9. Demo Day
Demo Day
The hammers started before eight.
The first real demo day felt different from the walk-throughs.
Now there were trucks in the drive, voices over radios, the rhythmic clang of tools—an audience of motion she hadn’t had in weeks.
Cole moved among them easily, professional, deliberate, the kind of man who somehow made chaos look organized.
Surrounded by his crew, he was all business, which should have made it easier for her to be the same. And it did. Mostly.
Jenna had forgotten how loud construction could be when you weren’t the one running it.
She stood at the kitchen sink listening to the thud-thud-thud from next door and the low voices of men she didn’t know.
The bakery had always been laughter and music and the clatter of dishes.
This clatter sounded like… tearing down.
She checked the time. 7:52 a.m. Cole had texted her earlier:
COLE: Crew’s here. Starting on the exterior and flooring. I’ll knock before I come through the house.
COLE: Don’t freak out if it sounds like the world is ending.
Too late.
She pulled her hair into a clip and headed for the back door just as someone knocked—two knuckles, polite, not the bang-bang of a worker.
She opened it to find Cole on the step, ball cap turned backward, tape measure hooked to his jeans, that worn work shirt stretched across his chest like it had given up trying to contain him.
“Morning,” he said, his voice was calm enough that the noise behind him didn’t feel like chaos. “We’re going to open up some of the floor in the front. I wanted to let you see it before we start pulling anything you might cry over.”
For a second, she forgot how to form words. Her eyes traced the line of his forearm as he gestured toward the bakery, the faint tan on his skin where a watch must’ve sat. There was nothing delicate about him, but everything about the way he moved was careful.
He caught her looking. Not a smirk, just a quick flicker of awareness that sent heat crawling up her neck.
His hand went to the brim of his hat, tugging it a little lower, that shy gesture men made when they weren’t sure if they should grin or apologize.
“Appreciated,” she managed, the word catching slightly in her throat. Trying to decide if she had actually been biting her lip.
They crossed over to The Blue Cypress. The front door was propped open with a tool bag. Two of his guys were already pulling up the warped boards near the display cases; another was outside examining the fascia. The place smelled like sawdust and old sugar.
“Morning, Ms. Hart,” one of the guys called.
“Jenna’s fine,” she said automatically.
Cole gestured toward the corner. “We’ll replace anything soft, then run new transitions. The good news is, it’s not as bad as I thought from the estimate.”
“That’s rare,” Jenna said. “Contractors never tell you good news.”
“I’m special,” he said, straight-faced.
She rolled her eyes, but the smile was there anyway.
He turned toward the back. “I’ve got one guy doing a walk of the roofline. The soffit on the west side is rough, but fixable. Shouldn’t blow your budget.”
“Good,” Jenna said. “Because I just spent a chunk of it on teenage freedom.”
He laughed, “She liked the car?”
“She hasn’t come home yet, so I’m assuming she loved it.”
Right on cue, Emmie’s black Civic slid into the driveway like it had always belonged there.
Music pulsed distantly through the closed windows; the engine cut off.
A second later, Emmie walked in through the front door, ponytail high, sunshine on her face in a way Jenna hadn’t thought was possible this soon after the funeral.
It was the first night Emmie had spent away, not with family, since her mother died.
Just a normal sleepover, something a sixteen-year-old should’ve been able to do without the weight of loss hanging over it.
Then Emmie saw the open floor, the men, and the tools, and her smile faltered. “Oh.”
Jenna moved toward her. “Hey. They started this morning. Remember?”
“Yeah,” Emmie said slowly, eyes moving over everything. “I just . . . didn’t think it would be so loud.”
Cole, picking up on the tension without being asked, wiped his hands on a rag and walked over. “Morning, Emmie.”
She nodded, “Hey.”
“We’re just opening things up,” he said gently. “Nothing’s changing without you two saying so.”
That disarmed her for a moment. How quickly he’d read what she hadn’t said out loud. Jenna smiled. “You wanted the fans gone.”
“Yeah,” Emmie said, softer this time. “I did.”
Cole gave her a small nod and went back to the workroom, his crew instinctively lowering their volume a notch.
When she was gone, Jenna looked at him. “You’re good.”
He shrugged. “It sounds like you two made decisions together. I’m not about to steamroll that.”
“Thank you.”
