Chapter 36
The drive to Finley Point took twenty-two minutes.
Cole knew because he counted. He’d promised his cardiologist he’d stay away from work, but he was only going to look at the site. There was a difference, and he intended to hold the line between them.
He parked at the far end of the cleared lot and slowly got out of his truck.
His body was still reminding him that he wasn’t fully healed.
A low ache spread across his chest when he moved too quickly, and a heaviness in his legs on cold mornings.
Even though he didn’t like it, he was getting used to listening to his body.
He stopped halfway to the site. The concrete footings for the main building were in and cured, and the framing crews had begun laying out the sill plates along what would eventually become the great room’s east wall.
Two months ago, this had all been raw grade and survey stakes.
Now it had shape. The bones of something were beginning to appear in the ground.
Even at this early stage, he could read the structure of the buildings the way other people read a page.
The proportions were right. The setbacks from the shoreline were correct.
When the great room eventually rose here, the lake would fill the south windows from corner to corner.
He stood and looked at it for a while.
Noah appeared from the direction of the equipment yard, carrying a clipboard and a coffee. When he spotted Cole, his expression changed from surprise to warmth.
“You drove yourself,” Noah said without any preamble.
“I’m allowed to drive.”
Noah smiled. “I didn’t say you weren’t.” He fell into step beside Cole, not pushing him toward anything or steering him away from anything. Just present. That was Noah’s particular skill, and Cole had never fully appreciated it until recently.
They walked around the edge of the site without doing a lot of talking. Cole stopped to study the layout at the northwest corner, then again when his body needed a few minutes to rest.
A voice came from the direction of the material storage area. “Hey, Cole.”
Dave McGuire was coming toward them across the cleared grade, his work boots raising a little dust on the dry subsoil. He was a big man, somewhere north of sixty, with the kind of handshake that let you know immediately where you stood.
He extended his hand and Cole took it.
“Good to see you back on your feet,” Dave said. He wasn’t a man who added words to fill a moment. The sentence came out plain, without ceremony, and was all the more genuine for it.
“Good to be on them,” Cole told him.
Dave glanced across the foundation work, then back at Cole.
“My crew’s been talking about this project.
I want you to know that.” He scratched the back of his neck, appearing to pick his words rather than reach for easy ones.
“They know what’s been done to delay things.
They know what it’s cost you. But they come in every morning, and they give it everything they’ve got, because they believe this resort is going to be something the area needs.
” He paused. “I thought you should hear that.”
What Dave had said meant a great deal to Cole. “Thank you. That means more than you know.”
Dave nodded once, then turned to Noah. “Can I talk to you for a minute? One of our suppliers is having difficulty getting another shipment of steel to us.”
Noah looked at Cole.
“You go,” Cole told him. “I’m not going far.”
“Call me if you need anything.”
After Noah left with Dave, Cole walked slowly along the footings. There was nothing rushed in their construction. The anchor bolts were plumb. The form lines were clean. Whoever had been setting the pace out here during the past four weeks had done it with care.
It was easy, when a project ran into the kind of trouble this one had, to believe that something essential had been damaged.
That the setbacks had altered the nature of the thing being built.
Cole had felt that during the worst of the permit suspension, when he’d been sitting in a hospital bed trying to work out how much of what he’d started could be salvaged.
He moved carefully along the south edge, where the view corridor would open toward the lake, and stopped again at the corner where the great room would turn into the entrance hall.
He crouched, which cost him something, and pressed two fingers to the top of the concrete footing.
It was cold and hard and exactly as it should be.
He straightened up and turned to face the lake.
Flathead was doing what it always did—brilliant in places, dark in others, the surface shifting with the light and the breeze in a way that never repeated itself. He’d looked at the water from this exact point perhaps a hundred times.
It did not get ordinary.
He walked the long way back toward the parking area, taking the route that swung along the northern edge of the site. He hadn’t planned to go there, but his feet made the decision before he fully registered it.
The ground where the storage shed had stood was bare.
