Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
MARGOT
Four days in Whisper Vale, and Briggs Holloway has fixed my pipes, run a garden hose through my kitchen window, replaced three cabinet hinges, left a bag of groceries on my side door step without knocking, and hauled away the remains of my front porch with nothing more than a truck, a crowbar, and forearms that should be classified as a public safety hazard.
I didn't ask for any of it.
He just does things. Shows up at seven in the morning with tools, works for two hours, leaves without lingering. No small talk beyond what's necessary. No questions about my life, my divorce, why I'm here. Just a man with a truck full of lumber who keeps finding reasons to be on my property.
It's infuriating.
It's also the reason I can walk through my own front door without falling through the floor, so there's that.
The plumber came Tuesday. Ray Castellano, exactly who Briggs recommended.
Quiet guy, efficient, replaced the cracked pipe in under an hour, assessed the rest of the system, told me I'd need a full replumb before winter but the patch would hold for now.
He charged me half of what I'd budgeted.
When I tried to pay more, he said any neighbor of Briggs's was a friend of his and left before I could argue.
Small towns. Everyone connected to everyone, favors traded in six degrees or less, and Briggs Holloway apparently sits at the center of this web doing quiet good deeds for people who didn't ask.
I hate how decent he is. It would be so much easier if he were terrible.
This morning, the problem is the bedroom floor.
Specifically, the section under my bed. I'd been sleeping on an air mattress over it for three nights without issue until Princess Buttercup knocked a pen off the nightstand, batted it under the bed with the deliberate cruelty of a cat who wants to watch you suffer, and when I got on my stomach to retrieve it, my hand went through the floorboard.
Through it. Into open air. Cold, damp, crawlspace air rushing up through a hole roughly the size of a dinner plate.
So now I'm sitting cross legged on the mattress, staring at the gap in the floor, drinking coffee from the same mug I've been using since day one because my wine glasses are still in a box I can't find, and considering my options.
Option one: ignore it. The bed covers it. Nobody has to know.
Option two: call a contractor. Spend money I'm trying to conserve for the kitchen renovation.
Option three: fix it myself. YouTube exists. How hard can subflooring be.
Option four presents itself in the form of a knock on the side door at seven fifteen.
I don't have to open it. I already know who it is. The knock is distinctive. Three slow, heavy raps with a pause between each one, as if the person knocking is giving you time to prepare yourself for the fact that he's about to be helpful whether you want him to be or not.
Barefoot, in leggings and the oversized UNR sweatshirt I've owned since freshman year, I pad through the kitchen. Princess Buttercup is already at the window, tail twitching.
"Traitor," I mutter.
She chirps. At the window. At him.
Opening the side door, I find Briggs standing on the flat stone that serves as a back step. He's in a thermal henley, jeans, those same boots. Sawdust on his forearms. Behind him, Tinsel is sitting in my yard with his tongue out, looking thrilled to be here.
"Morning." He lifts a thermos. "Brought coffee. Figured yours is the instant stuff from the grocery bag."
"My coffee is fine."
"It's not, but okay." He leans against the doorframe. "Heard from Ray the crawlspace under your bedroom is open in a couple spots. Said the subfloor's got soft patches."
"I found one."
His eyebrows go up. "How."
"My cat knocked a pen under the bed. My hand went through the floor."
He processes this with the minimal expression of a man who communicates primarily through physical labor. A nod. A glance past me toward the hallway. "I've got leftover tongue and groove from a barn project. Enough to patch it, maybe enough to redo the whole bedroom floor if the joists are sound."
"Briggs."
"Yeah."
"Why do you keep doing this."
He looks at me. Direct. Those blue eyes that I've been avoiding for four days because every time they land on me, something in my chest that I thought I'd shut down after Daniel starts making noise.
"Because your floor has a hole in it."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got."
We stand there. Him in the doorway, me barefoot in a sweatshirt. The morning is cold. Pine and frost. His breath makes small clouds in the air between us.
"Fine." I step back. "But you're drinking the instant coffee."
"Deal."
He steps inside, and my kitchen gets smaller.
Immediately. Physically. The man takes up space without trying.
