Our Last Sleepless Night - One Competition, Two Rivals, and Nights They Can\'t Bring Themselves to End - Laura Bellini

INTRO - Our Last Sleepless Night - One Competition, Two Rivals, and Nights They Can't Bring Themselves to End.INTROAt 2:17 in the morning, I began to suspect the building didn't like me. The old railway power station in Warsaw's Praga district creaked every time the wind forced its way beneath the half-closed skylights. During the day, those sounds disappeared beneath architects' conversations, snapping laptop lids, and presentations from the competition organizers. Now I was alone with four stories of brick, steel beams, and my own project, which in less than six hours would decide whether my studio survived another year. The ground-floor plan still glowed on the screen. I moved one light source twenty centimeters. Undid the change. Moved it again. "This isn't designing. It's negotiating with a lamp." The voice came from the dark passage leading toward the former machine hall. I jumped hard enough to knock my cup. Adrian Krawiec stepped out from behind a concrete column carrying two paper cups of coffee and wearing the expression of a man who did not consider appearing soundlessly at two in the morning a character flaw. "I thought you went back to the hotel." "That's funny. I thought you did." "Then I guess we're both disappointed." He set one of the cups on my desk. I didn't thank him. Adrian only smiled and took a step back, as though he knew perfectly well I would accept the coffee only once he could pretend he hadn't left it there for me. He had been my most dangerous competitor ever since, three months earlier, the five final studios invited to compete for the redevelopment of the power station into a twenty-four-hour cultural center had been announced. His firm was bigger, richer, and had completed projects mine could still only place in presentations under the heading "inspiration." My name had one advantage. I knew how to design light in a way that made people want to stay somewhere longer than they had planned. And that was exactly how I intended to win. The organizers had allowed the finalists to spend the last two days inside the building. Each team had been given a separate workspace, access to the documentation, and permission to take measurements at night. My colleagues had gone to sleep after midnight. I had made them. At nine in the morning, they needed to look like people who knew what they were doing. I could look like a ghost. Adrian sat on the edge of the next table. "Still fighting with the main hall?" "I'm not fighting." He looked at the screen. "You've been moving the same light for forty minutes." I turned toward him. "You've been watching me for forty minutes?" "I can hear the mouse clicking." "That's worse." He laughed quietly. I didn't like his laugh. It was far too calm for a man whose project could, in a few hours, cost me a contract worth more than every commission my studio had completed over the last two years combined. I also didn't like the way being around Adrian made me forget that I was thirty-two, owned my own firm, and had enough experience not to react to men just because they rolled up the sleeves of their shirts and knew how to look at you as if a conversation mattered more than merely filling the silence between their own sentences. I picked up the coffee. "This doesn't mean I forgive you." "For what?" "The coffee." "I didn't know it required forgiveness." "Everything from the competition requires suspicion." His smile disappeared faster than it had appeared. "Marta." The fact that he said my name seriously irritated me immediately. "No." "I haven't said anything yet." "That's why I'm saying it in advance." He slid off the table. "Come with me." "Absolutely not." "I want to show you something." I looked at the clock. 2:24. "If it's your project, I'd rather lose honestly." "It's not about my project." That stopped me more effectively than any request could have. Adrian headed toward the old control room. After a few steps, he glanced back, but he didn't urge me to follow. I should have stayed. I had a presentation to finish, three visualizations to review, and exactly zero reasons to walk through an abandoned power station in the middle of the night behind a man who, in the morning, would stand before the same jury I would. I went. The control room overlooked the main hall. We climbed the metal stairs, every step answering with a dull clang. Adrian switched on the flashlight on his phone. "I found this behind a cabinet," he said. A thin gray folder lay on the old control console. At first glance, there was nothing unusual about it. A city hall stamp. An archive number. A date from seven years earlier. Then I saw the name of the competition. I stopped. "Where did you get this?" "I told you." "I'm not asking where it was lying." Seven years earlier, I had entered the first major competition of my life. I had been twenty-five, had far too much faith in people, and had spent four