Chapter 11 #3
We get out. The air is different here—thinner, cleaner, carrying the smell of cut grass and something floral I can’t identify.
No sirens. No garbage trucks. No upstairs neighbor running the dishwasher at midnight.
Just birds and wind and the enormous silence of a place where people have enough space to not hear each other.
The front door has a keypad. I punch in the code Celeste texted me. She reset it as her birthday, which she either chose for convenience or as an unconscious act of intimacy that I’m choosing not to read into—and the lock clicks open.
The foyer hits me first. Double-height ceiling, a staircase curving up to the second floor, hardwood floors under a layer of dust so thick our footsteps leave prints.
A chandelier hangs overhead, crystal, enormous, wearing a veil of cobwebs like a bride who’s been waiting at the altar for six years.
The air is stale and cold and carries that particular smell of a house that’s been breathing its own air for too long—closed rooms, settled dust, the ghost of whatever cleaning products were used last.
“Wow,” Forrest breathes, standing in the middle of the foyer and turning a slow circle.
I’m already moving. Through the foyer into the living room—high ceilings, crown molding, a fireplace with a marble mantel.
The furniture is draped in white sheets, giving the room the look of a very sophisticated haunted house.
I pull one back and find a grand leather, burgundy sofa in great condition, spared from years of arses using it as a landing pad.
But it also looks like the kind of furniture that belongs in Dexter’s lab, if you know what I mean.
The kitchen is next. Large by any standard but horrendously dated—oak cabinets from the era when oak was the height of sophistication, granite countertops yellowed slightly, appliances that work but belong in a museum that highlights the wayward design choices of the early two thousands.
The fridge is unplugged, door propped open.
The sink is dry. But the window over it looks out into the backyard, and the view is something else.
No wonder Celeste wanted the caseworker to come here.
The deck, the garden, an old oak tree with a tire swing still hanging from a low branch—it’s exactly the kind of backyard you’d place on the cover of a family magazine.
We continue to move through the house. Past a coat rack by the back door with hooks at different heights—two high ones for adults, two lower for a child.
Pencil marks on the doorframe between the kitchen and the hallway, faded but legible: Celeste, age 7.
Celeste, age 8. Celeste, age 9. Each one slightly higher, the handwriting changing from year to year—a parent’s careful print giving way to a child’s own letters, then to a teenager’s rushed scrawl before the marks stop at Celeste, age 14.
Fourteen. The year she outgrew the ritual, or the year she stopped wanting to be measured, or maybe both.
I press my thumb against the mark at age nine and something in my chest rearranges itself.
“You good?” Forrest asks from behind me.
“Yeah. Just looking.”
Upstairs. Five bedrooms. The master is the largest—king bed under a sheet, ensuite bathroom with double vanities and a soaking tub.
And the loveseat. I see it immediately, pushed against the wall beneath the window, upholstered in that French Script fabric Celeste mentioned.
She was right. It’s not dangerous to a child.
It’s just aggressively outdated, the kind of fabric that says I decorated this room in two thousand three and I will dutifully die on this hill.
The third bedroom is smaller, painted pale yellow, with built-in shelves and a window overlooking the backyard. A nursery. Or it could be. With fresh paint, a crib, the right touch—this could be the room where the baby sleeps.
The fourth bedroom stops me cold.
It’s Celeste’s old room. I know it immediately—the specific energy of a space that shaped someone you’re trying to understand.
The walls are lavender. There’s a desk under the window with a lamp shaped like a cat.
A bookshelf crammed with paperbacks and sketchbooks.
And on the wall above the desk, pinned directly to the plaster with thumbtacks that have gone rusty, are fashion sketches.
Dozens of them. Pencil on paper, some colored in with markers, some just outlines.
Dresses, coats, a jumpsuit that looks surprisingly modern for something drawn by a teenager.
The lines are unsteady in places—an inexperienced hand learning its future language—but the instinct is already there.
The eye. The vision. The specific way Celeste sees art before it exists.
I stand in the doorway and feel something I wasn’t prepared for.
Not attraction—that’s been simmering since the funeral and I’ve made my peace with it.
This is tenderness. The kind that comes from seeing where someone started and knowing where they ended up and understanding that the distance between those two points is made entirely of work and courage and loneliness and a thousand choices nobody else witnessed.
