, in the sense that you'd be difficult to replace."

Under normal circumstances, I might have appreciated the argument. That morning I was incapable of appreciating anything.

"Lena," Jakub said.

I turned my head.

He stood several meters away. He had taken off his jacket and was holding it in one hand, as if only now remembering that the building was warm. His left cuff was still unfastened.

A stupid detail.

A malicious one.

My brain kept choosing things like that so it wouldn't have to deal with what actually mattered.

"Don't use that tone with me."

He frowned.

"What tone?"

"The one that says I'm about to do something unreasonable and you're the only person who can stop me."

"You want to walk into a room where part of the ceiling just came down."

"Because my work is in there."

"I know."

"Stop saying you know."

This time he went quiet.

The firefighter pointed toward the stairs and left no room for further discussion. I went down first. Several people from the other studios were already gathered on the ground floor: an interior designer from the second floor, a photographer I knew only from the elevator, two guys from an advertising agency, and an older man who ran a bookbinding workshop at the far end of the corridor.

Everyone was talking at once, showing one another their phones, wet patches on the ceiling, and the growing number of closed doors. Someone asked if the building was collapsing. Someone else answered that this section had supposedly been reinforced.

Jakub looked in my direction.

He had heard it.

So had I.

"It was," I said.

He didn't answer.

Outside, the rain had stopped, but the paving stones in front of the former factory were dark and glossy in the cold morning light. The red-brick building looked innocent. Tall windows, restored metal frames, black plaques with the names of studios and businesses.

Five years earlier, I had fallen in love with the place because of the light. Because of the way the afternoon sun came through the three enormous windows and traveled across my worktables. I had signed the lease before common sense had time to tell me the rent was too high.

It was supposed to be my place.

The first thing that truly belonged to me, even if only under the terms of a rental agreement.

I took out my phone. I had twelve unread notifications, three messages from my sister, and a missed call from Marta Leszczyńska at the museum.

Her name lit up the screen again.

I moved a few steps away from the group.

"Marta."

"Finally. Are you all right? I saw the administrator's message saying they're closing the building. What happened?"

I looked at Jakub. He was standing with two firefighters, pointing at something on the plans displayed on Marek's tablet.

"We had an accident."

"What kind of accident?"

"Water. Part of the ceiling. Structural."

Silence on the other end.

"And the set?"

I knew immediately she meant the porcelain.

"It was in the studio."

"Lena..."

"I don't know the extent of the damage yet."

"Can you get inside?"

"No."

I heard her breathe out.

Marta was not someone who panicked. She was head of the decorative arts department, had survived a flooded storage room, a theft during transport, and one director who had tried to clean eighteenth-century silver with bathroom cleaner.

If Marta went quiet, things were serious.

"I need information by ten," she said. "Even preliminary. The insurer will want documentation."

"You'll get it."

"And Lena?"

"Yes?"

"Don't try to save anything yourself until they say it's safe."

I looked toward the entrance.

"Everyone has the same advice for me today."

I hung up and sent my sister a single message: I'm okay. Studio damaged. I'll call later.

I didn't want to hear Alicja's voice yet. She would ask whether I was safe, then whether I needed money, and then remind me that two years earlier she had already told me not to invest all my savings in a space I didn't own.

She would do it lovingly.

That would not improve matters.

The doors from the parking lot flew open, and Maciej Rudzki, the owner of the building, appeared.

I had seen him maybe five times before. Mid-forties, always too well dressed for a man supervising renovations in an old factory, and always looking as though he had just walked out of a meeting where he'd earned more than I made in a year.

Today he wore a navy overcoat and white sneakers that stopped at the first puddle.

"Jakub."

Not hello.

Not was anyone hurt.

Jakub lowered the tablet.

"No one goes onto the second floor."

"I know. The site manager called me."

"Who was on site last night?"

Rudzki glanced at the people standing nearby.

"We'll talk privately."

"There's no point."

