Page 44 of Most Eligible Billionaire

“Somebodyhas been busy investigating my background,” I say.

“Surely you’re not surprised we investigated. Considering.”

I shrug. According to our fake identities, our parents died in a car crash, then I graduated high school at age seventeen and got custody of her.

All lies. Except the custody-at-seventeen part, though it was more like Itookcustody. Got my baby sister out of a dangerous situation and myself out of the blinding glare of national hatred.

We keep on walking. I take a last look back, remembering myself then. Traumatized, slouching through the crowds in my new brown hair and innocent court clothes, hand-in-hand with Carly, finally away from Mom’s lechy boyfriend with his creepy stare that got creepier every time she passed out.

Away from Mom’s growing desperation for money for the next fix.

I’m not sorry I took Carly out of there. She was so young and vulnerable. I saved her—I know that to my bones. But she saved me, too. She was a reason for me to keep fighting.

We stop at a Starbucks. I get a java chip Frappuccino and he gets a latte. We take a cab the rest of the way.

The fabrication facility is a giant warehouse on Front Street—the old kind with arched-top windows.

We enter a massive, well-lit, state-of-the-art space full of state-of-the-art machinery in bright, primary colors. The place hums with activity and guys in Locke-blue jumpers making giant things out of metal and wood.

“We make doors and windows, refurbish heating plants, that sort of thing,” he says over the din. “Locke owns so much property, it stopped making sense to sub this stuff out.”

I keep expecting Smuckers to react to the loud sounds, but Henry holds him tight and scratches his snout in a vigorous way, lulling him with an overload of attention.

Is it possible that’s what Henry is doing with me? Is it working?

He knows people’s names here, too. A few come up and pet Smuckers. We head to an elevator bank at the center of it all and take it up to the drafting floor. We cross a tundra of desks and people doing things on huge computer screens to get to a place with lots of long tables.

He hands Smuckers over and pulls out a piece of foamcore the size of a door. “I’ll cut this down a little for the check.” He takes it to a table that has lots of measure markings and slices off two hunks with a large box cutter. “I don’t actually do this, typically, but I don’t want to pull people off jobs that have been waiting in a queue.” He pulls his phone out of his pocket and taps. Soon he’s the proud parent of a giant printout of a check front. He spray glues the back of the check and we roll it onto the foamcore, working together to avoid bubbles and wrinkles.

Just like that, we have a giant blank check from Locke Worldwide. It’s signed, but there’s no dollar amount or recipient.

“Maybe we should get an armored car for this.”

He doesn’t reply; he’s setting the check aside to dry. He’s careful, even a bit of a nerdy perfectionist. “Come here,” he says.

I straighten. Was it a little sexy, how he said that?

He leads the way to a wide-open space full of architectural models; desks and cubicles line the perimeter. “We have a few exciting projects you should be in on,” he says.

We end up at a table displaying a five-by-five block area covered with tiny buildings and roads and cards and tiny green trees and people.

He puts Smuckers down.

“I thought architects only made these on TV. I mean, don’t you have computers for this nowadays?”

Henry kneels down, getting eye level with the thing. “Building is one of the most tactile things you can do. We’re creating physical environments. Making them tiny first, holding them and situating them, it reveals new things about the buildings and the spatial relationships. You see what feels right on the ground.”

He touches the tallest building.

“Where is this?”

“Nowhere yet. It’s going to be along the Queens waterfront. The Ten—that’s what we call it.”

I figure out the blue is the East River. “Dude, I hate to tell you, but Queens is all built up along the river.”

“There’s a swath of factories there that are moving to a less expensive area. We’ll knock them down and replace it with residential and green space.”

“It looks nice.”

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