months working on the project. I didn't win. Six months later, I saw pieces of my concept in another team's completed design. I was never able to prove where they had gotten them. That had been enough to make me stop working for anyone else. Adrian opened the folder. The first page listed the jury members. The second contained the scoring table. My name was on the third. Beneath it, someone had written in red ink: "Project recommended for the final. Withdraw before publication of results." The coffee I had drunk a few minutes earlier seemed to turn into something heavy and cold inside me. "This document wasn't in the official archive." "I know." I looked at him. I didn't ask how he knew. I didn't have to. At the bottom of the page, beneath the handwritten note, were three initials. A.K. For several seconds, all I could hear was the wind striking the control-room windows. "Tell me that isn't you." Adrian didn't answer right away. And that brief hesitation was enough for me to understand that our current competition was no longer the only thing we could lose that night.

Chapter 1 - Red Pen - Our Last Sleepless Night - One Competition, Two Rivals, and Nights They Can't Bring Themselves to End.Chapter 1 - Red PenAdrian said nothing for several seconds. He stood on the other side of the console, one hand braced against its metal edge, the light from his phone angled downward as though he wanted me to see the document rather than his face. The easy late-night manner he had used only minutes earlier to disarm me over coffee was gone. Suddenly he looked exactly the way my competitor should have looked - focused, closed off, and dangerously difficult to read. "Those are my initials," he said at last. I couldn't decide what made me angrier: the admission or the fact that he didn't even try to deny it. "Great. Now give me the second half of that sentence." "Marta..." "Not my name. It's two-thirty in the morning, we're standing in a building where tomorrow we're supposed to compete against each other, and you've just shown me a document suggesting that seven years ago someone removed my project from a competition. Your initials are under the decision. Don't start using the voice of a man who wants me to calm down." I pushed the sheet toward him. The paper was dry and yellowed around the edges, but the red writing had retained its intensity. "Project recommended for the final. Withdraw before publication of results." Underneath were the letters A.K., small and slanted. Adrian looked at them as though he were seeing them not for the first time, but the hundredth. I noticed that too. "You knew about this." He raised his eyes. "I knew a document existed." "Since when?" "Seven years." I let out a short laugh without any humor in it. "That may be a record. And here I thought the worst thing you could do today was beat me." I turned away from the console because the control room had suddenly become too small. Its glass walls overlooked the main hall, now almost entirely black, with only the emergency lights burning near the entrance. I could see my own reflection in the glass - exhausted, pale, and far too still. Seven years. For seven years, I had told myself that maybe I had overreacted. That architects often arrived at similar solutions. That a public interior, timber partitions, and a diffuse lighting system did not belong to me. That perhaps feeling wronged had simply been easier than admitting that I had lost. Then I saw the photographs of the completed project and I could no longer make myself believe any of that. No one else had wanted to believe me either. "What exactly did you do?" I asked. "Not what you think." "You don't know what I think." "You think I made the decision to remove your project." "Didn't you?" "I didn't have that authority." "But you signed it." "I initialed receipt of the document." I turned toward him. "What document?" Adrian closed the folder but did not take it away. "I worked for Marek Radecki's firm at the time." I knew the name far too well. Anyone working in public-interior architecture in Warsaw knew Marek Radecki. His studio won competitions, handled major developments, and had appeared for years in industry media as an example of how design and business could be combined successfully. Seven years earlier, a team connected to his office had received the contract where I later saw my own ideas. "You worked for him?" I asked. "Four years." The information should not have mattered. It did. "You never mentioned that." "You never asked." "You also never mentioned that you knew the competition that wrecked the start of my career." "At the time, I didn't know it was you." I frowned. "My name is on these documents." "The projects were coded during the early stages. I saw numbers, scoring sheets, and technical correspondence. The participants' names appeared later. By the time I realized one of those numbers belonged to you, the results had already been announced." "And what did you do?" He hesitated a fraction too long. "Not