CHAPTER 6
Beckett
The arch stock was in the back of the workshop — two walnut planks I'd been holding for a credenza that kept getting pushed down the schedule.
Good grain. Straight enough to joint without fighting them.
I ran my hand along the edge of the first board and felt the ripple of figure under the rough surface.
Too nice for a wedding arch that would stand outside for one ceremony, but I'd already said I'd do it, and I wasn't going to build it out of pine.
It was after two. Lunch at the Harts' had ended an hour ago, and the rest of the afternoon was clear — no wedding tasks until tonight, when Willa had texted something about a bonfire at Eli's family's place.
Nora was upstairs in the spare room, doing something on her laptop that she'd described as "life admin" in a voice that meant don't ask.
The house was quiet. The workshop was quieter.
I set the first plank on the bench and started marking measurements. Four-post freestanding frame, bridle joints at the top, chamfered edges if I had time. Simple. Clean. The kind of project I could think through with my hands and not have to sit with whatever was building in the rest of me.
Because something was building.
I'd known it at the walkthrough, standing in that field while her mother talked about us like we were a fact she could rely on.
I'd known it at lunch, when Nora leaned into me for Theo's camera and her shoulder touched my arm and I'd had to concentrate on the grain of the kitchen table to keep my breathing even.
I'd known it in the truck on the way home, when she'd sat in the passenger seat with her knees angled toward the door and said, almost to herself, Thursday. Two more nights.
She'd said it like she was counting down. I couldn't tell toward what.
The bandsaw took the first plank to rough length.
I switched to the jointer, running the face flat, watching the blade take clean passes.
The smell of walnut filled the shop — warm, slightly bitter, familiar.
I'd spent most of my twenties in this room, learning what happened when you stopped forcing material to be something it wasn't. Wood told you what it wanted to do. You just had to pay attention.
Nora was harder to read than walnut.
Not because she was closed off. The opposite.
She was so fast, so visible, so constantly managing her own surface that the real tells happened underneath — the half-second pause before she smiled at her mother, the way her voice dropped when she said something that was actually true, the way she'd pressed her phone facedown on the table at lunch when Theo mentioned Mae's quote.
She ran the optics. She always ran the optics.
But every now and then something got past the filter, and those were the moments that made my hands feel wrong when they weren't near her.
I set the jointed plank aside and pulled the second one onto the bench.
The cottage was still down. June had confirmed Thursday at the earliest for the electrician, and even then the floors needed another day.
Which meant Nora was here through Friday at a minimum.
Three more mornings of her hair products next to my soap.
Three more nights of hearing her move behind the spare-room door — quiet, careful, like she was trying not to take up space in a house that was already rearranging itself around her.
Last night I'd been in the kitchen past midnight, working on a cut list for a different project, and I'd heard her come out of the spare room.
She went to the bathroom, and then she stood in the hallway for a few seconds, and I could feel her deciding whether to come downstairs.
She didn't. The door clicked shut, and I stood there with a pencil behind my ear and my hand flat on a piece of paper I hadn't written anything on.
The shop door opened.
Nora stood in the doorway in a white T-shirt and cutoff shorts, barefoot on the concrete threshold, her hair pulled up in something messy that exposed her neck. She was holding two glasses of water.
"I heard power tools," she said. "Figured you were either building the arch or disposing of evidence."
"Arch."
She stepped inside and looked around. I watched her take in the room — the tool wall, the bench, the stacks of lumber against the far side, the half-finished bookcase frame on the assembly table.
Her eyes moved over everything with that quick, cataloging attention she usually aimed at social situations, but here it landed differently.
Like she was reading a space that didn't have an audience.
"This is where you disappear to," she said.
"I don't disappear."
"You definitely disappear." She set one glass on the bench, away from the wood. "Willa texted. Bonfire at Eli's parents' place tonight. Seven thirty."
"I saw."
"So that's — both families again. Plus the bridal party. Plus whoever Eli's parents invite, which, based on patterns, will be half the county."
"Probably."
She leaned against the door frame. "You're remarkably calm about being perpetually observed."
"I grew up here."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got."
She watched me feed the second plank through the jointer. I could feel her attention on my hands, specific and quiet, the same way I could feel a board's grain direction by running my fingers over it before cutting.
"What kind of wood is that?" she asked.
"Walnut."
"For a one-day arch?"
"It'll last longer than a day."
"You're building a permanent arch for a wedding you got dragged into by a fake girlfriend."
I stopped the jointer and looked at her. She was backlit by the workshop door, and the late-afternoon light caught the side of her face and turned her eyes this particular shade of amber I hadn't seen before. Or hadn't let myself look at long enough to notice.
"I wasn't dragged," I said.
