Chapter 3 #2
"Just a lot going on with Yates's company," I said, which was true enough to satisfy the question without requiring me to explain the actual full extent of what had unsettled me. "An acquisition. A lot of public attention."
"That sounds like a lot to carry alongside all of this," Daniel said, gesturing at the theater behind us. "You know you can always dial back your involvement here if you need to. Nobody expects you to run at full capacity through something like that."
"," I said, surprising myself with the certainty of it, "this is the thing keeping me steady right now. I'd rather have more of it, not less."
Daniel studied me for a moment, then nodded, apparently satisfied with the honesty of the answer even if he didn't fully understand what lay beneath it, and we spent the rest of the afternoon back inside the auditorium, cataloging plaster and photographing damage, and I found, by the time the light started failing outside, that I'd gone hours without once checking my phone for a message from Yates, a small, unremarkable fact that felt, walking to my car that evening, considerably larger than it should have.
I stopped at a small hardware store on my way home, needing a specific grade of sandpaper for a sample restoration test I wanted to run on a piece of salvaged molding, and found myself lingering in the aisles longer than necessary, enjoying the ordinary, uncomplicated pleasure of a task with a clear beginning and a clear end, unlike nearly everything else currently occupying my attention.
The store's owner, an older man named Frank who'd sold me materials for years, asked how the Bellweather project was coming along, and I found myself talking more animatedly than I had in weeks, describing the plasterwork, the roof stabilization, the funding gap I was still working to close.
He listened with the genuine interest of someone who cared about the actual craft of restoration rather than its politics, and I left the store feeling lighter than I had going in, grateful for an ordinary conversation about sandpaper and plaster compounds that asked nothing of me beyond simply being present and knowledgeable about work I loved.
I drove home with the small bag of supplies on the passenger seat, already planning tomorrow's tasks, and understood, pulling into the driveway, that this quiet, growing absorption in my own work was becoming something more than a distraction from what was happening with Yates.
It was becoming, gradually and without my full permission, the actual center of gravity around which the rest of my life was starting to organize itself.
Yates was already home when I arrived, an unusual occurrence for a Tuesday evening, and he looked up from his laptop at the kitchen table as I came in, supplies bag in hand.
"You're later than usual," he said, though not unkindly, more curious than critical.
"Hardware store," I said, setting the bag down. "Sandpaper emergency."
"Only you would consider that an emergency," he said, smiling, and for a moment the easy familiarity of our old rhythm reasserted itself, banter that required no effort, born of years of knowing exactly how to make each other laugh.
"How was your day?" I asked, settling into the chair across from him.
"Busy," he said, and something in the careful, general full extent of the word made me look up, though I couldn't yet identify what exactly had caught my attention. "Campaign stuff. Nothing interesting."
"You keep saying that," I observed, mostly teasing, though some quieter part of me registered the pattern for what it was, "nothing interesting, every single day. At some point I'm going to start wondering what interesting thing you're protecting me from hearing about."
He laughed, a touch too quickly, and changed the subject to dinner, and I let the moment pass without pressing further, filing the small, nagging observation away in the same place I kept most of my low-grade unease those days, present but not yet urgent enough to demand my full attention.
We ate dinner together that evening, something simple, pasta thrown together from what was already in the refrigerator, and the conversation drifted easily to the Bellweather timeline, to a funny story from Daniel about a contractor who'd shown up to the wrong job site, and for an hour or so, the earlier flicker of unease receded into the comfortable background hum of an ordinary evening between two people who still, underneath everything, genuinely enjoyed each other's company.
"I miss this," Yates said, unprompted, midway through the meal. "Just this. Dinner, no phones, no schedule to manage."
"We could have more of it," I said, "if you wanted."
"I do want it," he said, and something in his voice sounded almost wistful, as though the ordinary evening in front of him felt, even as he sat inside it, already slightly out of reach. "I'm going to try to make more room for it. Once things settle down with the acquisition."
I nodded, accepting the promise the way I'd accepted so many similar promises before, without quite examining how many times I'd already heard some version of it, and we finished dinner in comfortable quiet, the earlier unease tucked away for another day, though it would not, I understood even then in some unacknowledged corner of my mind, stay tucked away indefinitely.