enough." It was the first answer he had given me that night that I believed immediately. I rested both hands on the cold surface of the console. "Specifics." Adrian ran one finger along the edge of the folder. "I was coordinating the competition team. I was young, but senior enough that documents passed through me between the office, the investor, and the consultants. I received a scoring summary for circulation. Your project number had a recommendation for the final beside it. Two days later, a second document arrived. Your number was gone." "And you didn't ask why?" "I did." "Who?" "Radecki." The name sounded heavier than it had a moment earlier. "He said the technical criteria had changed and your project no longer met the cost requirements. I asked for written confirmation." "Did you get it?" "No." "So you took his word for it." "No." "And yet seven years later, here we are, and this is the first time I've seen this document." Adrian rubbed the back of his neck. "I went back to the archive and photographed part of the file." "Part?" "What I could access. Scoring sheets, revisions, a few notes. The next day, my access to the competition folder was revoked." My heart beat harder, and it had nothing to do with how close he was standing. "Do you still have those photographs?" "Not all of them." "What does that mean?" "The phone I used to take them was later submitted for forensic examination in another matter." "What matter?" He looked at me. "That was when I left Radecki." "You didn't answer." "Because this isn't a five-minute conversation before we go back to work." "We have six hours." "Marta." "Stop saying my name as though it settles everything else." Silence fell. Somewhere below us in the hall, something metallic struck the floor. We both looked through the glass, but nothing moved. The building was shifting under the wind again. "This document shouldn't be here," Adrian said. "We've established that." "No. I mean literally here. The archive for that competition was kept at city hall. Later, part of it was moved to an external storage facility. This power station was never used for archiving." I looked at the folder. "So someone brought it here." "Or hid it." "Why?" "I don't know." "And you found it by accident?" "I was looking for an outlet." I studied him suspiciously. "At two in the morning behind a heavy metal cabinet?" "My extension cord slipped behind the panel. I moved it and noticed one of the wall boards was loose. There was a recess behind it." "Of course there was." "Does that sound bad?" "It sounds like a story prepared by a man who designs competition presentations for a living." He almost smiled that time, but gave up on it quickly. I went to the place he had indicated. A section of the old paneling was indeed missing behind the cabinet. The narrow recess was full of dust, and in the dust there was a fresh rectangular mark where the folder had been. "What else was in there?" "Nothing." "You checked?" "Yes." "Properly?" "Marta, I design buildings. When I see a hole in a wall, I look into it more carefully than the average person." "Reassuring." I crouched and shone the light from my own phone into the recess. Maybe thirty centimeters deep. An old bundle of cables ran along the left side, long since abandoned. On the bottom lay dust, small flakes of plaster, and something white. I reached in carefully. "What are you doing?" "What you apparently failed to do more carefully than the average person." I pulled out a small rectangular scrap of paper. Not a document. A torn piece of an envelope. There was a stamp on it. Radecki & Partners Design Office. Adrian swore under his breath. "You know it?" "Yes." "That seems obvious." "No. I recognize that specific kind of envelope. We used them for internal circulation." I turned the scrap over. Part of a handwritten notation remained on the back. Two numbers and a letter. "17/K..." "What is that?" Adrian took the paper, but carefully enough not to touch my hand. "A circulation number. Seventeenth document in a matter marked with the letter K." "Competition?" "Probably." "So someone hid documents from your old firm in here." "That's what it looks like." "Documents connected to my competition." "Yes." "In a building where both of us are finalists in another competition." He didn't answer. The worst part was that he didn't need to. I returned to the console and opened the folder again. This time I ignored the red note. I turned the pages slowly, checking dates, stamps, reference numbers. On page five I found a score sheet. My project was in second place. On page six, first. In the lighting-concept category, I had the highest score of anyone. I felt something I had denied myself for seven years. Satisfaction. Not because someone had wronged me. Because I hadn't imagined it. "I was right," I said. Adrian stood completely still. "Yes." One word. And somehow it did more than all his previous explanations. I sat in the old operator's chair. The upholstery was cracked beneath my