Page 1 of The Night We Lost Him

— Part I —

The architect works in the territory of memory.

—Mario Botta

Open Houses

“So what do you think? Can it even be salvaged?” she asks.

I’m standing in the doorway of a five-story brownstone in Brooklyn, perched at the edge of Cobble Hill. In my professional opinion, the brownstone is remarkable as it is: an extra-wide with steel windows, original banisters, wainscot ceilings some twelve feet above. And an eighteen-hundred-square-foot rooftop garden, which looks over a lush and lovely corner of Henry Street.

I turn to look at Morgan, my client. “What do you mean by salvaged, exactly?”

“Well, you’re the expert, but the place obviously needs to be gutted. It’s dumpy, you know?”

Morgan shakes her head, apparently waiting for me to catch up. She is beautiful and young (twenty-five, maybe twenty-six) and wearing the same blue knee-high boots that she’s been clad in the few times we’ve met in person. Each time, she has seemed increasingly unhappy about being Brooklyn-bound. I don’t know if it’s this brownstone she doesn’t like, or the idea of leaving Manhattan in general. But this move is clearly not one she is excited for.

She is moving to Brooklyn, she keeps telling me, because her fiancé, a business guy of some sort, is pushing for it. He has decided he wants to leave Tribeca and their North Moore Street loft and flee to the outer borough. I have yet to meet Morgan’s fiancé, even though he was apparently the one who insisted that Morgan hire me. He wants to get married on the rooftop here. And, while they’re at it, to completely renovate the five floors beneath it.

“When do you think it can all be done?” Morgan asks.

“Which part?”

“You know. All of it.”

She motions to indicate the entire brownstone as she clips down the steps, down into the sunken living room.

“Let’s start by talking about what you’re imagining,” I say. “Then we can get more granular and make sure we’re on the same page in terms of schedule and planning. Sound good?”

“Sure…”

She sits down on the sofa, seemingly accepting this plan. But then she pulls her phone out of her bag—already bored with the details we haven’t begun to discuss. She taps into Instagram, her five hundred thousand followers staring back at her. And she is lost to me.

I start unloading the brownstone’s original blueprints anyway. The previous owner is an architect I’ve known since graduate school. He spent the better part of three years remodeling this space for his own family, not anticipating that his wife’s job would send them to Colorado shortly after they moved in. There are, of course, many ways to design a space, but I can feel the attention he paid to every detail—the way the living room is relaxed and spacious, the rounded corners, the olive tree balancing out the fireplace, the natural light coming in from three directions.

You may think of noteworthy architecture as constructing the most novel, sculptural buildings. But I lean first and foremost into how people’s environments can positively impact the quality of their lives. I am focused, most fundamentally, on building spaces that can be healing. I specialize in neuroarchitecture. Most of my clients are interested in this particular architectural approach, which is all about designing spaces to benefit overall well-being.

Whatever Morgan means by dumpy, I doubt that she is interested in exploring this type of calculus.

“Is your fiancé still joining or is it just going to be the two of us?” I ask.

Instead of answering, she holds her phone out, in selfie position, and puckers up. I step out of camera view as quickly as I can.

“He should be coming.”

This is when her fiancé walks through the front door, the winter wind following him in. He is good-looking—tall and broad with a strong jaw, intense eyes. He is older than Morgan, nearly thirty, and wearing a sports jacket, with a hoodie peeking out beneath it, making him look younger than he is.

He is also, it turns out, my brother.

Sam nods in my direction. “What’s going on, Nora?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say.

Morgan sits up and looks back and forth between us. “Do you two know each other?” she asks.

“Nora’s actually my sister,” he says.

“Your sister?”

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