CHAPTER FOUR Frost on the Windows
The first hard frost of the season arrived overnight, and Josie woke to find it laced across her bedroom window in patterns her father used to call the world's oldest handwriting.
She lay there a moment before getting up, listening for the sound that had become, in three short days, an unwelcome kind of comfort: Sawyer's truck idling at the curb below, earlier each morning, as though some part of him was as unwilling to sleep as she was.
When she finally went down, coffee in hand, she found him already unloading tools from the truck bed, breath fogging pale in the cold, the frost still silvering the sidewalk in a thin, undisturbed sheet everywhere his boots hadn't yet touched.
"You're going to run out of reasons to be here before I run out of coffee," she said, handing him a cup without quite deciding to.
He took it, surprise flickering across his face at the gesture, quickly folded into something warmer. "Framing inspection's today. After that it's just drywall and paint. Should be done by end of week."
"That fast."
"Your dad built good bones." He said it simply, no weight to it, and yet something in the observation landed heavier than he probably meant it to, an old ache surfacing in the small space between them. "Some things hold up no matter what gets thrown at them."
She didn't answer that, unsure whether he meant the building or something else entirely, and unwilling to ask which.
They worked through the morning in the easy rhythm that had somehow reestablished itself despite Thursday's tension still hanging unspoken between them, old shorthand resurfacing in small, unguarded moments: him handing her a tool before she'd asked for it, her passing him a rag at the exact second he needed one, both of them falling back into a partnership neither had consciously decided to rebuild.
The framing inspector arrived just before ten, a stooped, humorless man named Garrity who'd been failing contractors on technicalities for as long as Josie could remember, and Sawyer handled him with a patient, meticulous thoroughness that reminded her, uncomfortably, of exactly the man she used to know before any of this happened.
He walked Garrity through every stud, every joint, answered every nitpicking question with a straight face and a level of detail that eventually wore the inspector's suspicion down into grudging approval.
"Boone." Garrity said it like a verdict, snapping his clipboard shut. "Cleanest framing repair I've signed off on this quarter. Tell your outfit I said so, not that they'll believe me."
"I'll pass it along." Sawyer's mouth twitched, the ghost of the easy humor Josie remembered, and once Garrity had climbed back into his truck and pulled away, Sawyer turned to her with an actual grin, unguarded for just a second. "Man hasn't smiled at a job site since I was a prospect."
"You used to say he failed jobs just to remind everyone he had the power to."
"Still true." He shook his head, still half smiling, and for a moment the three years between them folded away entirely, replaced by the easy, familiar rhythm of two people who had once known exactly how to make each other laugh in the middle of a hard day's work.
At one point he made a dry, understated joke about the inspector's notorious pickiness on a job years back, and she laughed before she could stop herself, a real laugh, surprised out of her, and the sound of it seemed to catch him as much as it caught her.
"Haven't heard that in a while," he said quietly, not quite meeting her eyes.
"Don't get used to it."
But something had shifted, small and undeniable, and she felt it the rest of the morning like a low hum under her skin, the particular unsettled warmth of remembering, against her own will, exactly why she'd loved this man in the first place.
Her phone buzzed midmorning while she was elbow deep in a supply order, and she nearly ignored it before she saw Nadia's name on the screen.
**Nadia:** heard through the grapevine (delia) that a certain someone has been parking outside your shop every morning this week **Nadia:** the grapevine also says you're smiling more **Josie:** the grapevine needs a hobby **Nadia:** the grapevine would like details **Josie:** the grapevine is not getting details **Nadia:** rude. tell foreman hottie i said hi
Josie set the phone face down on the counter, unable to fully suppress the small huff of laughter the exchange pulled out of her, and looked up to find Sawyer watching her from across the shop with the particular curious half smile of a man who badly wanted to ask what was funny and had decided, wisely, not to.
"Nadia says hi," Josie offered, before he could ask.
"Tell her I said the bar's looking good from the outside. Haven't had time to come in."
"You used to be a regular."
