Chapter 28 Ben
Ben
Isanded a section of trim that didn't need sanding.
Just ran the block back and forth until my shoulder burned, because I needed something to do with my hands that wasn't thinking. The wood was already smooth. Had been smooth yesterday. I kept going anyway.
Outside, Collins and Frank were hanging the last of the exterior doors—I could hear the thud of the jamb setter, the occasional curse when the shimming was off.
Walt was upstairs somewhere, his footsteps slow and deliberate across the subfloor as he worked through the closet trim.
The sounds of a house that was almost finished.
Olivia was at the folding table in the garage, same as every morning. Laptop open, coffee going cold beside her. I'd seen her pull in just after seven. We'd nodded at each other across the clearing like two people who worked together and nothing more.
Mostly that was on me.
Ruth had shown up in Ryan's hoodie, and that was enough.
Somewhere between the drive home and the drive back, the thing I'd been carefully not examining had examined itself.
Four months out here and Ryan had become mostly abstract — a name on blueprints, a set of decisions I was correcting.
Then Ruth had looked up at this house with those eyes, and he wasn't abstract anymore.
He was her son. He was my best friend. And Olivia wasn't just Liv.
I ran the sanding block back over wood that didn't need it and told myself to get it together.
The truck came in just before nine.
I heard the air brakes before the truck cleared the tree line, then the long groan of a heavy load settling as it rolled to a stop in the clearing.
Three weeks out from the original schedule, which had cost us a rescheduled countertop template and a very unpleasant call with the fabricator that Olivia had handled without complaining.
I set down the sanding block and walked outside.
The driver was already dropping the tailgate, and what I saw when he pulled back the moving blankets made my stomach drop.
An upper cabinet—a long, expensive run of shaker-style maple in the finish we'd specified—had a corner crushed inward, the face frame splintered. And that was the first one I looked at.
"How many?" I asked.
The driver shrugged. "Few look roughed up. Rest seem okay."
I pulled back the next blanket. Wrong finish. These were supposed to be the lower cabinets—same maple as the uppers. These were painted white, and not even close to the finish we'd ordered.
"Hey." Olivia's voice, behind me. She'd come out of the garage without me noticing, her clipboard already in hand. She looked at the painted cabinet, then at me. "That's not maple."
"No."
"And that one's—"
"Yeah."
She stepped up onto the tailgate without being asked and started pulling blankets back, methodically, moving through the stack. I watched her sort as she went—uppers to the left, lowers to the right, damaged ones called out with a tap of her pen. She didn't look at me. I didn't look at her.
"Four damaged uppers," she said finally. "And the entire lower run is the wrong finish." She jumped down and turned to the driver. "I need your delivery manifest."
He handed it over. She scanned it, then held it next to her clipboard and compared the two documents line by line, her finger moving down the page.
"They pulled from the wrong order," she said, half to herself. "Someone transposed the job numbers." She looked up at the driver. "The lowers all go back. Today."
"Lady, I've got four more stops—"
"I understand that." Her voice was even. Pleasant, almost. "But I'm not signing for a twenty-thousand-dollar order that's half wrong and a quarter destroyed. So here's what's going to happen."
I leaned against the truck and let her go.
She was on the phone with the supplier inside of two minutes, the delivery manifest folded under her arm.
I could tell from twenty feet away that they were giving her the runaround — her jaw tightened, she pulled the phone from her ear and looked at it for a second like it had personally offended her, then put it back.
This was the second time this supplier had gotten the order wrong.
The first time she'd accepted the apology and the revised confirmation email and trusted that it wouldn't happen again.
The driver stood beside his truck waiting, and I kept unloading.
I started unloading the undamaged uppers myself, stacking them carefully against the garage wall. Walt could still install these today—it would keep him on schedule while we waited on the lower replacements. Something to do. Something that kept my hands moving and my eyes off her.
Collins appeared at my elbow. "Bad?"
"Four damaged uppers, whole lower run is wrong finish. Lowers are going back."
He winced. "How far does that set us back?"
"Depends how fast she can get them to turn around a replacement order." I lifted another cabinet, the wood heavier than it looked. "Ten days if she can hold them to it."
Collins was quiet for a moment, watching Olivia pace near the garage entrance. Then he looked at me with that expression I'd been seeing too much of lately.
"What," I said. Flat. Not a question.
"Nothing." He picked up the other end of a cabinet. "You just look like you slept on your own floor last night."
"I slept fine."
"Okay."
We carried the cabinet to the wall in silence. We set it down and went back for the next one.
"She okay?" Collins asked.
"She's handling a twenty-thousand-dollar cabinet crisis. She's fine."
"I meant in general."
I looked at him.
He held up both hands. "Just asking."
"Mind the doors," I said. "Frank needs help with the shimming on the mudroom entry."
Collins took the hint. He disappeared around the side of the house, and I went back to unloading cabinets alone, which was what I deserved.
Olivia finished the call and walked over. She had that look she got when she'd won something—not triumphant, just settled. Like a problem had been moved from the active pile to the resolved pile and she could breathe again.
"Replacement lowers in ten days," she said. "They're expediting at no charge. And they're filing a damage claim on the four crushed uppers, so we should be covered on those." She paused. "If they can be trusted to get it right this time."
"Good."
"Driver's taking the wrong order back now." She glanced at the stack of undamaged uppers against the wall. "Walt can still install these today. Keeps him on schedule."
"Yeah." I picked up my end of the next cabinet. "I'll let him know."
"Ben."
I stopped.
She was looking at me the way she looked at a problem she'd decided to stop ignoring.
