3. Daniel
CHAPTER THREE
Daniel
Rebecca had the Cartwright Farms punch list open on her laptop before I'd finished my second cup of coffee, and by the time I sat down across from her at the conference table she'd already color-coded it by contractor, red for anything that would embarrass us in front of the client on Thursday.
"Landscape lighting's still not right along the north path," she said, turning the screen toward me. "I told the electrician's foreman it needs to read warm, not institutional. He looked at me like I'd asked him to explain color theory."
"You want me to call him?"
"I want you to let me handle it, which I am handling, I'm just telling you in case he calls you crying.
" She said it without looking up, already typing a note to herself, and I laughed, because that was Rebecca, competent and a little merciless and entirely unbothered by anyone's feelings but the client's.
We'd worked like this for six years, since she'd come over from a commercial real estate firm with a Rolodex I still didn't fully understand the value of and a willingness to do whatever the job required that had made her indispensable inside about eight months.
She anticipated things. I'd say half a sentence about a problem and she'd already have three solutions ranked by cost, and more than once I'd caught myself thinking that the company would have stalled out at half its current size without her, which was probably true and probably also something I should have examined more closely than I did.
Marcus stuck his head into the conference room. "You two got a minute? Grading crew's asking about the retention pond spec again."
"I've got it," I said, standing, grateful for a problem I could solve with my hands instead of a spreadsheet.
"I'll have the lighting fixed by lunch," Rebecca called after me. "Don't let Marcus talk you into changing the pond depth again, we already re-engineered it twice."
"Yes, ma'am."
Out on the site, the heat was already climbing, that specific Tennessee humidity that made a hard hat feel like a punishment by nine in the morning.
Marcus walked me through the grading issue, which turned out to be nothing, a subcontractor's misreading of an elevation number, fixed in fifteen minutes with a level and a conversation.
That was the job I'd fallen in love with twelve years ago, dirt and math and a problem you could actually finish, and I stood there afterward for a minute longer than I needed to, just looking at the pond taking form against the tree line, feeling something like the pride I hoped I'd feel Saturday night, except this version belonged only to me and the crew and didn't require a microphone.
"Natalie coming Saturday?" Marcus asked, wiping his forehead with his sleeve.
"Course she's coming. Wouldn't be much of a night without her."
"Good. Been a while since I've seen her out at a company thing.
" He said it easily, no weight behind it, just an old friend noting a fact, and I nodded and didn't think much more about it, because it was true and also not strange.
Natalie ran her own business now. She had clients and a kid's school and a life that didn't orbit mine the way it had when the company was small enough to fit in a garage.
That wasn't a problem. That was just what growth looked like, for both of us.
My brother found me a few minutes later, leaning against the tailgate of his truck with a thermos of coffee that had gone cold hours ago, watching the crew set the last of the pavers along the plaza's edge.
Ben had been a foreman at Kessler Outdoor for nine years, ever since he'd finished a stint doing something he still wouldn't fully describe in the Army Corps of Engineers, and he had a habit of saying the thing everyone else in the room was thinking but too polite, or too employed, to say out loud.
"Deb was doing her bit again this morning," he said. "The work wife thing."
"I heard."
"You laugh along with it every time, you know. I've been watching you do it for about two years now." He said it without much weight, more observation than accusation, which was Ben's whole style. "Not saying it means anything. Just saying you laugh."
"It's a joke, Ben."
"Sure. Jokes usually are, right up until they're not.
" He took a sip of the cold coffee, grimaced, and kept talking anyway, the way he always did when something was actually on his mind rather than idle noise.
"You remember when Rebecca started, you asked me what I thought of her.
I told you she was sharp and you should hire her on the spot.
Still think that. Doesn't mean I think it's normal for half the office to have a running bit about the two of you being married. "
"Nobody thinks we're actually married."
"I didn't say they thought it. I said they've got a bit about it.
Bits usually start because there's something in the room worth making a bit out of.
" He shrugged, already moving off the subject the way he usually did once he'd said his piece, unwilling to belabor a point past the point of usefulness. "Natalie coming Saturday?"
"Everybody's asking me that like there's a reason she wouldn't."
"Nobody's saying there's a reason." Ben knocked his knuckles once against the truck bed, a habit he'd had since we were kids, some private punctuation mark that meant he was done for now. "Just checking. She's good people. Better than you deserve, probably."
"Thanks for that."
"Anytime." He grinned, the grin we'd both apparently inherited from our father, and went back to his crew, and I stood there another minute turning his comment over before deciding, the way I decided most things that week, that there was nothing in it worth losing sleep over.
Ben liked to needle. It was practically his whole personality outside of work.
I filed the conversation away next to a dozen other small comments I'd absorbed and dismissed that week, and went back to the office to finish the Whitmore bid.
Back at the office, Deb from the estimating team caught me in the hallway with a grin already halfway formed. "You and the missus running late again tomorrow?"
"Which missus?" I said it as a joke, half-formed, and only understood a beat too late that she meant Rebecca, because Deb laughed and gestured down the hall where Rebecca was on the phone, one hand pressed over her free ear, pacing the length of the reception area like she was trying to walk the lighting subcontractor into submission through sheer proximity.
"You two are like an old married couple around here," Deb said. "She finishes your sentences in meetings. It's kind of terrifying."
"She's good at her job," I said, which was true, and let the comment roll off me the way I let most office jokes roll off me, because there was nothing underneath it as far as I could tell.
People joked about work spouses in every office in America.
It didn't mean anything except that Rebecca and I worked well together, which was the entire reason I'd hired her.
Later that afternoon, a rep from the awards committee called to confirm logistics for Saturday, table assignments and who'd be walking up with me for the photo afterward. "We'll want you, obviously," the rep said, "and is your wife attending?"
"She'll be there," I said. "Wouldn't miss it."
"Wonderful. We'll make sure there's a seat for her at the head table."
I hung up and went looking for Rebecca to confirm the final headcount for our table, found her at her desk finishing the lighting call, and relayed the awards committee's question about seating.
"They know Natalie's coming, right?" I asked. "I don't want a mix-up like the chamber dinner two years ago."
Something passed over Rebecca's face, quick, there and gone, the kind of expression I might not have noticed at all if I hadn't happened to be looking right at her.
"I'll double check with them," she said, and her voice was perfectly even, perfectly professional, and if there was anything underneath it I couldn't have told you what, and didn't ask, because I had four other things to do before lunch and this wasn't one of the ones that seemed to matter.
"Thanks. It's a big night. I want it to go smooth."
"It will." She smiled, quick and easy, back to business before I'd finished the sentence. "You've earned it, Daniel. Twelve years for this."
"We've earned it," I said, meaning the company, the crew, all of it, and she nodded and turned back to her screen, and I went back to my office to draft the Whitmore bid, already thinking about Thursday's walkthrough and not at all about the flicker I'd seen cross her face, and not at all about Ben's cold coffee and his comment about bits needing something in the room to be about, because neither of those things had seemed like anything at the time, and because I had built an entire working relationship, an entire professional life, on the assumption that Rebecca was simply good at her job and nothing more complicated than that.
I believed it, too. That was the thing I couldn't have explained to anyone who asked, not that week and not for a long while after.
I wasn't hiding anything. I wasn't managing two lives or lying to anyone about where I was or who I was with.
Natalie was coming Saturday. I'd told the rep so myself, without hesitation, because there had never been a single moment where I considered not wanting her there.
I had simply built a decade of habits that made her invisible without my noticing, and the habits ran so deep by then that I couldn't have found the seam if you'd handed me a flashlight and told me exactly where to look.