CHAPTER TWO Foundations
The problem with sleep, Josie had learned, was that it gave her mind exactly the kind of unsupervised time it wanted to spend on Sawyer Boone.
She'd woken twice in the night from dreams she couldn't fully remember, only the shape of them, water and old kitchens and a hand she used to know better than her own.
By five thirty she gave up and went downstairs, coffee in hand, to check on the shop before the crew arrived, and found Sawyer's truck already idling at the curb, headlights cutting through fog that hadn't fully lifted from the night before.
He was alone this time, no crew trucks yet, just him leaning against the tailgate with his own coffee, watching the river the way he used to watch it when they were younger and had nowhere better to be at that hour.
Something in the set of his shoulders looked different in the gray half light, less braced than yesterday.
"You're early," she said, coming to stand a careful distance away.
"Couldn't sleep." He didn't dress it up. "Figured I'd get a jump on assessing the foundation before the crew's underfoot."
"That makes two of us."
He looked at her then, really looked, the kind of look that used to mean he was about to say something honest. "You want to walk it with me? Four eyes on a foundation beats two."
It would have been easy to say no. She almost did.
But some part of her, the part that had spent three years being furious at a version of him built entirely out of silence and secondhand rumor, wanted to see for herself what was actually underneath her shop, wanted proof of something solid before she let herself trust anything he said about it.
"Fine," she said, and followed him inside.
The shop in the gray dawn light looked worse than it had the day before, water lines drying into pale, ugly rings on the walls, the smell of wet drywall settling into something that would take weeks to fully clear.
Sawyer crouched at the base of the back wall with a flashlight, running his hand along the studs where the drywall had already been pulled away.
"Framing's solid," he said. "Good news is your dad built this place to last. Bad news is you're looking at new drywall floor to about four feet, all the way across, and I want to core-test the foundation slab before we put anything back."
"How long."
"If nothing surprises us, week and a half." He glanced up at her. "If something surprises us, longer, but I'd rather tell you the honest range now than a number that's wrong later."
It was such a small thing, an honest range instead of a comforting lie, but it landed harder than she expected, an old ache surfacing under the practical conversation. She looked away first, toward the front window where the fog was starting, finally, to burn thin.
"You changed," she said, before she'd fully decided to say it.
He went still, crouched there with the flashlight in his hand. "In what way."
"You used to tell people what they wanted to hear when it was easier." It wasn't quite an accusation, not anymore, more an observation she hadn't expected to make out loud. "Foundation work, timelines. You used to round up."
"I used to do a lot of things." Something moved through his face, quick and complicated, gone before she could fully read it. "I don't anymore. Not since."
He didn't finish the sentence, and she didn't push, though her whole body wanted to. The silence that followed wasn't the easy kind from yesterday morning, it was thicker, loaded with a question neither of them said out loud.
Cole's voice on the radio broke it, tinny and cheerful, checking in about a materials delivery scheduled for that afternoon. Sawyer answered in the clipped, practical tone of a foreman, and whatever had almost surfaced between them folded itself back down and disappeared.
By midmorning the rest of the crew had arrived, and the shop filled with the particular noise of real work: drywall being stripped from the studs in long, satisfying tears, a wet-vac running steady in the background, someone's radio playing classic rock low enough not to compete with the generator.
Josie found herself working alongside them without quite deciding to, sorting salvaged parts, hauling ruined stock to the dumpster, falling into the same rhythm she remembered from years of working beside a crew of men who talked with their hands as much as their mouths.
She caught herself, twice, watching Sawyer work.
Once when he stripped off his outer jacket in the growing warmth of midday, revealing the cut underneath, and she made herself look at the bare patch of leather where his rank insignia used to sit, made herself hold the question instead of asking it.
Once when he laughed, short and surprised, at something one of the younger crew members said, a sound she hadn't heard from him in three years, and she felt it land somewhere under her ribs she didn't have full control over.
Delia showed up again around noon, this time with sandwiches instead of just coffee, and made a point of setting one down in front of Sawyer without being asked, a small gesture that said more than any question would have.
He thanked her with the kind of quiet surprise of a man who hadn't expected kindness from that direction and didn't quite know what to do with it.
"You're not eating," Delia observed to Josie, once Sawyer had moved back to the far wall.
"I'm working."
"You're watching him work, which is different.
" Delia said it without heat, just a fact laid down between them.
"I'm not going to tell you what to feel, baby.
I gave up trying to manage your heart a long time ago.
I'm just saying, you let that crew into your shop yesterday.
You let him back in the door. That's not nothing, whatever you're telling yourself about foundations and timelines. "
Josie didn't answer, because Delia wasn't wrong, and there was nothing satisfying about being told the truth by someone who loved you.
By late afternoon the drywall demo was done, the studs standing bare and honest under work lights, and Sawyer called it for the day, sending the crew home with instructions to return at seven the next morning.
Josie stood in the stripped-down shell of her own shop, exhausted in the particular way that came from a full day of physical work stacked on top of an emotional one, and found Sawyer lingering near the door instead of following his crew out.
"I wanted to say," he started, then stopped, restarted. "I know I don't get to walk in here and act like the last three years didn't happen. I'm not trying to do that."
"Then what are you trying to do."
"Fix a foundation." He held her eyes, steady, none of yesterday's careful distance in it. "That's all I came here able to promise you, Josie. I'm not going to pretend it's the only thing I want to fix."
The words sat in the space between them, too honest for either of them to know what to do with yet. Josie felt her own careful armor shift, just slightly, just enough to let something colder and more frightening than anger through: the fear that she might actually want to hear whatever came next.
"Goodnight, Sawyer," she said instead, because she wasn't ready, not yet, and he nodded like he understood that better than she expected him to, and let himself out into the cooling evening air.
She stood alone in her half stripped shop for a long moment after his truck pulled away, listening to the river, feeling the particular ache of a door that had been left open on purpose, for the first time in three years, by her own hand.