fingers, and the metal base creaked. I remembered that day. The café on Marszałkowska where I had opened the results on my phone. Patrycja sitting across from me. The glass of water I had been unable to lift. Losing my job three months later because my employer at the time decided I was reacting "too emotionally" to the similarities between my project and the winning realization. Maybe that was when I had learned to sleep four hours a night and call it ambition. "Why didn't you tell me earlier?" I asked. Adrian moved closer, but stopped on the other side of the table. "When we met, I didn't know it was the same competition." "We met two years ago." "Yes." "So when did you figure it out?" "About nine months ago." I counted backward. "The library competition." His face confirmed it before he spoke. "I saw the name of your studio in the reference documentation. In your experience summary, you mentioned a project that had never been realized. The competition number was the same." "Nine months." "Yes." "For nine months we've run into each other at tenders, conferences, presentations. You had coffee with me after the jury session in Gdańsk." "I remember." "You sat beside me for three hours on the train to Kraków." "I remember that too." "And you said nothing." "I didn't have proof I could give you." "You had what you knew." "I knew something had been wrong. I didn't know who made the decision or why. If I had come to you and said, 'Listen, seven years ago I worked for a firm connected to a competition you suspect was fixed, but I don't have the documents,' what exactly were you supposed to do with that?" "I would have had a choice." That landed. I could see it. "Yes," he said. "And that is exactly what you didn't give me." He put both hands on the table. "I was afraid that if I told you without proof, you'd decide I was part of it." "And now?" I looked at the initials. "Now you look exactly like part of it." Adrian took the sentence without arguing. It irritated me. It would have been easier to hate him if he defended himself, raised his voice, or tried to redirect the problem. Instead he stood opposite me looking like a man who fully understood that he had put himself in a position with no good way out. "You're right," he said. "I don't want to be right about this." "I know." "And I don't want you to know what I want." "All right." I reached for the folder. Adrian put his hand on it. Not on mine. On the cover. "Don't take it yet." I looked first at his fingers, then at his face. "Move your hand." He did it immediately. "Why?" "Because at eight this building will fill up. Security, organizers, teams. If you walk out with that folder, the entrance camera will record it." "You think someone is looking for it?" "I don't know." "You've been saying that more and more." "Because I understand less and less." "First sensible point you've made in this conversation." I closed the folder and slid it into my laptop bag. Adrian watched, but did not try to stop me. "I'm taking it." "Then at least photograph every page." "I was already going to." "And send the copies somewhere off your phone." I looked at him sharply. "You seriously think someone is going to delete my files?" "I think a document that should have spent the last seven years in another archive has appeared behind a wall in the middle of an important competition. We don't have to turn this into a thriller to decide a cloud backup is sensible." He was right. I didn't tell him that. For the next ten minutes, we photographed the documents. Not "together," even though we stood side by side. I turned the pages. He checked the page numbers so we wouldn't miss any. Our hands never touched once. For some reason, that was what I noticed most. When we finished, I sent the entire set to Patrycja. No explanation. Just one sentence. "Don't open this now. Save it." Her reply came a minute later. "It's 2:57. Of course I'm opening it now." I smiled despite myself. Adrian glanced at the screen. "Patrycja?" "How do you know?" "She's the only person in your studio who replies at three in the morning." "Stop monitoring my team." "It's a small industry." "Do you have an answer for everything?" "Unfortunately not for what matters most." I almost asked what he considered the most important thing, but my phone vibrated. Patrycja was calling. I moved toward the window. "What happened?" she asked instead of saying hello. "Nothing." "You sent me six photographs from a competition seven years ago at three in the morning and wrote 'save these.' In your language, that's roughly the equivalent of a fire alarm." I looked toward Adrian. He stood by the console, turned partly away, obviously giving me privacy. "I'm at the power station." "I know where you are. Who are you with?" I hesitated. Patrycja sighed. "Oh God. Him." "Don't start." "I'm not starting. I'm asking: is Krawiec with you?" "Yes." "Marta." "Later." "Does he have anything to do with these documents?" I looked at him again. "I don't know." It was true, and I hated