He tipped his head toward the back. “Come tell me what you want to do with the kitchen wall.”
They spent the next hour that way, moving through spaces, making choices.
He’d point at a cabinet, and she’d imagine what Grace would have wanted.
He’d quote a price for new light fixtures, and she’d mentally subtract it from the “leftover” column in her folder.
It felt less like gutting a place and more like waking it up.
Her phone buzzed once. It was a follow-up from Atlanta.
HANNAH: Assets listed. Mark’s handling two projects. Accountant said they can file final returns when you’re ready.
JENNA: You’re a lifesaver. Severance will hit this week.
Then she slid the phone face down. When she looked up, Cole was watching her.
“You really did shut it all down,” he said, not unkindly. “Your life up there.”
She blinked. Word travels fast, she thought, but out loud she just said, “Small town.”
He smiled gently. “Small town,” he agreed.
Outside, a drill whirred. One of the guys called, “Hey, Cole? You want us to start clearing the wall with the menu on it?”
Cole glanced at Jenna. “Front wall?”
“Yeah.”
He squinted past her. “We can pull it and patch. Won’t take long.”
Jenna followed his gaze. The chalkboard with Grace’s last specials still hung there. Two weeks old now, but frozen forever. She felt something tug in her chest.
Grace had always written the specials, even when they were teenagers helping out after school. Her handwriting was neat and looping, every letter perfectly spaced like a recipe measured by heart. Jenna had tried once, but the words always slanted uphill, too hurried, too uneven—too much like her.
So Grace kept that job, and Jenna never minded. It made sense then, and somehow, it still did.
“Leave it for now,” she said. “We’ll decide later.”
“Got it,” Cole called back to his guy, then looked at her again. “We’ll work around it.”
“Thanks.”
He didn’t ask why. He didn’t need to.
By noon, the bakery was officially “under renovation.” Tools everywhere. Floor opened up. One of the ceiling fans on the ground, looking pleased to be retired.
Travis found them, pulling his gloves from his hands, with a deep-set frown. “Hey, boss,” he said to Cole. “We pulled up the subfloor by the bakery entry. Looks like the damage goes all the way to the joists.”
Cole walked over and crouched beside the opening Travis had pointed out, running his hand along the edge of the plywood that remained. He didn’t rush, didn’t bark orders—just studied it, thoughtful.
“Okay,” he said finally. “We’ll open this up in sections, work it by board, four feet at a time, and check how far it runs. If it’s isolated, we’ll sister the joist and patch. If not, we reframe the corner. Don’t pull up more than you have to, and make a decision from there.”
Travis nodded, already moving. “Got it.”
Jenna watched the exchange from a few feet away. No panic. No grandstanding. Just calm logic, step-by-step—the same rhythm she used when she’d run her own teams.
It was strangely attractive to watch someone else carry that kind of certainty.
* * *
When the crew broke for lunch, Jenna found Cole at the tailgate of his truck, jotting numbers onto a clipboard. His shirt clung to his shoulders, darker at the collar where sweat had dampened it.
“Please tell me you plan to keep your shirt on for the rest of this project,” she said before her filter could catch up.
He looked up, one eyebrow lifting, a grin already forming. “Yearbook?”
Her stomach dropped. “What?”
“Page eighty-three. Construction class feature. You found it, didn’t you?”
She opened her mouth, closed it, then groaned. “Oh, my God.”
He laughed, that warm, low sound that always felt too close. “Don’t worry. I looked you up, too.”
That stopped her. “You what?”
He tapped his pen against the clipboard. “Yearbook staff, right? Picture by the bleachers. You looked like you had opinions about everyone’s captions.”
“I did,” she said, half mortified, half amused that he’d looked her up too.
“That’s not the only thing I found. Turns out you’ve done this before,” he said, gesturing toward the gutted bakery behind them. “Construction. Managing chaos.”
She forced a small smile, but something twisted in her chest. The strange collision of the life she’d built in Georgia and the one she’d come home to in Florida. The lines between them were starting to blur, and she wasn’t sure she liked it.
She changed the subject fast. “When are you going to have those light fixture options for Emmie to look at?”
“I’ll have them over tonight.”
Cole turned, squinting up at the house, searching for something to fill the silence. “Thinking we match the bakery trim to this blue. Keep it consistent.”
