Chapter Seven – Meryl
He was here.
Meryl heard Spencer’s truck before she saw it, the low rumble carrying up the lane to Pine Cottage. Her first instinct was to go straight to the porch and watch him arrive.
She stayed where she was.
Barely.
Instead, she poured coffee into two mugs and then busied herself in the kitchen, cleaning the inside of the cabinets, refusing to go out onto the porch to greet him. It was just Spencer. Just another morning of work.
That was all.
Outside, the truck door shut. Boots hit gravel. A moment later, she heard him on the porch.
“Morning,” he called.
Meryl continued to scrub the inside of a wall cabinet. “Morning. Coffee’s ready.” She turned just as he walked through the doorway and caught the look on his face as he saw her.
He smiled, and her stomach did a flip. “You’re spoiling me.”
“I’m being practical,” she said, putting down her cleaning cloth and handing him a mug. “Caffeine makes you work faster.”
“Is that so?” His fingers brushed hers as he took the coffee, and the contact sent a thrill of electricity up her arm, as it had every time he touched her.
She’d never experienced it before. But there was something about him that always made her react.
No, it ran deeper than that. As if they shared a connection.
She had felt it the first time they met, that day on the porch.
At first, she’d put it down to the intense gratitude she felt toward him for helping her.
But as the days passed, she was beginning to think it was something more.
She just didn’t know what. Or if he felt it too.
Spencer held her gaze, and in that moment, she was sure he felt it too. But then he turned away and nodded toward the living room. “You’ve been working hard.”
Only then did she remember she’d been working in the living room before she was distracted by his arrival.
“Yes. I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know if it’s the birdsong or the light being so different up here,” she began. “So I got up and started stripping wallpaper. I also took down the curtains and cleaned the fireplace.”
He moved aside as she stepped around him and then followed her into the living room without a word.
The room was still a mess, but it was a better sort of mess now.
One wall stood mostly bare. The faded floral paper on the next hung in damp strips.
Without the curtains, the morning sun streamed in, illuminating the handcrafted fireplace surround that had emerged from beneath years of soot and dust, leaving the mantel at last looking like something worth keeping.
Spencer set his coffee down and ran his hand over the cleaned stone, then the trim she had scrubbed back.
“Meryl.” He looked at her properly. “You’ve done a fantastic job in here.”
She felt the heat rise into her face. “You mean that?”
“I do. You didn’t gouge the plaster, and you stopped where the paper was still holding instead of tearing at it just to get it done faster.
” He touched the mantel again. “And this was worth uncovering. The whole room feels different now. You can really start to see what a warm and welcoming room this will be when it’s finished. ”
Meryl folded her arms, mostly to keep herself from smiling too much. “I thought so, too. I’ve even been giving some thought to paint colors.”
He turned and smiled. “I can’t wait to see what you have planned. That’s the knack, seeing what something can be, not what it is right now.”
“Well,” she said, aiming for dry, “I am learning from a man with tools and opinions.”
That made him laugh softly. “Dangerous combination.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m beginning to notice.”
For a second, they stood there looking at each other in the half-stripped room.
Then Meryl nodded toward the porch. “Come on. If we stand in here admiring my wallpaper-removal skills much longer, nothing else is getting done.”
“Wouldn’t want that.”
They went back outside. Spencer set his coffee on the porch rail and opened his toolbox. Meryl pulled on her gloves and handed him the pencil she had been using earlier. He took it without comment, as if that was just how things were done now.
Maybe it was.
He checked the measurements she had marked on the next boards and looked up. “You did these already?”
“I thought it might save time.” Although her need to rush through this job was starting to fade.
“It will,” he agreed, and then they got to work.
For the next hour or so, things went as they had the day before.
Spencer cut. Meryl held boards in place, checked the fit, and passed him what he needed.
They spoke when they had to and fell quiet when they didn’t.
It was good work, and there was comfort in it. That’s what had surprised her the most.
That was why the interruption hit so hard.
Spencer levered up another stretch of old porch boards near the far corner, then stopped.
Meryl noticed at once. “What?”
“Flashlight.”
Her stomach dropped at his tone. She fetched it and came back fast, kneeling beside him as he aimed the beam into the gap beneath the porch.
At first, she only saw shadow. Then the light settled, and the shape of the timber became clear.
The main support beam had split along most of its length.
The crack was ugly, jagged, and dark with damp. When Spencer touched the edge with his screwdriver, a chunk gave way.
“Oh.”
He did not comment at first. He kept the light on the beam as he assessed the damage.
“How bad?” she asked, needing to know the worst.
