3. Maple
three
Maple
I push him for a real number on Wednesday morning because I am a project manager and I have been avoiding this one since day one.
He's across the kitchen table from me with his notebook — handwritten, small precise columns, a shorthand I've mostly decoded by now. I've made coffee. Rivet is under my chair. I stopped commenting on this yesterday.
He slides the estimate across the table.
I know how to read a trades estimate. I know what labour costs, what materials run, what margin looks like.
What he's handed me is deliberately low — not incompetently, elegantly.
Hours listed as partial when I watched him work them in full.
A materials line with no markup. Work I know happened because I was there when it happened, absent entirely.
I look up. He's watching me read.
"This is low," I say.
"It's accurate."
"It's accurate for part of the work."
He holds my gaze. Says nothing.
I decide not to have this fight today. "I'll have the draw schedule ready by Friday." He nods. We leave it there.
I find him on his lunch break an hour later — I have a pipe question, a real one, not an excuse.
Not in the parlour. Not in the library. He's in the small back parlour, the room I haven't touched yet, still Ruth's furniture under drop cloths, the winter light coming in cold and low.
He's in the window seat with his notebook open in his lap, cap pushed back, completely still.
He doesn't hear me.
I stand in the doorway and take a moment I shouldn't take.
He looks entirely different like this — not the careful professional, not the man who goes quiet when his hands are on a problem.
Just a person, alone, being privately himself.
I'm about to announce myself when I catch a glimpse of the notebook page.
Not figures. Not pipe measurements.
Photographs. Small ones, tucked into the pages — Rivet as a puppy, all ears and indignation. Wrench asleep in the sun with his tongue out. Penny in a knitted orange vest looking deeply unimpressed. Candid, unposed, the kind of photos you take because you couldn't help it.
He hears me.
The notebook closes. He stands. The competent version reassembles in the time it takes him to turn around.
"Pipe question?" he says.
"Yes." I ask it. He answers. We're professional.
But I saw it. The man who documents pipe measurements in precise shorthand keeps photos of his dogs tucked between the pages like they're something worth carrying around. Like they're the best thing in his day and he knows it.
I go back to the kitchen and I stand at the counter and I feel it settle into my chest, warm and inconvenient.
Rivet, who has been asleep by the radiator, gets up and trots into the back parlour. I hear Nash's low voice saying her name. Then quiet.
Then Rivet trots back out, looks at me, and goes back to sleep.
I have the distinct impression I've just been reported on.
A few minutes later, Nash appears in the kitchen doorway. He looks at me. I look at him. Something sits in the air between us that neither of us has named.
He crosses the room.
He stops in front of me close enough that I have to look up, and he looks down at me for one long moment — reading me, the way he reads everything he's about to take responsibility for.
Then he kisses me.
Not tentative. Not a question. His thumb at my jaw, his other hand at my waist, and he kisses me like he's thought about it and now that he's doing it there's no reason not to be thorough. He's warm and solid and certain and I get my hand in the front of his coveralls and hold on.
When he pulls back I'm breathing through my mouth. He isn't, which is unfair.
We look at each other. Rivet makes a small satisfied sound from her spot by the radiator without opening her eyes.
And that's when it arrives — not doubt exactly, but clarity.
The particular kind that comes from having been wrong before in a way that cost you everything.
I came here to build something on my own terms. Entirely mine.
Eight months out of Toronto, eight months out of Troy, and I am still checking every choice at the door: is this what I want, or is this what I've been positioned to want?
Nash is not Troy. I know that. But my ability to read that distinction clearly — in a back parlour, two days in — is not something I trust yet.
The distance between kind and controlling is a question of degree, not direction, and I would like more than two days and one very good kiss before I find out which side I'm standing on.
His hand is still on my jaw. He's watching me think.
"I need—" I start.
"Yeah," he says. Drops his hand. Steps back. Clean and uncomplicated, no argument, just space because I need it.
I go.
Back to the south window, the mountain, the kitchen I've been building for four months. My heart is doing something I don't have a category for.
That evening I bake. Brown sugar pound cake. Then lemon curd because there are lemons going soft. I stand at the counter with flour on my wrists and think about what I want and what I'm afraid of and whether those are the same thing.
Nash finishes up and leaves. The front door opens and closes. The truck starts.
Rivet doesn't follow him.
She trots into the kitchen and sits on my foot and looks up at me with her dark steady eyes — the way she looks at Nash when she's decided something is true and is waiting for everyone else to catch up.
"It's complicated," I tell her.
She puts her chin on my knee.
Outside, the truck lights sweep across the kitchen window and disappear down the road.
I bake until midnight. It doesn't help.