4. Nash
four
Nash
I don't sleep well.
I lie in the dark and I think about her hand on the front of my coveralls.
The way she held on. I've been in a lot of houses, close quarters with a lot of people, and I have never once kissed a client in a back parlour while my dog sat on my foot and watched.
I don't do things like that. I'm not built for things like that.
She said I need— and stepped back, and I let her go because it was the right thing and I'd do it again. I haven't stopped thinking about it for twelve hours.
Wrench puts his head on my chest at four in the morning.
"I went too fast," I tell him.
He breathes on me. Patient. Unhelpful.
"She's got enough to deal with."
Rivet, at the foot of the bed, makes a small sound that might be disagreement.
"She stepped away," I say.
Neither dog has anything to say to that. I stare at the ceiling until it's light enough to get up.
I come back on Thursday because the work isn't done and because staying away would make it worse. Professional. I know how to be professional. I've been professional for fifteen years — I can walk through that door and do the job and not think about the back parlour.
She opens the door in a grey dress with her hair down and she meets my eyes for exactly one second before she steps back to let me in. I go to the library. She goes to the kitchen. We find the rhythm of the work and stay in it, and by mid-morning it almost feels like Wednesday didn't happen.
Then I reach past her for the manifold gauge and she goes still, and I go still, and we're six inches apart in the library doorway for a moment that stretches longer than it should.
"Sorry," I say.
"You're fine," she says.
I go back to the manifold. She goes back to her measurements. Rivet sits between us and looks from one face to the other like she's watching a conversation happening just below the range of human hearing.
I'm packing up mid-afternoon when I hear the car.
Silver crossover, rental clean, never been near a logging road. And the man getting out of it.
Good coat. The easy posture of someone who has never had to hurry for anything. He looks up at the house with an expression I've seen before — not appreciation, assessment. Pricing.
I go to the entrance hall.
She's already at the door. Arms folded, chin up. Not how she stands when she's cold or thinking. How she stands when she's waiting for someone to finish.
She sees me over his shoulder. Something moves across her face — quick and complicated — and goes neutral.
"Nash." A beat too careful. "We're just finishing up."
He turns. Files me under not relevant in half a second, extends his hand anyway because his manners are impeccable. "Troy Alderman."
I shake it. "Nash Brennan."
Troy. The name lands somewhere specific.
She said it once, two days ago, on the phone with someone — I heard it through the library door and let it go.
I'm not letting it go now. I can see it in the set of her shoulders, the particular quality of her neutral, the way she's standing in her own doorway like she's been bracing for this longer than today.
"Nash handles the plumbing work," she says. "The house has kept him busy."
"I can imagine." Troy looks up at the original ceiling mouldings with the expression of someone running numbers.
"Incredible bones. Exactly the kind of property the group is interested in — the heritage value alone would anchor the whole portfolio narrative.
" He turns back to Maple and the smile he gives her is different from the one he gave me.
Older. More practiced. Built for her specifically.
"Which is why the offer stands where it does.
We're not lowballing you. We want this to be easy. "
We. Too familiar for a business offer.
"I'll think about it," she says.
"Don't think too long." He says it warmly, which makes it worse.
"Timeline is end of month. After that the group moves to the Vernon property.
" He glances around the entrance hall — the restored staircase, the chandelier she rewired herself, the original tile she's been refinishing on her hands and knees — and there's something proprietary in the look that pulls tight across the back of my neck.
"It'd be a shame to do all this work and not see it through. "
I go to the library.
I crouch over the manifold I already finished and I stay there while his voice carries through the plaster — all that reasonable warmth, all that we want this to be easy for you — and I understand exactly what kind of man he is.
The kind who never had to take anything.
Just kept the offer on the table, kept himself available, and let time and money do the work he should have been doing himself.
He knew she'd run out eventually. He came here because she's close.
The front door closes. I wait five minutes.
She's at the counter with her hands around a mug, not drinking from it. Looking at the window. Her shoulders are held in that particular way — not fine, planning to say she is.
"All balanced," I say. "Shouldn't get cold spots in the library anymore."
"Good." She doesn't turn around. "Thank you, Nash."
I pick up my bag.
Every professional instinct I have says go. The job is done. She didn't ask for anything else. I already kissed her, and she stepped back, and I have no business adding myself to whatever that man just put on her shoulders.
I pick up the bag.
"Nash."
I stop.
She still hasn't turned around. "I'm not selling," she says. "I need you to know that."
I look at the back of her head. At the set of her shoulders. At the mug she's holding with both hands like it's the only solid thing in the room.
"Okay," I say.
A beat. Two.
"He knew you," I say. "Before."
She goes still.
"The way he looked at you," I say. "That wasn't a business call."
The kitchen is very quiet. Outside, the wind is picking up off the mountain.
She sets the mug down. "Troy and I were together. In Toronto. Two years." She says it flat, like something she's recited before and stopped expecting to feel. "He's very good at knowing when someone's almost out of options."
I set the bag down.
She turns around then. Eyes dry, chin up, looking like someone who has been underestimated by this particular person before and is tired of it, and is also, underneath all of that, not nearly as steady as she's standing.
"I'm not almost out of options," she says. Like she's telling herself as much as me.
"No," I say. "You're not."
She looks at me for a long moment. Something in her face shifts — not relief exactly. More like someone who braced for an argument and didn't get one and doesn't quite know what to do with the space that leaves.
Rivet gets up from the radiator and walks to Maple and sits on her foot. Maple looks down at her. Then back at me. The corner of her mouth moves.
"She does that when she thinks someone needs it," I say.
"Does it work?"
"Usually."
She looks down at Rivet again and some of the held-together quality in her shoulders eases, just slightly, just enough. Her hand drops to Rivet's head. Rivet leans into it and closes her eyes with the satisfaction of a dog whose plan is coming together.
I should go. The job is done, she's told me what she needed to tell me, and anything else I do right now is going to be too much in the wrong direction.
I pick up my bag. I go to the door.
"Nash." Quieter this time.
"Yeah."
A pause. "The back parlour." She's looking at the window again, the mountain going dark behind the glass. "I didn't step away because I didn't want to."
I stand in her kitchen doorway with the cold coming in and I don't say anything because there isn't anything to say that wouldn't be too much too fast.
I drive home in the dark. Rivet rides with her nose against the glass the whole way, watching the road behind us, and I let her, because one of us should.
I don't sleep that night either. But it's a different kind of not sleeping — less like a man who went too far, more like a man who knows exactly where he's going and is trying to be patient about getting there.
I'm stubborn. But for her, I’ll make an exception.