6. Jake
JAKE
I told her it was a code violation. It was a leaky faucet. I have never once cared about a leaky faucet in my life.
I'd come down off her roof forty minutes earlier, flashing replaced, two winters of leaves cleared out of gutters nobody had asked me to touch either, and I should have been in my truck by then, headed home to reheat whatever Carol had dropped off for dinner.
Instead I was on my knees under Aria's kitchen sink, informing her that a slow drip was a liability waiting to happen.
She hadn't exactly invited me up on the roof in the first place. She'd come outside, phone still in hand, and found me straddling her ridge line like it was the most reasonable place in the world for a grown man to be on a weekday afternoon.
"You're on my roof," she'd said, which seemed like an odd thing to need confirming out loud.
"I noticed that too."
"Did I miss an invitation somewhere?"
"You did not."
She'd stood there a full minute, hand shading her eyes, deciding whether to be angry about it, and I'd used every one of those sixty seconds to keep working instead of explaining myself, because I hadn't actually worked out an explanation yet.
By the time she stopped debating and started laughing instead, mostly at me, I'd already found the real problem: flashing worked loose from a hard winter, water finding its way somewhere it had no business being.
"Rosalind used to pay a man from three towns over for this," she'd called up. "You could have just told me it needed fixing."
"I'm telling you now."
"From up there. Very convenient timing."
I hadn't had a good answer for that one either, so I'd climbed down, toolbox in hand, and let the conversation drift toward her kitchen instead, one small manufactured emergency at a time.
"That's not a real code," she said now, arms crossed in the kitchen doorway, watching me work. "I looked it up while you were still up there deciding my roof needed you specifically."
"Which section did you look up?"
"All of them. Generally. In spirit."
"So you didn't actually look anything up."
"I looked at you very skeptically, which is basically the same thing."
I turned the wrench another quarter turn and didn't look up, mostly because looking up meant looking at her, and I'd been doing entirely too much of that for one afternoon already.
"This pipe's original to the house," I said. "It's probably older than you."
"Everything in this house is probably older than me. That's what happens when you inherit a place instead of buying one."
"Rosalind kept good bones. Bad plumbing, but good bones."
"Is that a metaphor for anything, or are we still talking about the house?"
"No metaphor. Just the house." I wasn't, entirely, but I wasn't about to say that out loud either.
I'd fixed a hundred sinks like this one over the years, could probably do it half asleep, and yet I was taking twice as long as the job needed, double-checking a gasket that didn't need checking, because the alternative was standing up, calling it done, and driving home to an empty kitchen that didn't have anybody in it asking me smart questions about metaphors.
I hadn't let myself notice that particular thought too closely. Noticing it felt like the kind of thing that came with consequences.
She crouched down next to me, closer than the cabinet really allowed for two people, and peered into the dark space under the sink like she might actually understand what she was looking at.
"What am I looking at?"
"The trap. See where it's corroded, right there where it joins the wall pipe?"
"I see a pipe. I do not see corrosion. I am taking your word for it."
"That's usually how this works."
She reached past me for the flashlight I'd set on the cabinet floor, and I reached for it at the same moment without thinking, and our hands landed on it together, her fingers warm against the back of mine in a space too small for either of us to pretend it hadn't happened.
Neither of us moved for a second. Then two.
I could hear the faucet dripping, slow and steady, the sound I'd used as my whole excuse for being here, and I thought that if I stayed very still, maybe the moment would just keep going, which was not a thought I had any business having on my knees in another woman's kitchen.
"You can have it," she said, and her voice had gone quieter than the joke deserved.
"I know."
Neither of us let go right away.
"Jake."
"Yeah."
She didn't finish it, whatever it was going to be, and I decided not to push, because pushing on a quiet moment felt like the same mistake as pushing on a quiet door, and I'd already lost a finger to one of those once, metaphorically speaking.
"The flashlight," she said finally.
"Right." I let go first, mostly because I wasn't sure I would if I waited for her to.
She sat back on her heels, cheeks a little pink, and handed me the flashlight properly this time, no accidental collision required, and I told myself that was for the best even though some traitor part of me disagreed loudly.
"So," she said, clearing her throat.
"Code violation. Terrifying. Glad I called someone."
"You didn't call anyone. I invited myself onto your roof."
"That's worse, actually. That's breaking and entering with a tool belt."
"I prefer resourceful."
"I prefer accurate."
That got the twitch out of me before I could stop it, and she caught it this time, grinning like she'd won something.
"There it is," she said. "I knew you had one in there somewhere."
"One what?"
"A sense of humor. I've been documenting the evidence."
