Chapter 32
Ben
I'd expected her to cry.
Not because Olivia cried easily—she didn't, I'd learned that in four months of watching her absorb things that would have flattened most people—but because Lucia had just walked through the house Ryan built for the both of them, and Olivia had let her.
Had walked her through it herself. Room by room, quiet as a docent.
That had to cost something.
But she just stood in the doorway watching the Range Rover go, and when she finally turned back inside her face wasn't wrecked. It was something harder to read than that. Like she'd expected a fight and found a funeral instead.
"You okay?" I asked.
She looked at me. "I genuinely don't know."
Which was the most honest answer she could have given, so I left it there. She walked back into the living room and stopped in the middle of it, hands in her pockets, looking up at the ceiling. The beams. The joinery Ryan had drawn in notebook margins before he even knew what he wanted to build.
"It's done," she said. Not to me. Just out loud, like she was confirming it.
"Yeah," I said. "It is."
She turned slowly, taking in the whole room. The staged furniture, the fake lemons on the island, the light coming through those enormous windows going gold and flat as the sun dropped behind the hills.
"I keep waiting for something else to go wrong," she said.
"Nothing's going wrong."
"I know." She looked at her hands. "That's the weird part."
I understood that. We'd spent four months in crisis mode, lurching from one problem to the next—wrong orders, failed inspections, weather, money, the thousand small disasters that come with building something from nothing in an impossible timeline.
The emergencies had become the rhythm. And now there was no emergency, just a finished house standing quiet around us, and neither of us quite knew what to do with that.
"Walt left a bottle in the garage," I said. "He always brings one for the last day of a job. Never drinks more than a measure."
She looked at me. "You've been saving that information."
"Since this morning."
Something moved across her face. Something in the neighborhood of a smile. "Go get it."
The garage was dim, the work lights off, the folding table still in the corner where Olivia had set up on day one. I found the bottle on the shelf above the pegboard, exactly where Walt had left it. Halfway down. Jameson, same as always.
I stood there for a second holding it, not moving.
The table still had her coffee ring on it. The blue folder she used for permits was gone, filed away somewhere, but the ring was still there. Four months of early mornings.
Tomorrow there'd be no reason to come back out here.
No crew, no deliveries, no permits to chase.
The listing would go live and strangers would drive up that gravel driveway and walk through these rooms deciding if they could picture their lives here.
And Olivia would go back to Oak Street, and I'd go back to my shop, and whatever this had been would just… stop.
Walt had told me not to be the guy who waits. Frank had told me to figure it out. Collins, in his roundabout way, had said the same thing. I'd stood in this house that night after they all left and had nothing to say to any of it, which probably meant they were right.
That was weeks ago. I still hadn't moved.
The thing was, I knew what I wanted. That part wasn't complicated anymore. What was complicated was the twenty minutes that had just passed—Lucia walking through these rooms, Olivia walking beside her. The whole weight of Ryan still settling over everything like dust that wouldn't quite clear.
Maybe tomorrow. Maybe when the house sold and the debt was gone and there was nothing left of his mess between us.
Or maybe I was just good at finding reasons.
I picked up the bottle and went back inside.
We probably shouldn't have drunk this much.
That thought arrived somewhere around the fourth pour, when Olivia was laughing so hard she had to set her mug down before she spilled it. We were sitting on the kitchen floor, backs against the cabinets, legs stretched out on the subfloor.
"He said aesthetically motivated," she managed. "Those were his exact words. Frank's face—"
"Frank's face," I agreed.
It had been nothing, really. Three weeks ago, Collins had tried to argue that the cabinet hardware should be repositioned two inches to the left for—his words—aesthetic reasons.
Frank had looked at him the way you'd look at a dog that had just tried to sit in your chair.
The argument had lasted forty minutes and achieved nothing except Collins learning seventeen new ways Frank could express contempt without raising his voice.
She'd missed most of it, on the phone in the garage, and I'd filled her in after the crew left. She'd been pulling on that thread all evening.
"And then Walt," she said, catching her breath. "Walt just—he didn't even look up. He just said 'son' and went back to sanding."
"That's all Frank needed."
"That's all Frank ever needs." She shook her head, still smiling. "Someone to agree with him silently."
I poured another measure into her mug. She didn't stop me.
We'd eaten at some point. I'd found half a sleeve of crackers in my jacket pocket from God knows when, and Olivia had produced a slightly battered granola bar from her bag with the triumphant expression of someone discovering buried treasure.
