Chapter 2 - The Architecture of Debt
The apartment on Carson Street smelled permanently of fried onions and damp plaster. By the time I turned eighteen, the wallpaper had completely surrendered to the damp, peeling away from the lath in long, yellowed strips that looked like skin peeling after a severe sunburn.
Aunt Clara had given up on the diner three years prior after her knees finally gave out from standing twelve-hour shifts on grease-slicked linoleum. Now, she sat in the corner armchair with a wool blanket over her legs, her fingers perpetually moving over a ball of gray yarn that never seemed to turn into a sweater.
"Lily," she called out, her voice raspy from decades of generic menthols. "The letter from the district office came. They're cutting the heating subsidy again."
"Let them cut it," I said without looking up from the kitchen table.
The table was covered in architectural blueprints, legal pads filled with fine print, and a laptop whose fan sounded like a small jet engine about to fail. On the screen, a three-dimensional rendering of a multi-use commercial complex spun slowly in CAD. Glass, steel, and concrete—designed to withstand the punishing freeze-thaw cycles of the Monongahela valley.
Owen and Noah were sixteen now, towering over me by half a foot, both of them working evening shifts at the local auto parts warehouse to help cover the electricity bill. They weren't the fragile, wheezing infants from the Mercer Market anymore; they were broad-shouldered, quiet boys who looked at me with a mixture of reverence and terrifying protectiveness.
"You're working too late again, sis," Noah muttered, walking through the front door with a streak of black grease across his forehead and a bag of groceries that contained mostly store-brand pasta and canned tuna. "The Mercer group sent another notice about the commercial lease on the South Side storefront."
I stopped typing. My fingers hovered over the mechanical keyboard.
"What kind of notice?"
"Eviction warning," Owen said, setting his boots by the door with a heavy thud. "They’re clearing out the entire block between 18th and 22nd. Some conglomerate out of New York bought the air rights. They're putting up a luxury high-rise hotel. Even Mercer’s people can't stop it."
I stood up, my joints cracking with the stiffness of someone who had spent twelve hours hunched over a desk. I walked over to the narrow kitchen window and looked out across the river. Through the sleet, the downtown skyline glittered with thousands of amber lights, and rising above them all, like a dark monolith against the clouds, was the Mercer Tower—fifty stories of tinted glass and black steel bearing the family crest in polished brass above the main entrance.
Nineteen years.
Next month marked exactly nineteen years since that freezing night in Mercer Market.
In the top drawer of my desk, locked inside a heavy steel lockbox, was the business card Daniel Mercer had handed me. The silver foil was worn at the edges, and the ink had faded slightly to a dark violet, but his handwriting remained as sharp and aggressive as the day he wrote it: Daniel Mercer. Chairman & CEO, Mercer Holdings.
I hadn't called him once. Not when we were down to our last box of pasta in high school; not when the landlord threatened to throw our furniture onto the sidewalk; not even when I graduated valedictorian of my high school class with a full scholarship to Carnegie Mellon’s School of Architecture.
I didn't want charity. I wanted equality.
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"Where are you going?" Aunt Clara asked, her hazy eyes following me as I grabbed my heavy wool coat—the one I had bought with my first architectural drafting fee.
"To see a man about a building," I said quietly.
