Chapter 4
“Thanks,” he murmured, taking a sip without wincing at the scorched diner roast. “It’s terrible.”
“It’s authentic small-town charm,” she retorted, crossing her arms to disguise the slight tremble in her fingers. “Drink it and be grateful.”
Parker let out a low huff of amusement—the closest thing to a laugh she had heard from him all day. It transformed his face, softening the hard, defensive planes of his jaw and highlighting the quiet intelligence that made him so thoroughly dangerous.
“Look at this,” he said, tapping a blunt fingertip against the center of the yellowed 1938 blueprint.
Talia forced herself to step closer, close enough that the scent of him—rain, cedar shavings, and the faint, clean bite of soap—filled her senses. She leaned over the table, keeping her shoulder an inch away from his, though every nerve ending in her body seemed acutely aware of the heat radiating through his thermal shirt.
“This is the original architectural layout by Delacroix & Sons,” Parker explained, his voice dropping into that quiet, rhythmic baritone that commanded effortless authority. “The proscenium arch relies on two primary brick piers anchored in the limestone bedrock. The dead load—the weight of the building itself—transfers cleanly down both sides. The stage itself was designed as a floating timber apron. It was never meant to bear vertical compression.”
“I know,” Talia said softly. “The old vaudeville dancers liked the spring in the floor. They called it ‘giving the boards breath.’”
Parker glanced sideways at her. His gaze lingered on the curve of her cheek, illuminated by the cold blue wash of his laptop screen. “You really love this place, don't you?”
The question was so simple, so devoid of the bureaucratic hostility she’d braced for, that it caught her entirely off balance.
“It’s the only home I’ve ever known,” she confessed before she could stop herself. The truth slipped out, raw and unguarded. “When my mother left, I was six. My father would tuck me into a cot in the prompt corner during tech rehearsals. I fell asleep to the sound of people reciting lines they didn't write, pretending to be people they weren't, just to make five hundred strangers feel less alone in the dark. It’s an absurd business, Parker. It leaks when it rains, the heating bill bankrupts us every January, and half the town thinks we’re an eyesore. But when the house lights go down and the curtain rises... there’s nothing like it on earth.”
Parker didn't mock her. He didn't quote municipal fire codes or county liability statutes. He simply watched her, his expression softening into something intensely focused, almost tender.
“It’s not an eyesore,” he said quietly. “The ceiling medallion in the auditorium—the plaster acanthus leaves around the central chandelier. That was cast by hand using horsehair binder. You don't see that outside of Boston or Chicago anymore. The men who built this place had poetry in their hands.”
Talia stared at him, momentarily disarmed. “You noticed the medallion?”
“It was the first thing I looked at when I walked in,” he admitted, a self-deprecating quirk at the corner of his mouth. “Most people think engineers only care about steel and torque. But old buildings... they have a pulse. You can feel where the carpenters took pride in a joint, and where they rushed on a Friday afternoon. This place had a lot of pride put into it.”
A warm, treacherous flutter bloomed in Talia’s stomach. It was dangerous—madness, truly—to find herself drawn to the executioner sent to tear her life apart. But standing in the quiet of midnight, surrounded by the ghosts of a thousand performances, the boundary between enemy and ally felt perilously thin.
Then Parker’s pencil tapped the paper again, and the illusion shattered.
“Which brings me to the problem,” he said, the warmth vanishing behind analytical cool. He pulled a thick, leather-bound ledger toward him—the 1994 maintenance log Talia had pulled from her father's desk two hours ago. “Your father’s ledger says that in October of 1994, he replaced the under-stage joists with seasoned yellow pine to correct a dry-rot issue.”
“Yes,” Talia said, her voice tightening. “I remember him working late that autumn. He was covered in sawdust for weeks.”
“Then why does the Briar Glen Ready-Mix company have an invoice on file for twelve cubic yards of rapid-cure structural aggregate delivered to this stage door on November third, 1994?”
Talia’s throat went dry. “He... he was repairing the foundation walls along the alley.”
“Twelve cubic yards is enough concrete to pour a two-lane boat ramp, Talia,” Parker said. He looked directly at her, his gray eyes piercing, stripping away every layer of evasion. “And the aggregate they delivered wasn't standard masonry mix. It was crushed basalt with a silicate hardener. You don't use that on perimeter brick. You use that when you want to encapsulate something permanently, under four feet of impenetrable stone.”
He slid a sheet of graph paper over the ledger. On it, Parker had plotted a three-dimensional stress diagram using the laser readings he’d taken that morning.
“Look at the load path,” he said, his tone relentless now, like water finding a fracture in a dam. “The dead load isn't transferring to the Delacroix brick piers anymore. It’s bowing inward. The stage apron is sagging because there is a massive, eight-ton block of unreinforced concrete sitting directly beneath the center trap, sinking into the subsoil and dragging the timber frames down with it.”
“The river table—”
“The river table has nothing to do with it!” Parker’s voice rose slightly, sharp with the frustration of a man confronting an impossible equation. “Concrete doesn't magically appear under a stage floor, Talia. Your father didn't log the pour. He deliberately falsified the joist replacement records to hide the fact that he brought in a commercial pump truck in the middle of the night. Why?”
“He didn't falsify anything!” Talia snapped, panic flaring into fury. She slammed her hand down on the ledger, leaning across the table until she was inches from his face. “How dare you come into his building, thirty years after the fact, and call my father a liar? Arthur Vance gave everything he had to this town! He mortgaged our house twice to keep the Starlight open! If he poured concrete, he had an engineering reason for it!”
“Then where are the permits?” Parker demanded, rising to his feet, matching her posture, his chest nearly grazing hers. “Where are the structural stamps? Where is the sign-off from the city engineer? If it was legitimate, why did he bury it under three layers of tongue-and-groove pine and seal the access hatch with iron bolts?”
“Because he didn't want bureaucrats like you tearing it down!”
“I am trying to save it!” Parker roared, the sound bouncing off the cracked plaster walls.
The silence that followed was deafening.
They stood chest to chest, their breath mingling in the cold air, both of them trembling with an intensity that had ceased to be about building codes twenty minutes ago. Talia could see the tiny gold flecks in his pupils, the pulse hammering in his throat, the faint shadow of exhaustion beneath his eyes.
Parker stared down at her mouth, his lips slightly parted, his breathing ragged.