Someone had cleared the remaining debris and graded the area level. New grass seed had been spread across the scarred soil, and a few green threads were already beginning to push through. In a month, there would be nothing left to mark what had happened here.
Cole stood at the edge of it, thinking about his grandfather. Not about the end, he’d spent enough of his life returning to that, but about what Earl Morrison had built over the years.
A fishing cabin that still had the key under the bottom step. A chess game played slowly over several winter days. A way of looking at the world that had shaped Cole more than any architecture school or development firm.
His grandfather had built things and then left them behind when life moved him elsewhere. Not because he hadn’t cared, but because his circumstances had always carried him forward before he could put down roots in any one place. Cole had spent thirty-five years doing the same thing.
He looked where the shed had been and thought about what this ground would become. A terrace, eventually. Somewhere guests would sit on summer evenings with their drinks and their conversations, looking toward the lake without knowing anything about what had stood here before.
That seemed right.
Cole turned when he heard footsteps on the gravel behind him.
“I’ve just heard from the insurance company,” Noah said excitedly. “They’ve settled the claim for the full amount. The money will be in our account within the week.”
Cole’s eyes widened. “Are you sure they’re paying all of it?”
“Excluding our excess, every last cent.”
Cole exhaled. The full claim had been in doubt since the meeting with Randall Voss, when the security protocol question had been raised. Madeline had been working on it, sending documents and arguments and revised assessments. Cole had told himself not to count on the outcome until there was one.
Now there was. “Call Madeline. She’ll want to know,” Cole said.
“Already texted her. She’s relieved.”
So was Cole. “We’ll need to let our investors know. The bank wanted us to call them, too.”
Noah placed his hand on Cole’s shoulder. “I can do all that. Go and tell Julie. You know she’ll take all the credit for pushing the insurance company to review their decision, don’t you.”
Cole smiled. “I wouldn’t expect anything less, especially when her articles helped us. I’ll call her, then come and see you before I leave.”
Noah nodded. “Sounds good.”
Cole walked back to his truck and picked up his phone. Julie answered on the second ring.
“You went to the site,” she said.
“This isn’t a video call. How did you know?”
Julie laughed. “I know you almost as well as I know myself. You’ve been trying to find any excuse to go to Finley Point for the last week. I’m just surprised you stayed away this long.”
“You kept me busy,” Cole told her. A pair of geese flew low over the water, following the shoreline north. “I promised the doctor I was only going to look.”
“And did you?”
“Mostly.” He paused. “The foundation work is further along than I expected. Dave McGuire told me his crew has been giving it everything.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“It surprised me,” Cole said. “Maybe it shouldn’t have.”
A moment of silence came through the line, the easy kind.
“Noah just heard from the insurers,” Cole told Julie. “They’ve settled the whole claim.”
He heard the small intake of breath on Julie’s end. “That’s amazing, Cole.”
“I know.”
“It’s everything you could have hoped for.”
“It’s almost everything,” he said. The police had arrested Harmon, but there were other people who worked for him that were just as dodgy.
Julie sighed. “My final article comes out this week. I don’t see how the Sargeson Group will continue once their shareholders realize how corrupt their senior management team has become.”
“I hope you’re right.” Cole rubbed his forehead. As well as telling him not to work, his doctor had told him to keep his stress levels to a minimum. Talking about the Sargeson Group made his blood pressure spike.
“Do you want to have dinner with me tonight?” Cole asked Julie. “After all the home baking that’s come my way, I thought I’d cook something myself.”
“That could be interesting,” Julie said with a laugh. “What did you have in mind?”
Cole grinned. “Mac and cheese, the healthy kind.”
“I didn’t know there was a healthy version,” Julie teased. “I’ll bring a salad and some dessert. Does five-thirty suit you?”
It was perfect, in more ways than one. “I’ll see you then.”
Before Cole joined Noah in their temporary office, he closed his eyes and thought about all the good people he’d met in Sapphire Bay.
Maybe that was what had kept his grandfather here for more years than he could count. And maybe, Cole thought, that’s what would keep him here.