"Jakub."

"The seal on the support was broken."

Rudzki looked at him more closely.

It was brief.

Almost nothing.

If I hadn't known what to watch for, I might have missed it.

But I saw it.

"What seal?" I asked.

Only then did Rudzki seem to notice that I was standing several meters away.

"Ms. Król. First of all, I'm very sorry. Of course we'll establish the extent of the damage and..."

"What seal?"

"It's a technical matter."

"The technical matter was inside my studio."

Jakub stepped closer.

"Lena."

"No."

I looked at both of them.

"Don't do this thing people do when they know more than I do and decide that gives them the right to choose how much to tell me. Who broke the seal?"

Rudzki adjusted the sleeve of his coat.

"That's exactly what we need to establish."

"Who had access to the building?"

"Dozens of people have cards."

"To my studio?"

"That's a different matter."

"No. That's exactly the same matter."

Jakub looked at the owner.

"The system logs openings."

Rudzki pressed his lips together.

"Security has the data."

"Great," I said. "I want to see it."

"Ms. Król, we can't disclose employee information without..."

"I don't need anyone's national ID number. I want to know who entered my studio."

"We need to establish the situation first."

I took a step toward him.

"My studio is flooded, part of the ceiling is on the floor, and you've just told me you need to establish something first. What exactly? Your version of events?"

Jakub turned his head.

I almost saw the shadow of something that, under different circumstances, might have been a smile.

Rudzki did not share his reaction.

"I understand that you're emotional."

"Then you're wasting effort. My emotions aren't difficult to understand."

"Lena," Jakub said. "I want to check the logs with security. You can be there."

Rudzki looked at him.

"This is not a good time."

"That's exactly why it's the perfect time."

"Let's talk."

"We have nothing to talk about until I know who was there."

The two men stared at each other for several seconds, and for the first time I had the sense that this had not begun at 6:43 that morning.

It had begun earlier.

I was simply the last person to find out.

Security occupied a small room beside the side entrance. The three of us went in: me, Jakub, and Rudzki.

The shift supervisor, Mr. Sławek, had known me for years. Sometimes he accepted packages for me. Sometimes, when he saw me arriving at an absurd hour, he left a vending-machine coffee on the desk for me.

Now he looked as if he wanted to be anywhere else.

"The system was operating normally," he said.

"Show us the last twelve hours," Jakub asked.

Rudzki sighed.

"Are we really going to conduct an interrogation with..."

"Yes," I cut in.

Mr. Sławek clicked several times.

A table appeared on the screen.

The first entries concerned access to the building. The cleaning crew left at 9:17 p.m. The security guard made his round at ten. Then nothing for a long time.

At 11:48 p.m., someone used a service card.

Jakub leaned closer.

"Whose?"

"A technical card. Number seven."

"Who has it?"

Mr. Sławek hesitated.

Rudzki answered for him.

"The site manager."

Jakub straightened.

"Paweł?"

"Theoretically."

"Theoretically?"

"Cards get passed around sometimes."

"They shouldn't."

"I know how life on a construction site is supposed to work, Jakub."

"Apparently."

The next entry was at 11:52.

Technical doors, second floor.

Then 11:54.

My studio.

I felt my fingers tighten around the strap of my bag.

"How?"

Mr. Sławek looked at me.

"Your lock is linked to the main system. A technical card has emergency access."

"No one told me that."

"It's a safety measure in case of fire or..."

"Someone entered my studio before midnight."

Jakub scrolled down the list.

"Exit?"

11:58.

Four minutes.

Enough time to walk from the door to the support, break the seal, do something to the clamp, and leave.

Or enough time to do something else entirely.

"Camera," I said.

Mr. Sławek shook his head.

"We were replacing the recorder on that corridor yesterday."

I let out a short laugh.

Not because anything was funny.

"Of course."

Jakub looked at Rudzki.

"Call Paweł."

"I will."

"Now."

"You don't give me orders in my own building."

