13. Juliette
— ? —
Juliette
The work boots squeak.
I hear them before I see him - that distinctive new-shoe sound that announces someone has never done manual labor in their entire life.
When I turn around, Zachary Dean is standing in the doorway of my future bookstore in jeans, a work shirt, and boots so pristine they still have the price sticker on the bottom.
“No.”
“Good morning to you too.”
“I said no.” I set down the crowbar I was using to pry up rotted floorboards. “This is not happening.”
“I’m here to help with demolition.”
“You don’t know how to do demolition.”
“I can learn.” He steps into the building, looking around at the exposed walls with genuine interest. “Where do I start?”
“You start by leaving.”
“Can’t. I bought boots.” He lifts one foot as evidence. “The man at the store said they’re rated for demolition. I asked specifically.”
“You asked a shoe salesman if your boots were rated for demolition.”
“He was very confident.”
“He saw you coming from the ferry.”
“He saw a customer with excellent taste and a generous heart.” He sets the boot down. It squeaks. “The squeak is a safety feature. You’ll always know where I am.”
“That’s a threat.”
“It’s a promise, which I’m told is different.”
“Can’t do that.” He spots a sledgehammer leaning against the wall and picks it up, testing its weight. “I signed as guarantor. I have a vested interest in making sure this building is structurally sound.”
“That’s not how guarantor works.”
“It’s how I’m interpreting it.” He swings the sledgehammer experimentally, and I flinch. “Which wall is coming down?”
“None of them, if you’re swinging.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Zachary.” I step between him and the nearest wall. “Put down the sledgehammer.”
“I’m trying to help.”
“You’re going to hurt yourself. Or me. Or the building. In that order.”
“Then you can put me out of my misery.” He grins, and it’s such an unexpected expression - Zachary Dean doesn’t grin, Zachary Dean does controlled smiles that communicate appropriate levels of warmth - that I forget for a second I’m supposed to hate him.
“Come on. One wall. I need to hit something.”
I should tell him to leave.
But there’s something in his face I haven’t seen before. Something almost desperate. Like he needs to prove he can do something with his hands instead of just his checkbook.
“That wall.” I point to the false partition blocking the back storage room. “It’s not load-bearing.”
“That one?”
“That one. Aim for the seams between the panels.”
He positions himself, sledgehammer raised. His shirt pulls across his shoulders as he sets his stance, and I look away before I can notice anything else.
Stop that.
He swings.
The sledgehammer connects about six inches left of where he was aiming, punches through cleanly, and keeps going until it gets stuck in the stud behind it.
“Shit.”
“That stud was on the ‘don’t hit’ list.”
“You have a list?”
“I have several lists.” I walk over and grip the hammer handle, bracing my foot against the wall. “Pull on three. One, two-”
We pull. The hammer comes free, and he stumbles backward into me.
The two of us stagger a step together, his weight and mine finding one balance instead of two, and for the length of a breath the shop is just dust motes and his heartbeat going through his back into my hands.
His back hits my chest. His hand catches my hip to steady himself. For one moment we’re pressed together, off-balance, and I can smell sawdust and something underneath it that I remember from before-
I step back. Fast.
He turns, his hand dropping to his side. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to-”
“Try again.” My voice comes out sharper than I intend. “Aim better this time.”
He does. This time he actually hits the right spot, and there’s something deeply satisfying about watching the wall crack and crumble.
“Ha!” He turns to me with an expression of pure triumph. “Did you see that?”
“I saw.”
“I did it.”
“You hit a wall. With a hammer. It’s not exactly rocket science.”
“It felt like rocket science.” He swings again. “This is very therapeutic, actually. I should have taken up demolition years ago.”
“You can demolish your mother’s parlor when you get home.”
By noon, he’s knocked a hole in a wall that wasn’t on the list, worn his safety goggles upside down all morning, and mixed plaster to the consistency of soup.
He’s also developed opinions. Strong ones, arriving hourly.
“This corner wants the reading chairs.” He gestures with the sledgehammer like a pointer, professor of a subject he met on Tuesday. “Morning light, no draft, sight line to the register so you can glare at whoever puts books back wrong.”
“That’s-” I look at the corner. Morning light. No draft. Clean sight line. “That’s the right corner.”
“I know.” He’s unbearably pleased. “I’ve been standing in this building for six hours. I notice things now. It’s my whole personality.”
He’s also apologized to a wall.
I step outside to take a call from Rosie about lumber, and when I come back in, I hear his voice from the back room.