"Different life." He said it without bitterness, just fact, and turned back to the wall he was measuring, though Josie caught the small, private tightness in his jaw that suggested the observation cost him more than his voice let on.
Delia arrived at midmorning with her usual coffee run, and this time she didn't bother pretending not to notice the shift in the air. She caught Josie alone at the parts counter while Sawyer worked at the back wall, out of easy earshot.
"You're smiling different today," Delia said, not quite a question.
"It's the frost. Makes everything look nicer than it is."
"Mm hm." Delia's look carried the particular patience of a woman who had raised Josie's father's daughter through every hard year without ever once being fooled by a deflection.
"I'm not going to tell you what to feel, baby, I already said that.
But I am going to tell you to be careful.
Whatever's coming for that man on Thursday, it's bigger than a bad day at work.
I heard some things, secondhand, nothing solid, but enough to know it's serious.
If you're going to let him back in, even a little, you go in with your eyes open this time. You hear me?"
"I hear you." Josie meant it, though she wasn't entirely sure yet what she was agreeing to.
Delia squeezed her hand once, gentle, and let the subject drop, moving on to ask after the framing inspection like the conversation had never happened, though Josie carried the weight of it the rest of the day.
It was nearly dusk, the crew gone, the last light bleeding gray and gold over the frosted rooftops of the district, when Josie found herself alone with Sawyer for the first time since the sidewalk three days earlier, both of them lingering over the last details of the day's work longer than the work itself required.
"Can I ask you something," she said, before she'd fully decided to.
He straightened from the tool bag he was packing, giving her his full attention in a way that made her chest tighten. "Yeah."
"What happened to your colors." She said it plainly, no dressing it up, because she'd decided somewhere in the last hour that she was tired of circling the question.
"The top rocker, the rank patch. I saw it the first day.
You've been walking around in a stripped cut for three days and nobody's said a word about it in front of me. "
Something shuttered behind his eyes, quick and involuntary, the particular flinch of a man who'd been waiting for the question and still wasn't ready for it. "It's under review," he said finally, careful, each word chosen like it cost him something. "Thursday's part of that."
"That's not an answer."
"I know." He met her eyes, and for a moment she saw something raw underneath the careful control, something that looked almost like shame, almost like grief.
"It's the only one I've got right now, Josie.
I'm not trying to shut you out. There are things I genuinely can't say yet, not because I don't want to, but because they're not only mine to tell. "
She wanted to push. Every old instinct told her to push, to demand the whole story right now, standing in her half rebuilt shop with frost already forming again on the windows as the temperature dropped with the dying light.
But something in his face, some rawness she hadn't seen from him even three years ago, made her pull the question back instead of forcing it further.
"Okay," she said quietly.
His shoulders loosened, some fraction of tension releasing that she hadn't fully registered until it was gone. "Thank you," he said, and it carried the same weight as it had the day before, gratitude for a small mercy he clearly hadn't expected to receive.
He left a few minutes later, later than usual, the two of them standing a beat too long in the doorway before he finally made himself walk to the truck.
Josie stood in the quiet after he'd gone, watching her own breath fog in the cold air, and allowed herself, for the first time since he'd stepped out of that truck three mornings ago, to smile at something he'd said, alone, with no one there to see it and nothing to prove by hiding it.
Upstairs, later, she sat by her own frosted window with a mug of tea going cold in her hands, and let herself think, properly, about what she'd just done.
She had asked the question she'd been circling for three days, and instead of an answer she'd gotten a plea for patience, and instead of walking away from that plea the way the old, armored version of her would have, she had granted it.
She turned the decision over in her mind the way she used to turn over a stubborn bolt, testing for give, and found, uncomfortably, that some part of her trusted him already, before she had any real reason to.
That trust felt dangerous. It felt like exactly the kind of quiet, unearned faith that had cost her everything three years ago.
But it also felt, if she was honest with the version of herself that only existed at this hour, alone, with frost creeping up the glass, like something closer to hope than fear, and she hadn't let herself feel hope about this man in a very long time.
She fell asleep eventually with the mug still in her hand, and dreamed, for the first time in three years, of something other than water.