"Then the supervising inspector will."

Rudzki stepped half a pace closer.

"Careful."

The word changed the atmosphere.

Jakub didn't move.

"About what?"

Rudzki looked at me and apparently remembered he had a witness.

"About drawing conclusions before the expert assessment."

"I haven't drawn any."

"Good."

"I only said that someone entered a room under technical protection and left four minutes later. Several hours after that, the protection is gone and the ceiling is damaged. Those are facts."

Rudzki walked out without answering.

I stayed with Jakub and the security guard.

For a moment, more entries moved across the screen. At 5:58, the system recorded an alarm from the displacement sensor. At 6:02, Jakub entered the building.

I looked up.

"You were here at six?"

He looked at the screen.

"Yes."

I knew only that I had seen him later, once everything had already started coming apart.

"Why didn't you come straight to me?"

"I went to the technical room on the third floor first. The sensor was connected to the beam above your studio."

"Why did you get an alarm?"

"Because I installed it."

"When?"

His silence lasted one second too long.

"Yesterday."

That familiar cold feeling settled beneath my breastbone.

"After you told me it was safe."

"Yes."

Mr. Sławek suddenly became deeply interested in the second monitor.

"Why?"

"Lena, not here."

"Exactly here."

"I need the documents if I'm going to answer you precisely."

"I don't need precise. I need true."

Jakub rubbed a hand over his face.

He was tired.

I only noticed it then. Shadows under his eyes, stubble he usually didn't have in the morning, that unfastened cuff.

Part of me wanted to ask whether he had slept at all.

I immediately hated that part.

"Yesterday, after we spoke, I got the results from the measurements upstairs," he said. "I didn't like them."

"What does 'didn't like them' mean?"

"The displacement was greater than it should have been."

"And you didn't call me."

"I wrote to administration and told them to close part of the wing from the morning until we could inspect it again."

"From the morning?"

"You usually weren't here until after eight."

I stared at him.

"You've known me long enough to know that before a deadline, I can show up at six."

Something heavy entered his expression.

"I know."

"Again."

"I don't have a better word."

"Find one."

I turned and walked out.

He caught up with me in the corridor.

"Lena."

I kept walking.

"Lena, please."

"No."

"There's one more thing you need to know."

That was enough.

I stopped.

I didn't want to turn around.

I did anyway, slowly.

"If you start a sentence with 'there's one more thing you need to know,' it usually means I should have known it earlier."

"Probably."

"Fantastic."

He came closer but left more than a meter between us.

"Rudzki was pushing not to close the wing until we had a full assessment."

"And?"

"And I agreed to a temporary solution."

I glanced toward the stairs.

"The steel support."

"Among other things."

"You approved it."

"Yes."

"And yesterday you told me I could work here."

"On the condition that the protections remained intact and no work was carried out upstairs."

"But you weren't sure."

"I was sure enough to sign conditional approval."

Every word arranged itself into something worse.

"And by evening you weren't anymore."

"No."

"And instead of calling me, you wrote to administration."

He didn't deny it.

"Why?"

For a moment he looked as if he might answer.

Then his phone rang.

He looked at the screen and rejected the call.

"Tell me."

"Because after the first results, I didn't know whether the problem was the structure, the sensor, or the work being carried out. I didn't want to alarm you without grounds."

"So you decided for me how much risk was important enough for me to know about."

"Yes."

I hadn't expected that answer.

Not that's not what happened.

Not you misunderstood me.

Yes.

It was almost more infuriating.

"And you think that was the right decision?"

"No."

Silence again.

"Then why do I still feel like you're not telling me everything?"

He looked somewhere beyond my shoulder.

"Because I'm not."

All the tension from the last hour seemed to gather in one place.

"Go."

"Lena..."

"Not out of the building. Away from me."

He accepted it without arguing.

He turned first.

And I think that was exactly why I kept watching him walk away for several more seconds.