"You've said maybe twelve words to me today," she said.
"We've been busy."
"We're always busy." She tilted her head slightly. "What's going on?"
The cabinet was heavy in my hands. I set it down.
"Nothing's going on," I said. "We've got Walt waiting on the uppers. Can we do this later?"
She looked at me for a long moment. I watched her decide something.
"Sure," she said. "Later."
She picked up her clipboard and walked back toward the garage, and I stood there in the clearing holding nothing, watching her go.
Ah, hell.
I dragged a hand over my face and went after her.
She heard my boots on the gravel and turned, her expression already guarded. I stopped a few feet from her, and for a second I didn't know how to start. Which was stupid, because I'd been rehearsing this in my head since three in the morning.
"Listen," I said.
"Okay."
"Yesterday was—" I stopped. Started again. "I've been in my head. I know that. And I know you've noticed." I looked at her, then past her, at the house. "Seeing Ruth. It just—it reminded me of some things I'd been... letting slide."
Olivia didn't say anything. She held her clipboard against her chest and watched me with an expression I couldn't quite read.
"This whole thing," I said, gesturing vaguely at the space between us.
"It's gotten—I've let it get—" I exhaled.
"You're Ryan's wife, Olivia. He was my best friend.
And I know what happened, I know what he did, but he's still—he's still Ryan.
And I was the one who told him he was being an idiot.
I was the one who had all the answers." I shook my head. "I can't turn around and—"
"I understand," she said.
She said it quietly, without heat. Just two words, clean and flat.
I looked at her. "I just think we need to—"
"Ben." She said my name the way you'd stop someone from stepping into traffic — quiet, no heat behind it. "I said I understand."
She didn't look angry. That was the thing. She just looked like a woman who had done this math before and already knew what it added up to.
She reached down and picked up her car keys from the table.
"I'm going to drive out to the cabinet shop," she said. "Make sure they pull the right order this time. It's two hours but it's better than waiting ten days and getting the wrong thing again."
"Liv—"
"I'll be back before dark." She tucked the clipboard under her arm. "Tell Walt the uppers are ready to go."
She walked past me to her car, unhurried, and I stood there and let her.
The engine turned over. The tires crunched over gravel. And then she was gone, down the driveway, through the trees, out onto Route 9 heading west.
I stood in the clearing for a long moment, staring at the empty space where her car had been.
Collins appeared from around the side of the house, took one look at my face, and walked quietly back the way he'd come.
Smart kid.
Olivia called at four.
She'd walked into the millwork shop, found the guy who'd transposed the order numbers, and stood there while he personally pulled the correct spec sheet and walked it to the floor.
Right finish, right dimensions. Loading first thing tomorrow, she'd make sure of it.
She was staying until the truck was packed.
I told the crew at the end of the day, when we were cleaning up and the light had gone flat and gray through the windows of the house.
Collins stopped sweeping. "She just... drove two hours and walked in there?"
"Yeah."
He shook his head, grinning. "That's kind of terrifying."
"Good terrifying," Walt said, from the corner where he was coiling his extension cord with the slow, methodical patience of a man who'd learned not to rush things. "Woman knows how to get something done."
Frank didn't say anything for a moment. He was packing up his tool belt, methodical as always, unhooking each pouch and rolling it flat. Then he looked up at me.
"She drive out there because of the cabinets," he said, "or because of you?"
The room went quiet. Nobody looked confused. Nobody asked what he meant. Four months on a job site together and apparently I hadn't been as subtle as I thought.
Collins opened his mouth.
"Don't," I said.
He closed it. Lasted about four seconds.
"I watched this documentary once," he said, "about people who survive, like, disasters together. Plane crashes, that kind of thing. And apparently it's super common to—"
"Collins."
"—develop really strong—"
"Collins."
"—feelings. That's all I'm saying. It's science."
Frank looked at him. "That's not what that documentary was about."
"I'm pretty sure it was."
"It wasn't."
"Well." Collins picked up his broom. "The point stands."
"It's complicated," I said, which I immediately regretted.
"Sure," Frank said.
"Ryan was my best friend."
"Yep."
"I'm not gonna—" I stopped. "It's not appropriate."
Frank set down his tool belt. He turned to face me with the expression of a man who had run out of patience for stupidity sometime around 1987 and never found any more.
"You've been useless all day," he said, "and that woman just drove two hours to stand over a cabinet maker until he got the order right." He picked up his tool belt. "Figure it out."
Walt finished coiling his cord and straightened up slowly, his bad knee clicking. He looked at me with those steady, unhurried eyes.
"My wife wanted a house on Candlewood Lake," he said.
"Fifteen years she wanted it. We'd drive out there on Sundays, she'd pick the one she liked.
Same house, every time. Little blue cape on the water.
" He picked up his bag. "I kept saying we weren't ready.
Too expensive, wrong time, let's wait." He moved toward the door.
"Someone else bought it. She never said a word about it after that. "
He paused in the doorway.
"Don't be the guy who waits, Ben."
Then he was gone, his truck rumbling to life in the clearing. Collins grabbed his jacket and followed, pausing just long enough to give me a look that said he agreed with everything Walt had said but was too smart to repeat it.
Frank was the last to leave. He stopped beside me on his way out, tool belt tucked under his arm.
"For what it's worth," he said, "Ryan wasn't as good a friend to you as you were to him."
He walked out before I could respond.
I stood in the empty house as the last of the daylight died, listening to the sound of three trucks pulling down the gravel drive, and didn't have a single thing to say to any of it.