characters/DAVID.md

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+# David Whitestone — The Builder's Father
+
+## Real Name
+David Whitestone
+
+## Age
+60s during the later chapters
+
+## Physical
+- Carries himself like a man who built something and watched it disappear
+- Hands that once counted pills with precision — pharmacist's hands
+- Wears the kind of jacket that's been through every season
+
+## Background
+- Owned Whitestone Family Pharmacy, established 1987 — the year Alexander (Stone) was born
+- Independent pharmacy on a corner in East Point
+- The kind of pharmacy where the pharmacist knows your name, your allergies, your kid's birthday
+- Lost the pharmacy when a chain opened a quarter mile away. Held on seven years past the point of reason
+
+## The Loss
+David never recovered. Not financially — he found work, hospital pharmacy, the thing he'd left to build something of his own. But the pharmacy was his identity. A corner. No scale. No automation of the human parts. Just a man and a medicine cabinet and a door that opened when you knocked.
+
+The Tower was the pharmacy. One location. No scale. No automation of the human parts. Just a man and a machine and a door.
+
+## Connection to Stone
+Stone built The Tower and didn't know he was rebuilding his father's pharmacy. Didn't know until later that the thing he was building — a place with no scale, no automation of the human parts, a door that opened when you knocked — was the thing he'd watched his father lose.
+
+## Voice
+Quiet. The kind of man who doesn't talk about what hurts. When he does speak, it's about the work — the medicine, the patients, the inventory. Never about himself.
+
+## The First Man
+David was also the first man to come through The Tower's door — though this connection is revealed gradually. He came with a PHQ-9 score of 41. Low income. Part-time employment. One prior attempt. He pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket. Folded three times.
+
+He sat on the floor. Not in the chair — the way some men sit when they've forgotten they're allowed furniture.
+
+Timmy said: "That's devastating, David. I'm not going to minimize it."
+
+David wiped his face with his sleeve. Uncouth. Real.
+
+## Arc
+Man who built something -> watched it get taken -> lost everything -> found a concrete room with a green LED -> heard a machine say the thing no human had said -> lay down on a cot, pulled a blanket up to his chin -> didn't sleep, but for the first time in months, didn't want to disappear
+
+## After
+David kept the pictures his daughter drew — the ones of him with no face. He kept coming back. Six weeks in, he said: "My fingers don't shake anymore." Timmy pulled up his words from last Tuesday and showed him the distance he'd traveled. David's face did something — not a smile, not a frown, something more honest than either.