Around eleven, I was allowed into the studio for ten minutes, wearing a hard hat, a high-visibility vest, and accompanied by a firefighter. Jakub didn't try to come with me. He stood at the far end of the corridor talking to a structural expert and didn't look in my direction once.

The room looked worse than I remembered.

Not because of the scale of the damage.

Because of the details.

My mug lay on its side beneath the table. One of the lamps was crooked. Paper labels had peeled off two containers and floated in the shallow water. The cups stood on the table beneath the cloth.

My throat tightened when I saw the wet fabric.

I lifted it carefully.

Eleven were intact.

The twelfth had a broken handle.

I would have sat down if I could.

Instead, I took photographs.

Then more.

The documentation crate was wet underneath, but the contents in plastic folders had survived. I had taken my laptop home the previous evening. My camera was in a cabinet on the opposite side of the room and appeared undamaged too.

All of that could be counted.

The value of the damage could be entered in a spreadsheet.

Deadlines could be moved.

Clients could be apologized to.

Trust was the only thing that couldn't be taken apart and dried on blotting paper.

Near the exit, I spotted something red beneath the leg of a table.

I bent down.

A small fragment of the plastic seal.

I didn't touch it.

I photographed it.

Then I noticed a scratch on the metal clamp of the support.

Fresh.

Bright against the darker steel.

Someone had used a tool.

I didn't know who.

But I knew now that something more than a simple failure had happened that night.

And that Jakub had known from the beginning where I should be looking.

Chapter 2 - Terms of Access

The next morning, I woke on Alicja's couch with my phone pressed to my cheek and the realization that someone had been talking to me for the last two minutes and I hadn't heard a word.

"Lena?"

I sat up abruptly.

"I'm here."

"Good, because I've just explained half the emergency procedure for securing objects after water damage."

I recognized Marta.

I looked at the clock.

7:18.

"Sorry. I fell asleep."

"That's actually a healthy sign."

"Since when?"

"Since always. Conservators are the only people who seem to believe sleep is a form of professional weakness."

The apartment was quiet. Alicja must already have left for work. On the table she had left coffee in a thermos, two sandwiches, and a note with one sentence:

You are not the heroine of a disaster movie. Eat.

I smiled despite everything.

"What about the porcelain?" Marta asked.

"Eleven pieces without any new damage. One broken handle. I don't know yet whether it was caused by impact or whether there was already stress in the joint. I documented everything."

"Do you have somewhere to work?"

That question had kept returning to me for half the night.

"No."

"I can give you a table in the museum conservation workshop, but only for a week at most. After that, our glass project comes in."

"A week is enough to stabilize the set."

"And after that?"

"I'll find something."

"Lena."

"I'll find something."

Marta knew me well enough not to point out that I was stubborn.

"All right. Bring the objects as soon as you get permission to transport them. And don't sign anything the building owner gives you without reading it."

"I'm not that desperate."

"Yesterday you were ready to walk under a collapsing ceiling."

"That's different."

"Of course."

I ended the call and reached for the coffee.

Six messages were waiting on my screen.

Two from clients.

One from the insurer.

One from Alicja: Call me when you're up.

One from an unknown number signed by a structural expert.

And one from Jakub.

Sent at 2:11 a.m.

I haven't slept because of this, so you probably haven't either. I won't call. At 9:00, an independent structural engineer, Dr. Natalia Bieńkowska, will come to the site. She has never worked for me or for Rudzki. I asked her to assess the likely cause of the failure and whether it's safe to enter and remove the objects. I'll cover her fee privately unless you'd rather appoint your own expert. If so, I'll withdraw the commission. I won't enter your studio without your permission.

I read the message three times.

Then I read the last sentence once more.

I won't enter your studio without your permission.

What irritated me most was that this was exactly what I had needed from him earlier.

Not a grand gesture.

Not an apology in front of witnesses.

Information and a choice.

I wrote back: Bieńkowska can come. I don't agree to you covering her fee privately. Invoice me or the insurer.