it. Patrycja fell silent. "I'm coming earlier." "No. Sleep." "Stop pretending everything is normal." "That's exactly why I want you to sleep. We present at nine. No matter what I found, I'm not letting what happened seven years ago cost me one competition and what happens today cost me another." I heard her exhale softly. "That may be the most Marta thing you've ever said." "Good night." "I'll be there in two hours." She hung up. I put my phone away. "Good friend," Adrian said. "Business partner." "One doesn't exclude the other." "In your case, competition apparently doesn't exclude a lot of things either." There was that shadow of a smile again. "Was that supposed to be insulting?" "I'm not sure." I walked toward the door. "I'm going back to my project." "Marta." I turned. "One more thing." "You have an impressive number of 'one more things.'" "Don't show this to the organizers before the presentation." "Why?" "Because Tomasz Wilczek is chairing the jury." I knew the name. Professor. Urban planner. City advisor. A man with an impeccable reputation. "And?" "Seven years ago, he was a consultant on the investor's side in that competition." Cold went through me. "He's on the list?" Adrian opened the document to the right page. He was. Not under jury members. In the section below. "Formal consultation: Dr. Tomasz Wilczek." "You knew?" I asked. "I knew he had been involved then. I didn't know he would chair this jury until the panel was announced." "And you still entered." "So did you." "I didn't know." "That's exactly why I want to establish the facts before we accuse anyone of anything." "We?" Adrian looked at me calmly. "I didn't say 'we.'" "Almost." "You heard it." For a second, we stared at each other in the half-darkness. There was something unbearably familiar about him. Not because I knew Adrian well. The opposite. I only knew his conference version. His competition version. His professional version. The man who was always half a sentence ahead of everyone else, never improvised without a reason, and could walk into a room full of sponsors as though they were the ones waiting for his approval. Now I saw something else. Uncertainty. Maybe even fear. Not about the competition. About what would happen when I learned the rest. "When did you first see this folder?" I asked. "Tonight. Maybe fifteen minutes before you." "You swear?" For a moment, he looked as though he wanted to answer with something sarcastically rational. He didn't. "Yes." I nodded. It did not mean I believed him. But it meant I would remember the answer. We went down to the hall separately. Adrian turned toward his team's workspace. I headed for mine. At the doorway, I stopped. "Adrian." He looked back. "Until the presentation, we're competitors." "Of course." "I don't want any favors." "I wasn't planning to give you any." "Good." "Marta?" "What?" "If you win, I won't assume it was because of the lamp." I rolled my eyes. "Go work." He smiled. For real this time. Then he walked away. I sat at my laptop and opened the project. The light source was still exactly where I had left it an hour earlier. I moved it twenty centimeters. Looked. Undid the change. And for the first time that night, it occurred to me that maybe the problem had never really been the lamp.

Chapter 2 - Light After Six - Our Last Sleepless Night - One Competition, Two Rivals, and Nights They Can't Bring Themselves to End.Chapter 2 - Light After SixAt 5:40, Patrycja walked into our room carrying two paper bags, three coffees, and the expression of someone who had spent the entire journey organizing a list of questions and now intended to ask all of them at once. "No," I said before she could open her mouth. She put the bags on the table. "Fantastic. Then you talk and I'll just react." "We have three hours until the presentation." "Two hours and forty minutes." "Exactly." "Marta, you sent me a document suggesting someone manually cut you out of a competition seven years ago." "I know what I sent you." "And at the bottom are the initials of the man you've spent the last six months fighting professionally in the ongoing series entitled Which One of Us Gets Every Decent Commission in This City First." "Nine months." Patrycja narrowed her eyes. "Is that a factual correction, or did you just admit you've been counting?" "You know when he started entering the same competitions as us." "Of course." She took a sandwich out of one of the bags and handed it to me without asking. I accepted it because you could argue with Patrycja about almost anything except food. Our studio had an unwritten rule that if one of us worked more than fifteen hours, the other acquired the right to impose a meal. She was thirty-five, had short black hair, a voice one register lower than people expected, and a talent for organizing chaos until it looked like methodology. We had met at the firm we both later left. I went first, after the fallout over that competition. She followed six months later, claiming that "someone has to make sure