“…sorry about the hole. I know you didn’t deserve that. You were a perfectly good wall, just doing your job, and I came in here with my fancy boots and my-”
“Are you talking to the wall?”
He spins around, face flushing. “No.”
“I heard you. You were apologizing to the wall.”
“I was-” He runs a hand through his hair, which is gray with plaster dust. “Okay, yes. I was apologizing. It seemed polite.”
“You apologized to drywall.”
“It was load-bearing drywall.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“How do you know? It could have feelings.”
I stare at him. He stares back.
And then something happens that I haven’t felt in so long I almost don’t recognize it: I laugh.
Not a polite laugh. A real one, from the belly, from somewhere deep. It hurts coming out, like stretching a muscle that’s been cramped for months.
“It’s not that funny,” he says, but he’s smiling now too.
“You apologized-” I’m doubled over, hands on my knees. “To a wall-”
“I said sorry about the hole!”
“Because it seemed polite!”
“It did seem polite! Walls have dignity!”
I laugh until my stomach hurts. Until I’m gasping for breath. Until the tears on my face aren’t from laughing anymore, and I have to turn away so he won’t see them become something else.
The door swings open behind us.
“Knock knock!” A woman’s voice, bright and friendly. “I saw the cars outside and thought I’d bring - oh!”
I turn, wiping my face quickly. A woman in her sixties is standing in the doorway, holding a covered dish and beaming at us with the particular intensity of someone who’s been waiting for this moment.
“You must be the new owners! I’m Helen, from the bakery next door. I heard someone finally leased the Bishop place, and I wanted to welcome you to the neighborhood.”
“That’s very kind of you,” I start, but she’s already bustling past me to set the dish on a sawhorse.
“My grandmother’s recipe. Chicken and rice, nothing fancy, but it’ll stick to your ribs after all this hard work.
” She looks between me and Zachary, her smile widening.
“It’s so nice to see a young couple fixing up the old place.
The island needs more of that. Everyone’s always leaving for the mainland, but you two - staying, building something together - that’s what this community is about. ”
“You know, you two remind me of me and my Frank when we bought the bakery.” Helen beams between us, a woman constructing a story in real time and moving in.
“Fought like cats the whole renovation. He hung a door backward and I didn’t speak to him for a day.
Forty-one years, that door. Still backward.
” She pats the dish like a beloved pet. “The ones who build together stay together. That’s what my mother said. ”
“We’re-” I start.
“Starving, probably,” Helen says. “Eat it warm. Bring the dish back whenever. I’m right next door, and I will be watching your progress through the window, because I’m old and it’s the best show in town.”
Neither of us corrects her.
I don’t know why I don’t correct her. I should. I should say we’re not together, he’s just helping, we’re getting divorced. But the words don’t come, and the silence stretches, and Helen keeps smiling like she’s witnessing the beginning of something beautiful.
“Well, I’ll let you get back to it.” She pats my arm. “If you need anything, anything at all, I’m right next door. The bakery opens at six, and I always have coffee on.”
“Thank you,” Zachary says. “We appreciate it.”
We.
Helen leaves, and the door swings shut behind her, and the silence that fills the space is louder than any demolition.
“We should have corrected her,” I say finally.
“Probably.”
“She’s going to tell everyone we’re a couple.”
“Probably.”
“The whole island will think we’re back together by dinner.”
“Does that matter?”
I turn to look at him. He’s standing by the wall he apologized to, covered in plaster dust and sawdust, and he looks more human than I’ve ever seen him. More real.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “Does it?”
He doesn’t answer. Just holds my gaze for a long moment, and something passes between us that I don’t have a name for.
The ladder shifts.
I don’t know why I look up - instinct, maybe - but I do, and I see it happening in slow motion: the ladder I was using earlier, propped against the wall at the wrong angle, starting to tip.
“Zachary-”
He’s directly underneath it.
I move without thinking. Grab his arm and yank him sideways, hard, and we both go down in a tangle of limbs as the ladder crashes into the space where he was standing.
For a moment, everything is still.
I’m on top of him. My hands are braced on either side of his head. His chest is rising and falling beneath me, and his eyes are very close, and somewhere in the back of my mind I’m aware that this is exactly the kind of position I’ve been trying to avoid.
“You okay?” My voice comes out rough.
“Yeah.” His doesn’t sound much better. “You?”
“Fine.”
Neither of us moves.
