Six.
Shea
I pace the porch, hand on my chin, fighting the stress-fueled urge to bite my nails.
He’s late.
Well, late in my father’s eyes, because if you’re not fifteen minutes early for anything per Daniel Winton, you may as well be late.
Or he’s not coming at all, a little voice inside my head states unhelpfully.
I shake off the thought and tip my head back, staring at the white, wood paneled porch roof. It’s pretty clean considering the years of exterior wear and tear, all it needs is a fresh coat of paint. “Well, that’s something.” I sigh.
The rest of the house is not quite as encouraging.
I spent the better part of the morning, since leaving my coffee date with Callie, doing a proper walkthrough with Tyler, camera in tow—which mostly consisted of me narrating optimistically into the lens while Tyler panned slowly across water-stained ceilings and peeling wallpaper with the energy of a nature documentary.
“You’ve said good bones like a hundred times,” he’d said at one point, squinting at a doorframe that was decidedly listing to the left.
I tilted my head, pretending the frame was straight. “Because it does.”
He lowered the camera and looked at me. “You should probably write a script or something.”
It’s possible he had a point.
Still, standing out here in the cool October air with the mountains framed at the end of the street and a stunning maple tree in the front yard blazing an orange-red like a picture-perfect postcard—I feel it. That pull. The one that told me to buy this house sight unseen and trust my gut.
It’s never steered me wrong.
This house wants to be something again. I just need a contractor who believes it, too.
The sound of gravel crunching pulls my attention to the street, and there he is—black truck, royal blue and silver logo catching the mid-day sun as he pulls up to the curb with two minutes to spare.
He’s here.
The little voice in my head goes quiet.
Rhett kills the engine and steps out in one fluid motion, and I have approximately three seconds to arrange my face into something that does not scream I was terrified you wouldn’t show.
Three seconds is not enough time.
He comes up the front walk with that same unhurried ease from last night. “Hey,” he says, boots finding the bottom porch step.
“Hi.” I straighten, crossing my arms loosely. Casual. Completely unbothered. “How was your morning?”
“Productive.” He comes up the last two steps and stops at a polite, professional distance that I am desperately trying not to mentally measure for future reference.
His gaze sweeps the porch, the roofline, in that same quiet, assessing way he looked at my flooded hallway last night. “Porch is in decent condition.”
I nod. “Yes. I’m thinking just a fresh coat of paint will have it looking brand new.”
“Window frame needs resetting,” he says, lifting a chin to my right.
I glance over my shoulder. “Oh, um, noted.”
His gaze drops to mine. “You mentioned something about being on camera? Care to elaborate.”
“Oh!” I laugh nervously. “Well, you see…I have this project, or pilot, rather, that I want to pitch to a network my father has an in with. The whole premise is home restoration, bringing vintage houses like this one back to their original character with a fresh twist instead of gutting them for a modern flip.”
He says nothing, just watches me with those hazel eyes while I talk with my hands like I always do when I’m excited and nervous all at once.
“I want to document the entire process. The before, the during, the after. Real and unfiltered.” I gesture vaguely around us.
“This house is my proof of concept. My pilot episode.” I pause, reading his expression, which is giving me absolutely nothing.
“Which means, whoever works on this renovation, would be…on camera. Occasionally. Nothing invasive, just…process footage, you know? B-roll, some talking head stuff maybe if you’re comfortable, but mostly just the work. ”
Silence.
A beat too long that it has me swallowing thickly. I wasn’t nearly this nervous when I pitched the plan to my father a few weeks ago. Granted, the contractor I had previously lined up didn’t seem to care about being on camera or not, but something about Rhett worries me this may be a no-go…
“I completely understand if that’s a dealbreaker,” I add quickly. “I can work around it, keep the camera focused on the house rather than the—”
“It’s fine,” he says.
I blink. “Really? I mean, are you sure?”
“I’m not going to stop working because someone’s filming,” he says simply, like the idea of being self-conscious is a foreign language. “As long as it doesn’t slow the job down.”
“It won’t. I promise.” I smile with relief. “Tyler’s handling most of the filming, actually. He may act like he’s not happy about it, but I think he’s secretly thrilled.”
Rhett chuckles. “Got it.”
I stare at him for a moment. This man is either the calmest person I’ve ever met or the most unreadable man on the planet. “Right, um…”
“You done a full walkthrough yet?”
“Yes, uh, a bit last night, and everywhere this morning.” I wave my hands in front of me and drop them on an exhale. “It’s…a lot.”
His expression softens. “Show me.”
I push open the front door and Tyler is exactly where I left him—sprawled across the floor of the empty living room, laptop balanced on his stomach, camera sitting beside him.
He looks up, clocks Rhett, but doesn’t move to get up. “Hey.”
I glare at him. We really need to work on his manners.
“Hey.” Rhett steps inside, gaze shifting across the ceiling, the baseboards, the fireplace dominating the far wall. “You filming?”
Tyler glances at me, then back at Rhett. “Maybe.”