you don't become a one-woman business and die over your first spreadsheet." Seven years later, we employed six people. If we won the power station, we could hire three more. If we lost, one major project would end in two months, and for the first time in a long while we would have to start calculating our runway carefully. Patrycja knew that as well as I did. "Tell me," she said. So I did. Without editing. Adrian. The recess. The envelope. Marek Radecki. The fact that Wilczek had been a consultant on the earlier competition. When I reached the part about Adrian knowing for nine months and saying nothing, Patrycja stopped eating. "He knew?" "He knew something didn't add up. He didn't have documents." "And decided the best course of action was to say nothing." "Yes." "I love men who make decisions on behalf of women for their own good." "You don't love men." "Which makes my assessment especially objective." She sat across from me. "Do you believe him?" I looked at the files open on the second monitor. Photographs of the documents, one after another. "I don't know." "That isn't an answer." "It is. Just not the one you want." Patrycja leaned back in the chair. "Fine. Different question. Do you think he helped remove your project?" "He says he didn't have the authority." "That still isn't an answer." "I know." I got up and went to the model. It was almost finished. In our concept, the main hall of the power station remained open and raw. No filling it with new walls. No pretending brick and steel were more romantic than old industry. The project was built around light, movable partitions, and functions that shifted with the time of day. Workshops in the morning. Exhibition space in the evening. At night, a small cinema, a stage, a venue for concerts. That was my part. Patrycja handled the logistics of use, the budget, and the implementation plan. Without her, my project would have been a beautiful vision with a real chance of bankrupting the investor. Without my vision, her budget would have been a spreadsheet. That was why we worked. "We present," I said. "Obviously." "We don't raise the documents with the jury." "I agree." I looked at her in surprise. "Really?" "Marta, if you show them fifteen minutes before your own presentation, nobody will talk about the project. They'll talk about the scandal. And if Wilczek is involved, you'll give him time to prepare his version. If he isn't, you'll accuse a man without enough evidence." "Adrian said almost exactly the same thing." "I take it all back." I snorted with laughter. For the first time since finding the folder, some of the tension eased. Patrycja handed me a coffee. "And now the unpleasant part." "I thought that was the unpleasant part." "No. That was the dramatic part. The unpleasant part is that you need to sleep." "No chance." "Marta." "I face the jury in three hours." "Exactly. You have the eyes of someone who can see sounds." "That could be a design advantage." "Sofa. Forty minutes." "I won't fall asleep." "Then lie down with your eyes closed and pretend." "Patrycja..." "I'm your business partner and I own thirty percent of the company. I am exercising corporate authority." "You own forty percent." "Even better." I wasn't going to win. So I lay down on the small sofa in the break room, covered myself with my coat, and closed my eyes. For the first ten minutes, I thought about the presentation. For the next five, the red pen. Then Adrian. That was the most irritating part. Not the documents. Him. The way he had immediately moved his hand when I told him to take it off the folder. The way he hadn't tried to touch me when I sat down after seeing the scores. The way he answered questions even when the answers made him look worse. And those nine months. Nine months of knowledge he had not considered mine to have. That should have been enough to make me stop thinking about him. It wasn't. When I opened my eyes, it was after six-thirty. Patrycja was sitting at the table making final changes to the slides. "You slept," she said. "You're lying." "You snored." I sat up sharply. "I do not snore." "That was a control statement. Now I know you're conscious." I threw a cushion at her. She ducked. "I sent the photographs to our lawyer." I froze. "What?" "I left out the names. I said we had found what might be an archival document concerning an old competition and wanted to know how to preserve the original." "Without consulting me?" "Oh, now suddenly we value the right to information?" It hit accurately enough that I didn't answer. Patrycja's expression changed. "I'm sorry. But we need to protect ourselves." "What did she say?" "Don't write on the documents, don't separate the pages, don't do anything except make copies. After the presentation, we call her." I nodded. "Good." "And one more thing." "Of course." "Adrian came by." I looked at the clock. 