His hand comes up and his fingers brush my cheek, pushing back a strand of hair that’s fallen loose, and this time neither of us pretends it’s practical.
I kiss him.
Down into the plaster dust, no dignity anywhere and none missed.
He makes a low sound and kisses me back the way the wall got hit - committed, slightly off-target, correcting fast. Then we’re up, I don’t know how, his hands finding my waist and walking me backward until my shoulders meet the new shelving, which holds, because Rosie designed it.
His thigh slides between mine. My fingers are in his hair and there’s plaster in it and I do not care. He kisses my jaw, my throat, the spot under my ear, and my hips move against his leg with a mind of their own, and the sound I make is not a sound I have made since Boston.
“Juliette,” he says into my neck. Wrecked. Hopeful. Half-laughing.
That. The hope is what does it.
It takes me a long minute to remember why I should stop. I spend the minute anyway - his mouth, his hands flexing at my waist, the shelf edge printing a line into my shoulders I’ll find tonight - and then I put both palms flat on his chest and push, gently, until there’s air between us.
“That didn’t happen either,” I say. My voice has been thoroughly sanded.
“Of course not.” His hands leave my waist one finger at a time, the world’s slowest surrender.
“You should be more careful where you stand,” I say.
“Noted.” He sits up slowly, running a hand through his hair. “Thank you. For the-”
“Don’t mention it.”
“You yanked me,” he says, still on the floor, looking up at me with plaster dust in his hair. “That was - you moved really fast.”
“The ladder was falling.”
“On me.”
“On my building. You were incidental.”
“You dove, Juliette. That was a dive.” He’s grinning now, delighted, insufferable, alive. “You dove to save my life.”
“I dove to save my liability profile. Injured guarantors complicate leases.”
“You can’t take it back. It happened. There was heroism.”
“There was reflexes.”
“There was care,” he says, and the grin softens into the other thing, the thing I’m not ready to be in a room with, and I pick up the crowbar so my hands have a job.
The silence stretches again. Different this time. Charged.
“I should go,” he says finally. “It’s getting late.”
“Okay.”
He gathers his ruined jacket - the one that was probably worth more than my first car - and shrugs it on without complaint. At the door, he stops.
“Same time tomorrow?”
He pauses at the door, ruined jacket over his shoulder, plaster dust in his hair, and takes a slow look around the gutted shop - the opened wall, the swept rows, the corner he assigned to reading chairs - with the unguarded satisfaction of a man surveying the first honest day’s work of his life.
“I like it here,” he says. Not to me, exactly. To the building. An affidavit.
“It’s a construction site.”
“It’s the best room I’ve been in all year,” he says, “and I’ve been in rooms with two senators and a Monet,” and then he’s gone before I can decide whether that was a compliment to the shop or a verdict on the rooms.
“I didn’t say you could come back tomorrow.”
“I know.” He looks at me over his shoulder. “But I’ll be here anyway.”
“Zachary-”
“Goodnight, Juliette.”
He’s gone before I can respond, leaving me alone in my future bookstore with the sawdust and the broken walls and the particular silence that settles over a space when the person who filled it leaves.
I sweep up before I go. Two brooms leaning by the door and I only need one, and the second one stands there anyway, present, like a coat someone forgot on purpose.
Through the wall, Helen’s radio plays the big-band station she keeps on for the ovens, muffled brass and somebody’s grandmother’s love songs, and I sweep my future in long rows by lamplight and let myself, for exactly one song, imagine the whole thing finished: shelves full, window lit, door bell ringing.
One song. Then I put both brooms away.
I start gathering my tools. That’s when I see it.
On the sawhorse where he was working. A piece of cardstock, hand-cut, with a loop of ribbon at the top.
A bookmark.
My hands shake as I pick it up.
The handwriting is terrible - cramped and uneven, nothing like my careful script. But the words are clear enough:
Day one. I’ll get better at all of it.
I turn it over. The back is blank.
Six years of my notes went into a drawer without an answer, and his first one leaves the whole back side empty - room for a reply, if replies ever resume. He probably didn’t think it through that far. He probably just ran out of terrible handwriting.
I put it in the lid of my toolbox anyway, where the good screws live.
I stand in the empty building, holding the first bookmark anyone has ever made for me, and I don’t know what to do with the feeling in my chest.
This isn’t forgiveness.
But standing here, with his bookmark in my hands and his absence filling the room, I realize I’ve been looking forward to tomorrow.
And that terrifies me more than anything.