He moves carefully around the counter, ducks under the drying rack I hung from the ceiling for my salvaged books, takes the mug I hand him without complaint.
Our fingers don't touch. I make sure of it.
Tinsel tries to follow him in. I block the door with my foot.
"Your dog stays outside."
A whimper from Tinsel. A pointed look from Briggs. "He's gonna sit there and cry."
"Then he'll have something in common with me after I look at my floor again."
That almost gets a smile out of him. A twitch at the corner of his mouth. He hides it behind the coffee mug.
We move the bed first. The air mattress is light, but the old metal bed frame I found in the back room when I moved in takes both of us. He lifts his end with one hand. I use two. The frame scrapes across the floor, revealing the damage underneath.
It's worse than the dinner plate hole. Now that I can see the full section, there are soft spots running in a line toward the wall.
Briggs crouches, presses his palm flat against the boards.
Three of them give. He stands, looks at the ceiling, looks at the floor, does some calculation I can't follow.
"Joists are fine. It's just the subflooring. Moisture damage from a leak upstairs, probably years ago. I can cut out the bad section, sister a couple joists for support, lay the new boards. Half a day, maybe less."
"How much."
"For what."
"For the lumber. The time. I'm paying you."
"You're not paying me."
"Briggs, I can't keep letting you fix my house for free. That's insane."
He stands up from his crouch. Slowly. Which puts him at full height in my bedroom, barely two feet from where I'm standing, close enough that I can see the grain of sawdust still caught in the hair on his forearms.
"The lumber's scrap from a project I already finished. It's sitting in my barn doing nothing. If you want to pay for materials, you can buy the screws. They're about eight bucks at the hardware store in town."
"Eight bucks."
"If you want the premium ones. The cheap ones are five."
My mouth is fighting me. It wants to smile. I won't let it.
"I'll buy the premium ones."
"Big spender."
He goes to get the lumber. I make more instant coffee, which is terrible, and spend the ten minutes he's gone standing at the kitchen window watching him load boards from his barn onto a hand truck.
He rolls them across the tree line in two trips.
Tinsel follows with a stick, tail wagging, convinced this is a group activity.
Princess Buttercup watches from the windowsill. Her tail curls around her paws. She purrs.
"Stop it," I tell her.
She purrs louder.
When Briggs comes back, he brings a circular saw, a pry bar, a measuring tape, and a carpenter's pencil behind his ear. The saw goes on the front lawn, which currently has no porch above it. He kneels in my bedroom, marks the bad section, cuts the boards free with a hand saw to avoid dust inside.
I'm supposed to be working. There's a manuscript on my laptop that's due in two weeks.
An indie romance author whose dialogue tags need serious help.
Instead, I'm sitting on a box in the hallway watching Briggs Holloway rip out my bedroom floor, and I'm thinking about things I absolutely should not be thinking about.
His hands. How he holds the pry bar, knuckles wide, tendons visible under tanned skin. The concentration on his face when he measures. He mouths the numbers to himself. Pencil behind his ear like someone's grandfather, except nothing about the body attached to that pencil reads grandfather.
He's filled out since college. At twenty, he was tall and lean. A runner's build. Now he's broader. Heavier through the chest and shoulders. Eight years of hauling trees and splitting wood have done something to his frame that my body keeps noticing even when my brain tells it to stop.
"Can you hand me the measuring tape?" He's in the crawlspace hole, half his body below the floor, looking up at me.
I grab it from the floor and crouch to hand it down. Our fingers brush. His are warm, rough. Mine are cold.
"Thanks." He disappears back under the floor. "Your joists are solid. Red fir. Whoever built this place knew what they were doing with the bones."
"Just not the skin."
A sound comes from under the floor. Low, quiet. He's laughing. Under my bedroom, in the crawlspace of my disaster cabin, Briggs Holloway is laughing at my joke.
My chest does the thing again. The noise thing. I ignore it.
He works for two hours. The old boards come out, the new ones go in, trimmed to size with the circular saw on the lawn, carried in, fitted, screwed down with a drill that whirs every few minutes. I stop pretending to work and start handing him tools when he asks.
We talk. Grudgingly, on my part. Brief answers that get longer without my permission.