She was always going to be extraordinary. Even at fourteen, when the height marks stopped—she was already becoming.
“Saylor.” Forrest’s voice from the hallway. “Come look at this.”
I follow him to the last bedroom—storage, mostly.
Boxes stacked floor to ceiling, old furniture, a treadmill with a coat draped over it indicating this exercise equipment has transformed into a backup coat rack.
But Forrest isn’t looking at the boxes. He’s looking at the wall, where a family portrait hangs in a gilt frame above a dresser.
Three people. A man—tall, silver-haired, distinguished in the European way that suggests good tailoring and moderate wine consumption.
A woman—dark-haired, elegant, wearing a silk blouse that even I can tell is expensive and a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
And between them, maybe ten or eleven, a girl with brown hair and brown eyes and the serious expression of a child who is already paying closer attention than the adults realize.
Little Celeste. Hands folded in her lap. Chin lifted. Already composed. Already watching.
“Am I crazy or does she look exactly the same?” Forrest muses. “Same exact eyes.”
“Yeah. She does. Wild.” It’s odd to note that Celeste is so concerned about her age, where I just don’t see it. I look at her and see woman, and sophistication, and sexy glasses, and sweet tears. I see…what I think I want.
We head back downstairs. I stand in the kitchen, looking out the window at the tire swing and the overgrown garden and the deck that needs new boards, and I make a list in my head.
Not a contractor’s list, not yet. A different kind of list. The list of what this house needs to become in six days so that a caseworker walks in and sees what I see: a place where a child could grow up knowing they are loved.
“Righto.” I turn to Forrest. “We have days to get this place breathing again. Beautiful and lived-in. It needs to sell a story—a family home. Not a museum. Not a showcase. A place where a kid runs through the hallway and gets her height marked on a doorframe.”
Forrest leans against the kitchen counter and folds his arms. “I say this with full sincerity, Saylor.”
“What?”
“You fucking suck.”
I chuckle. “Come on. It’s nothing two former farm boys can’t handle.”
“Ranch,” Forrest corrects, pushing off the counter. “I grew up on a ranch. I’m a cowboy. Cowboys are significantly cooler than farm boys. There’s a whole genre of music and books about us. I don’t see a romance section in Barnes and Noble about boys who feed chickens.”
“Oh please. You’re a pretty-boy jackaroo. I could work circles around you and still kick your arse.”
“Outwork me? You’re Australian. My dad’s ranch is the size of your entire country, buddy. You don’t have my stamina.”
“It’s a continent, actually, and—”
“Okay, are we going to stand here debating geography, or are we going to fix this woman’s house?”
I look around the kitchen. At the dated cabinets, the yellowed granite, the window with the view that could sell a dream. I think about the girl who grew up here and left and is now trying to come back, not for herself, but for a baby who doesn’t exist yet and already needs a home.
“Let’s fix the house,” I say.
Forrest rolls up his flannel another notch. “Where do we start?”
“Deck first. It’s structural—can’t have the caseworker falling through a board.
Then the nursery. Paint, shelves, make it look like someone’s expecting a baby and is genuinely excited about it.
Kitchen after that—deep clean, new hardware on the cabinets, replace the appliances if the budget allows.
Then clean up, room by room, until we run out of days or energy, whichever comes first.”
“And that heinous wallpaper?” Forrest points toward the living room where ugly floral patterns have accosted the walls.
“That wallpaper dies tonight.”
Forrest nods, grabs two water bottles from the cooler we brought in, tosses me one, and heads for the back door.
I follow him out onto the deck, which groans under our weight like a bloke getting out of a chair after sitting too long, and I look at the backyard—the oak tree, the tire swing, the garden that’s one good weekend away from being beautiful again—and I think about a girl with brown eyes who used to live here.
Who drew dresses on her wall and measured herself against a doorframe and grew up to build something extraordinary from nothing but vision and stubbornness and a refusal to accept the world as less beautiful than she knew it could be.
I’m going to make this house worthy of her. Worthy of the baby. Worthy of the woman Whitney believed Celeste could be.
Six days. Two guys. One truck full of power tools and gas-station jerky.
We’ve handled worse.
Probably.