Two Signatures

Bellweather Tower topped out on a Thursday in October, twenty-one months after a woman in a green dress met a stranger at a gallery and told him she would have made him wait his turn for a coffee.

There is a tradition on Australian sites that the last beam goes up with a tree bolted to it. Meera stood on the forty-first floor with her hard hat on and watched a crane operator she had never met place four tonnes of steel to within six millimetres, with a sapling eucalypt zip-tied to one end and the wind coming off the harbour hard enough to make everybody hold their hats.

Faye, beside her, was crying and denying it.

“It’s the wind.”

“It’s absolutely the wind.”

“It’s a very windy day,” Faye said, and blew her nose.

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The partnership offer came in a meeting Meera had assumed was about fee variations.…