"You've known me six days."
"Six very thorough days."
I was halfway through explaining exactly what was wrong with the trap, using words like corrosion and gasket and pretending both of us cared, when the crash came from the direction of the bathroom, followed immediately by Lily's voice announcing, with the total lack of alarm only a five-year-old can manage, that everything was fine and nobody needed to come look.
Aria was up and moving before the sentence finished.
I followed her down the hall at a pace just short of running, tools still in hand, and found the bathroom doorway framed in an amount of water that suggested a burst pipe rather than whatever this actually turned out to be, which was two kids, one overturned bucket, and a bar of soap that had apparently been declared a boat.
The tub was an inch deep in soapy water that had migrated well past its intended borders. Lily stood in the middle of it in her socks, which explained roughly half the flooding on its own, directing Noah with the confidence of a small, damp admiral.
"The boat needed an ocean," she explained, as if this settled everything. "You can't sail a boat in a puddle. That's just science."
"We were doing an experiment," Lily announced, from the center of what used to be a dry floor.
Noah, soaked to the elbows and grinning wider than I'd seen him grin in longer than I wanted to think about, held up the soap like evidence in a trial only he understood.
"An experiment," Aria repeated, flat, surveying the damage with the weary calm of a woman who had clearly done this dance before. "In my bathtub. With my good towels."
"They're wet towels now," Lily corrected helpfully. "Not good towels."
I bit down on a laugh and lost, badly, and Aria shot me a look that was trying hard to be stern and mostly failing.
"This is not funny," she said, in a tone that suggested she found it at least forty percent funny.
"It's a little funny."
"It is a little funny," she admitted, and then ruined the sternness entirely by laughing, the real laugh, the one that had started this whole mess of a week for both of us in the first place.
We spent the next twenty minutes mopping up a flood that turned out to be mostly contained to the bathmat and a truly heroic amount of towel, Noah handing me items with the serious dedication of a surgical assistant, Lily narrating the entire cleanup as though it were a documentary she was hosting.
"And here we see the towel," she said, watching me wring one out over the tub, "being used to fix the ocean. Very sad for the ocean."
"The ocean will survive," I told her.
"You don't know that. You're not a scientist."
"Neither are you."
"I'm an ocean scientist in training," she said, with the total certainty of someone who had invented the credential thirty seconds earlier and intended to defend it regardless.
Noah caught my eye over her head and did something with his face that was almost, almost a laugh, silent as always but unmistakable, and I felt that crack of light again, the one I kept catching in him lately, a little wider every time.
By the time the floor was dry and both kids had been peeled out of wet clothes and declared, over Lily's strenuous objections, done with experiments for the day, the light outside had gone properly gold and I had a hallway full of tools I'd never actually finished using.
"I should let you get back to actual dinner," I said, gathering the flashlight and the wrench I'd barely needed. "Not the code violation kind."
"You never did finish the faucet."
"I'll come back for it."
"Will there be a new violation by then, or are you recycling this one?"
"I've got a list. Don't worry about it."
She walked me to the door, Noah trailing behind with his sketchbook already back under his arm like it had never left, Lily still narrating something about soap boats to anyone who'd listen.
"You're going to have to stop finding reasons to fix things over here," Aria said, leaning against the doorframe. "People will talk."
"People already talk. I've been informed of this at length by my foreman."
"Your foreman has opinions about my faucet?"
"He's got opinions about everything under the sun. Comes with the job, apparently."
"Well, tell him the faucet still drips and it's entirely his employee's fault for getting distracted by an ocean emergency."
"I'll pass that along."
"Thank you," she said then, quieter, and for once neither of us tried to turn it into a joke.
"For the roof. And the faucet. And whatever that was under the sink."
"Anytime."
I meant it more than the word usually carried, and something in her face said she'd heard that too, because she didn't say anything back right away, just stood there in her doorway with a soaked five-year-old narrating behind her and looked at me like she was trying to solve a different kind of equation than the one under her sink.
I drove home with the windows down and the radio off, the truck full of tools I hadn't used for their actual purpose, replaying a hand on top of mine in a space too small for two people, a laugh that had started this whole mess of a week, a small damp scientist defending her credentials to the death.
Somewhere around the turn onto my own road I realized I was whistling, off tune and completely unselfconscious, some half-remembered song I couldn't have named even if you'd paid me good money for it.
I caught myself doing it and almost stopped, out of habit more than anything, the way you'd catch yourself doing something you weren't sure you'd earned yet.
I didn't stop myself.
I whistled the whole drive home. I had not done that in two years. I did not know what to do with it.