Something shifted in her expression. Small. A flicker behind the composure that she covered by picking up her water glass and taking a sip.
"Can I watch?" she asked.
"Yeah."
She pulled a stool from the corner and sat. The shop was small enough that the stool put her about four feet from the bench. Close enough that when I turned to check a measurement, my line of sight crossed her bare knees.
I went back to work. Marked the bridle-joint cuts on both uprights, set up the tenon jig.
The table saw was loud enough to make conversation impossible while it was running, which should have been a relief.
It wasn't. Because in the gaps between cuts — while I was measuring, checking, adjusting — she was right there, and the silence in those gaps was the kind that has its own weight.
"You do this every day?" she said, during one of the quiet stretches.
"Most days."
"And you like it."
It wasn't a question, but I answered it anyway. "I like making something where, when it's done, you can see every decision you made. Good ones and bad ones. It's all there in the material."
She was quiet for a second. "That sounds terrifying."
"It is, a little."
"But you keep doing it."
"Yeah."
Her mouth curved. Not her performance smile — something smaller, less guarded. "I think that's the most words you've said to me in a row."
"Don't get used to it."
She laughed. The real one — short, caught, the one that came out before she could manage it. I was learning that laugh. I was cataloging it the way I cataloged grain patterns, by feel, by instinct, by the way it changed the temperature of the room.
I fit the first bridle joint and tested it dry. Tight. Clean shoulder. I turned the upright over and checked the second joint.
"Beckett."
I looked up. She was sitting on the stool with her hands wrapped around the water glass, and her face was doing something I hadn't seen before — not defended, not performing, not managing. Just looking at me.
"My mom loves you," she said.
"Your mom is being polite."
"My mom has never been polite a day in her life. She loves you. Willa loves you. Aunt June is already planning what to feed you at Thanksgiving." She paused. "And it's all built on something that isn't real."
The workshop was very quiet. Walnut dust in the air. The smell of linseed oil from the bookcase frame. Her bare feet on the stool rung.
"Is that a problem?" I said. Carefully.
"It's going to be."
I put the upright down. She was right. The walkthrough, the lunch, the group chat, the arch — every thread was pulling tighter, and when the week ended, pulling them loose was going to leave marks on people who hadn't agreed to be part of the performance.
Her mother's face at that table. Willa's voice when she said he's building me an arch.
My mother's hand on Nora's shoulder as we left lunch.
"We said one week," I said.
"I know."
"It's still one week."
"I know that too." She looked down at her water. "I'm just — I didn't think about this part. When I kissed you, I was thinking about me. About not falling apart in front of Tyler and the entire town. I wasn't thinking about my mom texting me that my dad would have liked you."
Her voice cracked on the last word. Not dramatically. Just a fracture line, thin and real.
I wanted to cross the four feet between us.
I wanted to put my hand on the side of her neck and feel her pulse under my thumb and tell her something that would make the fracture close.
I didn't do any of that, because what I wanted and what the situation allowed were two different things, and I was still trying to keep them separate.
"He might have," I said.
She looked up. Her eyes were bright but she wasn't crying. She was holding it, the way she held everything — tight, controlled, visible only if you knew where to look.
"You can't say things like that," she said.
"Why not?"
"Because this isn't —" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. Took a breath. "Because when you say things like that, I can't tell which version I'm in."
The air between us changed. Not hotter. Tighter. Like the room had contracted and the four feet of space between the bench and the stool was suddenly not enough distance to do the job it was supposed to do.
"Which version," I repeated.
"The one where this is an arrangement." She met my eyes. "Or the one where it's not."
I held her gaze. She didn't look away.
I could hear the clock on the workshop wall. I could hear her breathing. I could feel my own pulse in my wrists, heavy, deliberate, the way it got when a piece of work hit a moment where the next cut either saved it or ruined it.
"We should get ready for tonight," I said.
It was the right thing to say. The safe thing. The thing that kept the week intact and the rules in place and the distance between the bench and the stool exactly where it needed to be.
She blinked. And then the composure came back, fast, almost seamless. She straightened on the stool, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and picked up her water glass.
"Right," she said. "Bonfire. More witnesses. More grapes, probably."
"Probably."
She stood up. Walked toward the door. And then she stopped, one hand on the frame, and turned back.
"For the record," she said, "your joints are really tight."
She left before I could answer.
I stood in the workshop with walnut dust on my hands and the ghost of her voice in the room and a bridle joint that was, in fact, really tight, and I understood with complete clarity that the minimal-physical-stuff rule was not going to hold.
Not because either of us would break it on purpose. But because the distance it was supposed to maintain had stopped being physical three conversations ago, and the only thing left between us was the decision to keep pretending it was still working.
I picked up the second upright and marked the next cut.
My hands were steady. The rest of me was not.