We'd split both, sitting cross-legged on the floor of a house worth over a million dollars, eating stale crackers in the dark.
"Collins told me about the truck," she said, after a while.
I closed my eyes briefly. "Of course he did."
"The building." She was trying not to smile. "He reversed into the building."
"Just the bumper."
"He said that too." She pulled her knees up to her chest. "You never said anything to him about it?"
"What was there to say? The bodywork alone was four grand. Other car was another two. Building was—" I shook my head. "It was bad."
"Most bosses would've—"
"He knew what he did." I shrugged. "Saying it out loud doesn't fix the dent."
She was quiet for a moment, turning her mug in her hands. Outside, the dark had settled completely over the clearing, the tree line invisible now against the sky. The house held the warmth from the day, just barely.
"I'm going to miss them," she said. "And not just them. I’m going to miss… this."
I looked at her.
She laughed, short and a little disbelieving, like she'd surprised herself. "I know. I can't believe I'm going to say this about a house that almost took everything from me, but—" She shook her head. "I'm going to miss this fucking house."
I looked up at the ceiling with its high beams, the joinery Ryan had figured out in notebook margins. From here you could see straight through to the living room, the dark mass of the fireplace rising up the far wall.
"Yeah," I said. "Me too."
The silence that followed was different from the others.
She was looking at me and I was looking at the ceiling and I was acutely, painfully aware of exactly how close we were sitting.
The line of her shoulder. The way her hair had half-escaped whatever she'd tied it back with this morning.
Her hands around the mug, the pale band on her left finger that had been there for months now, the ghost of a different life.
I knew what I wanted to say.
I'd known for weeks. It wasn't complicated, it wasn't even particularly eloquent. Just true, the way true things usually are. Simple enough to say in one breath if I could just get out of my own goddamn way.
Instead I heard myself say:
"What you did out here—"
She looked at me. Waiting.
"Four months ago you didn't know a framing nailer from a finish nailer, and by March you were catching code violations before the inspector did. That delivery driver—" I almost smiled. "He didn't know what hit him."
Something shifted in her expression. She kept looking at me.
"And today. What you did with Lucia. Walking her through the house like that—" I shook my head. "That took something. That took a lot, actually. You should know that."
She was still watching me. Hadn't moved. Hadn't said anything.
"I just—" I turned the mug in my hands. "I wanted you to know that. Before the listing and the sale and all of it. Whatever comes next. You should know what you did here."
Silence.
"Ben," she said.
"Yeah."
"Why don't you just say it?"
I looked at her. "Say what?"
"Whatever it actually is." She held my gaze, steady.
"I know you're doing the speech. I've seen you do the speech — Collins, Frank, the tile guy who screwed up the bathroom twice.
You close out the job, you say the right things, everyone goes home feeling good.
" She paused. "I'm not an employee. I’m not a contractor. "
My mouth opened. Nothing came out.
"I don't need a pat on the back," she said, quieter now. "I need—" She stopped. Looked down at her mug. "I don't know. Something that isn't this."
The fire wasn't lit. The house was dark and warm and completely still around us and I was sitting six inches from her on a subfloor we'd laid ourselves and I knew exactly what I wanted to say and I still couldn't say it.
"Liv." My voice came out rough. "It's just— it's messy. All of it. Ryan, the house, everything that happened out here. I don't want to… I don't want to be another thing that hurts you."
She stared at me.
And then something in her face changed all at once, like a temperature drop.
"I'm a grown woman." Her voice was low and controlled, which was worse than if she'd shouted.
"I'm not Ryan's wife. I'm not a member of your crew.
I'm not—" She stopped. Drew a breath. When she spoke again it wasn't controlled at all.
"I have spent years being managed and protected and decided for and I am so tired, Ben.
I am so tired of people deciding what I can handle—"
She caught herself.
Pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling.
"I'm sorry." She set the mug down carefully on the floor. "You don't deserve that. I need a minute."
She got up and went into the dark of the house, toward the living room. Her footsteps crossed the subfloor, slow and deliberate, and then stopped.
I stayed where I was, back against the stone, staring at the two mugs on the hearth and the half-empty bottle of Jameson and the mess I'd just made of the one moment I'd been given.
I don't want to be another thing that hurts you.
As if she'd asked me to protect her. As if that's what she'd been sitting there waiting for.
Idiot.