6:38. "Where?" "Outside the door." "What did he want?" "You." "Very funny." "I'm not joking." "What did he say?" Patrycja stood. "There's a problem with the building's technical documentation. The organizers want the leaders of all five teams in the hall." "Now?" "Now." "It can't wait until eight?" "Apparently not." I put on my shoes and fixed my hair using the reflection in the dark monitor. "What did he look like?" Patrycja raised her eyebrows. "Professionally speaking?" "I'm asking if he looked like something had happened." "He looked like he always does." "Meaning?" "Like a man whose shirt costs more than my coffee machine and who has the nerve to look good after being awake all night." "That wasn't what I asked." "But it's what you heard." I walked past her without comment. Adrian stood at the entrance to our room. His jacket was slung over one shoulder, his shirtsleeves still rolled up. He looked as sleep-deprived as I felt, except on him lack of sleep stripped away some of the professional perfection and left something more human underneath. I should not have noticed. "What happened?" I asked. "They repeated structural measurements over the north section of the hall overnight." "And?" "Two beams are in worse condition than the competition documentation indicated." Patrycja moved closer. "How much worse?" "Enough that the area may have to remain closed for several months once construction begins." Patrycja and I looked at each other. In our concept, the north section of the hall was critical to the first opening phase. "That changes the schedule," Patrycja said. "For everyone," Adrian replied. "The organizers are giving us one hour for revisions, then presentations go ahead as planned." "One hour?" I asked. "Yes." "When did you find out?" "Fifteen minutes ago." Patrycja gave me a meaningful look. I knew exactly what she meant. This time, he had come immediately. "Thanks," I said. Adrian accepted it without smiling. "Meeting in the hall in five minutes." He headed down the corridor. I caught up with him after a few steps. "Adrian." He stopped. Patrycja stayed behind. "Does your project also use the north section in phase one?" He looked at me. "Yes." "So we're equally screwed." "Not entirely." "You have a Plan B." "I always have a Plan B." "Of course you do." He started walking again, and I fell into step beside him. "What will you do?" "Move the education function to the west wing. I'll lose exhibition area, but I can open the building on schedule." "The west wing has acoustic problems." "I know." "So?" "I'll change the exhibition function to workshop use." I stopped walking. He went another two steps before looking back. "What?" "Nothing." "That was a very expressive 'nothing.'" "I had a similar idea." The corner of his mouth lifted. "I think that's the first time you've admitted we think alike." "Don't use it against me." "Too late." Representatives of the organizer and the leaders of the other three teams were already waiting in the main hall. Tomasz Wilczek stood at a large table covered with documentation, speaking with the structural engineer. I looked at him differently than I had the day before. He was around sixty, with gray hair, plain glasses, and the kind of quiet courtesy that in academic circles was often mistaken for gentleness. I had seen him several times at conferences. We had never spoken for more than two minutes. Now I knew that seven years earlier his name had appeared in the records of the competition I had been removed from. Wilczek noticed me. "Ms. Marta. Good, you're here." An ordinary sentence. An ordinary tone. I still analyzed every word. "What exactly changed?" I asked. The structural engineer spread out a drawing. "Beams B17 and B18. Corrosion where they meet the external wall is deeper than the preliminary assessment showed. There's no danger now, but during redevelopment, the zone has to be closed." "For how long?" "Four to six months." Questions started coming from around the table. Schedule. Budget. Temporary shoring. I was looking at the beam number. B17. "17/K..." The torn envelope. Coincidence. There must have been thousands of them. A document number, a beam number, two digits that looked meaningful only because I had spent three hours trying to find meaning in everything. And yet I remembered it. "Ms. Marta?" Wilczek said. I raised my head. "Yes?" "I asked whether closing that area requires a change to your entire lighting system." "No. The system is modular. I need to change the implementation sequence, not the underlying concept." "Good." He held my gaze a fraction longer. "Do you always design with failure in mind?" "With change in mind." "That distinction is rare." I wasn't sure whether it was a compliment. "I learned that a project that works only when everything goes according to plan is just a pretty picture." Something shifted in his expression. Maybe nothing. Maybe fatigue. Maybe he recognized my name. Wilczek nodded. "You have an hour." We went back to our rooms. For the next forty minutes, Patrycja and I worked almost without speaking. She reworked the schedule. I changed the lighting sequence and zone layout. The rest of