The reply came a minute later.

All right.

No argument.

No absolutely not.

That was irritating too.

At nine, I stood outside the factory in the same jeans as the day before, with only a clean sweater borrowed from Alicja. The insurer had promised to send someone in the afternoon. Rudzki had emailed all the tenants officially referring to the event as an "installation-structural incident," which made it sound as though the building had independently taken offense at the laws of physics.

Dr. Natalia Bieńkowska arrived on time.

She was around fifty, with short gray hair, an orange rain jacket, and the manner of someone who felt no need to convince anyone that she knew what she was doing.

"Ms. Lena Król?"

"Yes."

"Natalia Bieńkowska."

We shook hands.

"Mr. Wysocki sent me the documentation, but he said all findings concerning your premises should be communicated directly to you as well. That's unusual for engineers."

"Maybe he's having a personal growth day."

One corner of her mouth twitched.

Jakub stood several meters away by the entrance and apparently heard me, because he lowered his eyes.

"Before we go inside," Natalia said, "one thing. I'm not a legal arbitrator. I'll assess the technical condition of the structure and the probable mechanism of the damage. Liability is a separate matter."

"I understand."

"And second. If I say we leave, we leave. No rescuing cups, paintings, cats, or your great-grandmother's last will."

"I don't keep a cat in the studio."

"Excellent. One less problem."

Jakub walked over.

"May I?"

He looked at me, not at Natalia.

It was a small thing.

I noticed anyway.

"For the inspection, yes."

He nodded.

We went inside.

The corridor smelled of wet plaster and metal. Additional props had been installed on the second floor, and cables feeding the dehumidifiers ran along the walls. My door was sealed with fire-department tape.

Natalia stopped in front of it.

"Upper floor first."

For forty minutes, I watched things I didn't understand but had decided not to ignore. Natalia measured cracks, photographed beams, tapped masonry with a small hammer, and asked Jakub questions.

He answered technically and directly.

"When was the support installed?"

"September twenty-seventh."

"Why?"

"A crack appeared in the beam bearing zone. Once we opened it up, we found that part of the steel girder had more severe corrosion than the earlier documentation indicated."

"Who prepared the earlier documentation?"

"Kowal Projekt. Two years ago."

"Did you verify it?"

"For visible elements. At the time, the investor didn't authorize full exploratory openings."

Natalia looked up.

"So you took over the building with a limited diagnosis."

"Yes."

"And continued work."

"In other zones."

"Above this one?"

"It was supposed to be suspended."

She shook her head.

"'Supposed to' is an interesting phrase on a construction site."

We went down to my studio.

Natalia examined the support clamp and the red fragment of seal I had photographed the previous day. This time she put on gloves, picked up the piece of plastic, and placed it in a small evidence bag.

"Is this your number?" she asked.

Jakub checked the marking.

"Yes."

"Do you have a photograph from after installation?"

"I do."

He showed it to her on his phone.

Natalia compared the two.

"The bolts were marked with a control line."

I stepped closer.

In the photograph, a thin white line ran across the bolt head and part of the nut. Now the two sections no longer lined up.

"Someone unscrewed it," I said.

Natalia looked at me.

"Someone changed the position of the nut. That's what we can say."

"That's the same thing."

"Technically, almost. Legally, not necessarily."

Jakub crouched beside the support.

"About half a turn."

Natalia took out a caliper.

"Possibly more."

I watched his profile. He was focused, the way he always was when he worked. I remembered that from his first visits. He could walk into a room full of people and within seconds stop noticing any of them because he had spotted the path of a crack or a wall that wasn't sitting square.

Back then, I had found it attractive.

Competence was one of the things that could disarm me faster than a smile.

Now that same competence raised a question I didn't want to ask.

If he was as good as I thought he was, why had he let me keep working there?

Natalia moved on.

"Ms. Król, can you show me what you want to remove first?"