CHAPTER 8
Beckett
Thursday morning. I was in the workshop by six.
I hadn't slept well. There wasn't a comfortable way to describe why, so I didn't try. I got up, made coffee, left a second mug on the counter where she'd find it, and came out here to do the thing I could actually control.
The walnut stock was waiting on the bench — four lengths I'd rough-cut yesterday, already squared on two faces, still needing dimensioning before I could start layout.
The arch design was simple. Two uprights, a gentle curve at the top, mortise-and-tenon joinery with a through-wedged detail at the shoulders because Willa had mentioned wanting to see the bones of it.
Ceremony faces east. Four-o'clock light from the left. The walnut would glow.
I ran my hand down the first board. Tight grain, good figure, one small knot near the base that I'd orient toward the back. My thumb found the surface and I pressed in — testing density, mapping the structure underneath. Wood tells you things if you know how to listen.
The problem was that I already knew what I was going to think about while I worked, and it wasn't wood.
She laughed, and I put down what I was working on and just listened.
I'd said that in front of forty people. In front of my mother, who was already picking out emotional real estate. In front of Mae, who was already on the phone to half the town by the time we hit the driveway. In front of Nora's family, her sister, her cousin with the camera.
I'd said it because it was true and because there was no invented version I could have offered that would have survived the scrutiny of that circle without a mismatch someone would have caught.
Nora's birthday? I didn't know it. Our first date?
Didn't exist. Any specific where-were-you-when claim would have been instantly verifiable by anyone who'd seen me in town that week.
So I'd told the truth. And the truth had landed like a thing with weight and texture and consequence, and now it was Thursday and she was somewhere in my house and the spare-room door had been closed when I passed it, and the electrician was coming at nine to look at the cottage panel, and the arch needed to be done by tomorrow morning for Friday's rehearsal setup, and none of these facts could be stacked in any order that made last night smaller.
I clamped the first upright to the bench and started marking the tenon shoulders.
Pencil line, square, knife wall. The repetition helped.
Marking gauge set to a third of the stock width.
Scribe both faces. Flip. Scribe again. My hands knew this work and my body settled into it — the rhythm of measuring, the focus narrowing to the line and the edge and the cut.
By seven-fifteen I had both uprights dimensioned and the tenons marked. I was setting up the mortise jig when I heard the side door open.
Nora came into the workshop carrying two mugs.
She was wearing cutoff shorts and a T-shirt that might have been mine — I didn't own many, so the options were limited, but this one was faded gray and too big in the shoulders and I'd never seen her wear it before, and the sight of it hit me in a place I hadn't braced for.
Her hair was still damp. No makeup. The morning light through the workshop windows caught the side of her face, the line of her throat, the collarbones visible above the neckline of my shirt.
She set one mug on the bench, away from the wood. "You left before the coffee was done."
"I wanted to get started."
"At six?"
"Arch has to be finished by tomorrow."
She looked at the walnut stock. Her fingers hovered over the nearest board but didn't touch — she'd learned that from watching me yesterday, and the fact that she'd absorbed the protocol without being told sent something warm and inconvenient through my chest.
"Can I help?"
I should have said no. Not because she wasn't capable, but because the workshop was the only space I had left where I could regulate, and she was standing in it wearing my shirt with wet hair and the residue of everything that had happened last night still unresolved between us.
"You can hold the other end when I need to flip the stock."
She nodded. Picked up her coffee. Sat on the stool near the wall.
We worked. Or I worked, and she watched, and every few minutes I needed a second pair of hands and she was there — holding the far end of the board while I ran it through the marking gauge, steadying the upright while I chiseled the mortise walls, sweeping sawdust with the short brush when the bench got cluttered.
She didn't fill the silence. She didn't make it weird.
She was just present in the space, and the space was different because of it.
The problem was the proximity. Not the kind we'd been managing all week — the public kind, the performed kind, the hand-on-the-back-for-the-audience kind.