Something in the suggestion caught in her chest, sharp and unexpected.
Brooks had painted those shutters, and they’d teased him relentlessly about the colors not matching.
The colors were never going to match. The paint on the bakery was a million years old even then, and none of them had the time, money, or manpower to repaint all the bakery trim, so he matched it as best he could, but they gave him hell about it, because that’s what they did.
“Yeah,” she said finally, her voice tight. “Match the blue.”
He studied her for a moment but didn’t push. “You got it, boss.” The word hit her harder than it should have.
Boss.
That was what everyone in Atlanta had called her—on job sites, in meetings, in a life that had felt so far away from this one until this moment. No one called her that here.
She didn’t know how he could have known what it meant to her or if he was teasing her. But somehow, Cole Bennett just knew.
By afternoon, professionalism had become armor. With his crew watching, Cole was the picture of composure: precise, courteous, focused. It made it easier for Jenna to mirror him, to keep her tone brisk and her hands in her pockets instead of tracing the air between them.
When the others drifted outside to load equipment, he stayed back to double-check a measurement. They ended up standing shoulder-to-shoulder again, close enough for Jenna to feel the warmth coming off him.
“Your crew’s efficient,” she said, low enough that only he could hear.
“So’s the client,” he murmured back.
She smiled despite herself. “Are you always this charming on demo day?”
“Only when the drywall cooperates.”
She couldn’t believe she had said that. She called the man charming. It was nothing, really— banter, professional, harmless. Right? But when someone called his name from outside, she felt the loss of the space between them like a physical thing.
Cole wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “We’ll wrap for today. I’ll get you the updated timeline tonight. I’ll send the light fixtures and paint swatches, too.”
“Okay.”
He looked toward the house. “You need me to walk that one more time? Make sure we didn’t miss anything?”
She shook her head. “No. I know what we’re doing.”
“Of course you do,” he said with a wink.
She should’ve left it there. Let him cross the yard, get in his truck, and drive away without making this feel like something more than a contractor walking a job site.
But every cell in her body was screaming to say, Actually, yeah, let’s walk it one more time, like she was asking him up for coffee after a date.
Perfect, she thought. Now I sound like a construction groupie.
She caught movement in the window. Biscuit, perched on the sill, staring out at her like a tiny, furry therapist waiting for her to make better choices.
Her stomach twisted. “Don’t look at me like that.”
The truck engine turned over, and she realized she was still gripping the porch railing like it might stop her from doing something stupid. Professional, she reminded herself.
Professional and composed.
But as the sound of his tires faded down the street, all she could think of was how much she already wanted the next ‘walk-through’.
* * *
The noise lingered even after the last truck pulled away. Jenna could still feel the thrum of saws and hammers, and the pulse of something being torn apart on purpose. The bakery looked hollowed out, but in the familiar way that things always were before they could come alive again.
Inside the house, the air felt too still. She dropped her keys on the counter and stared at the couch. It had become her default place, safe and temporary, an easy way not to commit. But the longer she stood there, the more it felt like avoidance.
She hesitated outside the doorway before she could talk herself out of it.
Grace’s room still held a delicate trace of vanilla and ghosts.
The same quilt lay folded at the foot of the bed.
The same stack of paperbacks on the nightstand.
Jenna sat on the edge of the mattress, the springs sighing beneath her, and felt the ache of realizing how long she’d been living half-moved-in.
She didn’t cry. Not exactly. Just let herself breathe in the space until it stopped feeling like trespassing.
When Biscuit hopped onto the bed beside her, circling once before settling, she reached out and scratched behind his ear. He purred, low and steady, the sound filling the room in a way silence never could.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket.
COLE: Sending over the revised timeline.
Efficient. Professional. Exactly what she’d told herself she wanted. She typed Got it. Looks good. Then deleted it.
Then typed it again.
The words stared back at her, too simple, too final. She set the phone face down and let the screen go dark.
The house had settled into that deep, nighttime stillness that only old places knew. Even Biscuit had gone quiet somewhere nearby, his small, steady presence the only proof she wasn’t entirely alone.
She changed into an old T-shirt and slipped beneath the quilt. The sheets were cool. It wasn’t comfort, not exactly, but it was close enough.
Her last thought before sleep was that maybe this was what moving forward really looked like. Not rebuilding everything at once. Just finally choosing a room.