“Grab the camera, then,” he says, the same way he told him to get the shop vac last night—easy, matter of fact, no room for argument, but no pressure either. “Walkthrough footage is good content.”
Tyler stares at him for a beat, then picks up the camera and stands.
I follow Rhett, the camera trailing us, and feel something warm and inconvenient bloom in my chest as I force myself to focus.
Rhett moves through the space the way he does everything else—quietly, deliberately, taking it all in before he speaks.
He crouches at the base of the fireplace, running a thumb along the original brick.
Stands and checks the window seals. Knocks on walls in a way that must mean something to him because his expression shifts slightly each time.
Tyler follows two steps behind, camera raised, and I’d bet money he’s actually paying attention even though he’d never admit it. He’s a hard nut to crack, my surprise stepbrother, but I’m learning his quirks, slowly but surely.
“Original hardwood under here?” Rhett asks, toeing at the edge of a curling patch of linoleum someone laid over the living room floor sometime in what I can only assume was a deeply misguided decade.
“I think so,” I say, pulling out my phone to reference the notes from the home listing. “The records say the original floors are intact beneath the updates. And I use the term updates very loosely.”
He crouches and peels back the corner of the linoleum with one careful hand, revealing a strip of honey-toned oak beneath.
I gasp. “Oh, my!”
“There they are.” He glances up at me, and something in his expression does something unfair to my pulse. “You’ve got good bones here.”
Tyler snorts behind the camera.
I ignore him and feel my face stretch with excitement. “I know, right!”
Rhett straightens and we move through to the kitchen. The cabinets are a painted-over oak, the countertops are cracked laminate in a color I can only describe as a sad beige, and the linoleum in here is a pattern of brown diamonds that appears to have survived several presidential administrations.
“Original layout is actually smart,” Rhett says, more to himself than to me, turning a slow circle. “Good flow, nice window over the sink, decent square footage.” He opens a cabinet door, checks the hinges. “Bones are solid. This is mostly cosmetic.”
“Mostly?” I ask carefully.
He gives me a look. “Plumbing needs a full assessment after last night. Electrical, too. Odds are it’s been updated once, but not recently.”
“How recently is not recently?”
“I’ll have my guy take a look.” He makes a note on a mini spiral notebook he pulls out of his back pocket. “Could be nothing, could be a full rewire. We won’t know until we get in the walls.”
I nod, a lot. Excessively, really.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “Totally fine.”
Tyler lowers the camera approximately two inches to look at me over the top of it.
“Rewires happen, it’s…fine,” I repeat, mostly to myself at the same time I guesstimate how much something like that would cost considering I am funding this whole thing out of pocket.
The corner of Rhett’s mouth pulls upward. He nods toward the stairs. “Show me the upstairs.”
The upstairs tells a similar story to the main floor—good structure, bad decisions made somewhere between 1975 and 1999.
Two bedrooms with original trim hiding under layers of paint, a third that someone converted into a half-hearted office, and a bathroom that, beyond last night’s incident, has good bones but dated everything.
Rhett checks every window, every doorframe, every suspicious water stain on the ceiling with the same focus he’s applied to everything else. Tyler gets it all on camera, occasionally zooming in on something without being asked, which I’m choosing to count as personal growth.
The basement takes another fifteen minutes. I follow Rhett down the narrow stairs and hover at the bottom while he moves through it with a flashlight from his belt, checking the foundation walls, the HVAC unit, the water heater that’s older than I am.
“Heater needs replacing,” he says.
“Noted,” I say, a safe distance away from a suspicious corner I decided not to investigate personally.
When we finally make our way back outside, I pull in a lungful of fresh, mountain air and sigh.
So far so good, I think as we make a slow loop around the exterior, Rhett checking everything—roofline, siding, foundation, the detached garage at the back of the lot that I’d forgotten existed.
He photographs things on his phone without narrating, and I resist the urge to fill every silent moment and let him do his thing.
Tyler, to his credit, films the whole ordeal without complaint.
By the time we circle back to the front porch, Rhett has filled four pages of his small spiral notebook. He closes it, tucks it into his back pocket, and leans against the porch railing with his arms crossed, looking at the house with an expression I can’t fully read.
I take a breath. “So.” I clasp my hands in front of me. “What do you think?”
He’s quiet for a moment, and it’s the longest moment of my life.
“It’s a solid project,” he says finally. “More work than it looks from the street, but that’s true for most houses worth saving.”
My heart climbs into my throat, daring to hope he sees what I see. “And…would you want to be the one to save it? With me, I mean.”
He looks at me then, like really looks at me, and I am acutely aware that my eyes have gone embarrassingly glassy, because if he says no, I genuinely don’t have a plan B and this entire thing falls apart before it’s even started and—
“I’ll take the job,” he says.
The breath leaves me in a rush and tears escape me as I cover my mouth with a dramatic, “Oh, thank god,” before throwing myself at him to wrap my arms around his middle.
He holds steady, catching me with a hardy laugh at my dramatics—and I’ll be the first to admit, that’s exactly what it is—but his grin is wide as I pull away to look at him. His hold on me tightens.
Neither of us moves.