This was private. Nobody was watching. There was no reason for her to be here except that she wanted to be, and there was no reason for me to let her stay except that I wanted her to stay, and the gap between those two facts and the arrangement we were supposedly running was now too wide to cover with any rule I'd ever set.
By eight-thirty I had the first mortise roughed out and was paring the walls clean.
She came to hold the piece while I worked, and her hip was against the bench edge and her arm was inches from mine and I could smell the soap she'd used — mine, probably, since her things were still limited — mixed with sawdust and something underneath that was just her skin in the morning.
I lost the line. Literally. My chisel drifted a thirty-second off the mark and I had to stop, reset, find the wall again.
She noticed. Of course she noticed. She noticed everything.
"You okay?"
"Fine."
"Because you just stopped mid-cut and stared at a piece of wood like it personally wronged you."
"The grain shifted. It does that."
"Is that what happened last night? The grain shifted?"
I set the chisel down. Looked at her.
She was trying to do the thing she always did — the fast-talking, bright-surfaced, keep-it-light thing. But her eyes were serious and her hands were gripping the edge of the bench and she wasn't smiling.
"We should talk about it," she said.
"Which part?"
"The part where you told a bonfire full of our families that you've been listening to me through the wall for two weeks.
And the part where I confirmed it by admitting I've been cataloging your coffee habits.
And the part where Mae definitely called your mother before we got home, because your mother texted me a heart emoji at eleven-fifteen last night, Beckett.
A heart emoji. Your mother has my phone number and she sent me a heart. "
"She has everyone's phone number."
"That's not the point."
"I heard the point."
"The point is —" She pushed off the bench.
Took a step, turned, came back. Pacing. The way she always did.
"The point is that what we said last night was real, and everyone heard it, and now the story isn't something we're managing.
It's something that's managing us. And tomorrow is the rehearsal, and Saturday is the wedding, and I don't know how to walk this back and I don't —"
She stopped. Her breathing was uneven. Her fingers were pulling at the hem of the shirt — my shirt — and there was sawdust on her forearm and her bottom lip was caught between her teeth and I watched her stand there trying to hold herself together in my workshop at eight-thirty in the morning and the restraint I'd been running on since Tuesday night finally hit a wall.
"I don't know how to walk it back either."
She looked at me.
"I don't want to walk it back," I said.
The workshop was quiet. Just the sound of the fan I'd set up to move air, and the distant hum of the house, and her breathing.
"Beckett."
"That's not a line. I'm not performing."
"I know you're not. That's what's scaring me."
"That's why this is bad."
She pressed her palms flat on the bench. She was looking at the walnut stock, at the partially cut joint, at the chisel I'd set down. Not at me.
"If we do this," she said, "it's not the arrangement anymore."
"It hasn't been the arrangement for two days."
"But right now, in this room, if we — it changes what happens Saturday. It changes what happens after Saturday. It's not a thing we can take back."
"I know what it changes."
"Do you?" She looked at me now. Straight on. Her eyes were bright and fierce and scared. "Because I have a very long track record of wanting things that are bad for me, and I need to know that this isn't me doing that again."
I could have said something careful. Something that kept the distance. I could have picked up the chisel and gone back to the mortise and let the moment bleed out into the safety of work and schedule and the clean logic of a building project.
Instead I closed the gap. Two steps. I stopped in front of her with enough space that she could move if she wanted to move.
"This isn't that," I said.
"You don't know that."
"I know that I've been thinking about you since you came home.
I know that the kiss at the Wisteria wasn't a favor.
I know that every morning this week I make a second cup of coffee and put it exactly where you'll find it because I want you to stay in the room with me for ten more minutes.
And I know that last night I told the truth because I couldn't not, and I'm standing here now because I couldn't not do that either. "
Her breath caught. I heard it — the small, sharp sound of something giving way.
"That's a lot of words for you," she whispered.
"Felt necessary."
She kissed me.