“Bad enough.” He sat back on his heels. “We can’t keep decking over this.”
Meryl stared down into the gap. “So we’ll replace that section.”
Spencer shook his head. “Not if the rot runs all the way along.”
She looked again, though she already knew what he was going to say.
“The whole beam?” she asked.
“The whole beam,” he confirmed.
She got to her feet and brushed her palms against her jeans, though they were already filthy. “How much work?”
“A lot.” Spencer stood too. “We’d have to take up the boards, support the porch properly, remove the damaged beam, fit a new one, then rebuild from there.”
“And the cost?”
He hesitated, which told her everything before he said, “Meryl...”
“How much?”
“For the beam and hardware alone, several hundred. Maybe more, depending on what else we find when it’s open.”
She gave a short laugh that held no humor at all. “Let’s face it, the more we look, the more we’ll find.”
Only minutes ago, the porch had felt manageable. Now it seemed to tilt beneath her again, not physically but in her head, becoming one more thing that would grow and grow until she could not keep hold of it.
“There has to be another way,” she said. “What if we reinforce it? Add supports under the worst of it. Buy some time.”
Spencer was quiet for too long.
“Well?”
“We could brace it,” he said. “But it wouldn’t be a real repair.”
“I’m not asking for perfect.”
“This isn’t about perfect.”
“No,” she said, sharper than she meant to. “Apparently, it never is with you.”
He looked at her then. And she didn’t like what she read on his face. Disappointment.
“If that beam fails,” he said, “the whole porch goes with it. That’s not cosmetic. That’s structure.”
“I know what structure means.”
“Then you know why this matters,” he insisted.
Meryl folded her arms. “What I know is that every day this place becomes a bigger project. More work. More money. More time.” She looked away toward the trees because it was easier than looking at him. “I came here to get it ready to sell, not to rebuild half of it.”
When Spencer answered, his voice was lower. “I know.”
Did he?
He was not the one doing the sums in his head. He was not the one watching the budget shift every time another hidden problem came loose. He was not the one who had arrived with a two-week plan to clean and redecorate, and watched it stretch beyond recognition.
“There has to be a middle ground,” she said. “Something that makes it safe without turning this into a huge job.”
“Not with this.” He shook his head.
“Then maybe we replace the worst part and leave the rest,” she suggested.
“That gives you a weak joint in compromised timber.”
“Maybe it holds long enough.”
The second the words left her mouth, she wished she could take them back.
Spencer’s face changed, only slightly, but enough.
“Long enough for what?” he asked.
Meryl lifted her chin, suddenly and unreasonably defensive. “Long enough to get the place on the market.”
He was silent for a long moment.
Then he said evenly, “That might be enough for you. It wouldn’t be enough for me.”
She winced.
“I’m trying to be realistic,” she said. “I have limits, Spencer. Financial ones. Time ones. I can’t just keep pouring money into this place because it keeps deciding to reveal some fresh disaster.”
He looked back down at the beam. When he answered, the edge had gone out of his voice. “I know. And I’m not pretending that doesn’t matter.”
Meryl said nothing. She had nothing to say.
He crouched again and put his hand on the damaged timber. “But some things don’t get easier just because you want them to.”
That was it.
That was the argument beneath the argument, and they both knew it.
Meryl looked at the replaced boards, the tools, and the two coffee mugs still sitting where they had set them earlier. The whole mood had changed.
“So what now?” she asked.
Spencer straightened. “Now I go into town and price the proper beam. Then you know what the real number is before you decide.”
She wanted to tell him not to bother. Numbers would only make it real.
Instead, she said, “Okay.”
He nodded once.
They worked on, clearing and tidying everything away, but the ease had gone. Until at last Spencer closed his toolbox.
“I’ll come back after I’ve spoken to Frank and asked him for his best price.”
Meryl nodded without looking at him. “All right.”
He waited a second, then said, “I’m not trying to make this harder.”
That made her throat tighten.
“I know,” she said. And that was part of the trouble. She did know.
He gave a curt nod and headed for his truck.
Meryl stayed where she was until the sound of the engine faded down the lane. Then she sat on the edge of the porch and pictured the split beam beneath her feet.
The problem was fixable.
That was not the issue.
The issue was that Spencer was right. Fixable did not mean easy. It did not mean quick. And it certainly did not mean cheap.
Pine Cottage was asking for more than she had planned to give.
And the worst part, the part she did not want to look at too closely, was that somewhere beneath the frustration and the fear, she already knew why Spencer had pushed back so hard.
He had not been talking only about the porch. No, it went deeper than that. They both knew it.