our team had arrived before seven. Lena updated the visualization, Michał recalculated costs, and Oskar checked compliance with the brief. Chaos turned into rhythm. That was the part of the work I loved most. Not inventing beautiful things. Saving good ideas from reality. At seven-thirty, I stepped out to get some water. Adrian was standing by the coffee machine. "If you say this is our third coffee, I'll kill you," I said. "My fourth." "Worse." He was filling a cup with water. "How's the revision?" "We'll manage." "I knew you would." "Don't say things like that." "Like what?" "Like you're rooting for me." He leaned back against the machine. "I can think you're good and still want to win." "That sounds very mature." "I'm thirty-five." I stopped. "Really?" "Is that surprising?" "I thought you were thirty-four." "I'm devastated." "You don't look it." "On the inside." He handed me a bottle of water. I took it. "Why did you leave Radecki?" The question hung between us, completely out of place after the lightness of the previous minute. Adrian looked toward the hall, checking whether anyone was close enough to hear. "After that competition, I started collecting documents from other proceedings." "Which ones?" "Those where Radecki acted as consultant or delivery partner." "And?" "I found a pattern." I stopped drinking. "What kind?" "Strong projects lost points between substantive assessment and the final protocol. Sometimes because of cost. Sometimes on technical grounds. Then pieces of their solutions appeared elsewhere." "Theft." "It wasn't always legally possible to call it that." "What do you call it?" He looked at me. "Theft." The word removed the last of the lightness between us. "Did you report it?" "Internally." "To Radecki?" "First to one of the partners. Then to the investor in one of the proceedings." "And?" "Two days later, I was removed from public-sector projects. A month later, I left." "That's all?" "No." I waited. Adrian ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek, a gesture I had never seen him make before. "I took copies of several files." "Legally?" "No." That was the first thing he said in the entire conversation that genuinely surprised me. "What did you do with them?" "Gave them to a lawyer." "And?" "Some of the material was too ambiguous. In other cases, we couldn't establish a full documentary chain. Nobody wanted to open a case based on suspicions from an employee leaving after a conflict." "And my competition?" "I didn't have a document with your name on it." "But you had the number." "Yes." "And the initials." "Yes." "Yours." "Yes." Each yes landed somewhere deep. "What did they actually mean?" "Confirmation that the document had passed through me in circulation." "So not approval of the decision." "No." "Can you prove that?" "If the company's procedures from that period still exist, yes." "If." "I know." We heard footsteps. Adrian moved away from the machine. "After the presentation, I'll show you something else." "What?" "Material I kept." "About me?" "Possibly." "'Possibly' is a very convenient answer." "I'd rather say 'possibly' than give you too little again and make you build the rest yourself." He took a step toward the hall. "Adrian." He turned. "Why now?" "What?" "Why are you helping me now? You have a competition to win. If this explodes before the result, the whole thing could be canceled." "I know." "So?" He was quiet for a moment. "Because seven years ago I decided I needed complete proof before I could tell anyone the truth. It turned out to be a very convenient way of doing nothing at the moment when something should have been done." I looked at him. There was no request for forgiveness in that sentence. Good. It was far too early for forgiveness. "Nine o'clock," he said. "Let's try to beat each other first." "Gladly." His smile returned. "That's what I was afraid of." At nine, I stood in front of the jury. The first slide showed the old power station at night. Dark windows. Brick. Empty interior. The next showed the same building after our intervention. Not brighter everywhere. Only brighter where it was meant to live. I looked at the five people seated at the table. Wilczek sat in the center. Adrian was waiting at the side of the room because his presentation came next. For several seconds, no one spoke. Then I began. "This building doesn't need us to pretend it's new. It needs us to give people a reason not to want to leave after dark." At the back of the room, Adrian raised his eyes. Only for a moment. I still didn't know what had really happened seven years earlier. I didn't know who had hidden the documents inside the power station or why they had resurfaced now. But as the light from the first visualization spread across the screen, I knew one thing. This time, no one was taking my place at the table without a fight. Even if the man I had every reason to treat as my opponent was starting to look like the only person in the building who understood what that fight had really cost me.