17. Sabine
SABINE
The question leaves my mouth before my brain approves it. Just slips out, casual as anything, like I haven't spent the last forty-eight hours white-knuckling my way through every possible version of this moment. Like my heart isn't hammering so hard my ribs ache.
Where would I put my desk?
Jagger's face does something I've never seen before.
The hard angles of his jaw go slack. His tusks catch the light as his mouth opens, then closes, then opens again.
Nothing comes out. The most feared bounty hunter in the Lower District, rendered completely mute by a question about office furniture.
I step past him into the house.
The front door sticks. I shoulder it and the hinges scream, a sound like metal dying.
Inside, the air is thick with dust and old wood and something faintly green, like moss growing in hidden places.
The entryway opens into a main room with wide plank floors, warped but intact, and a brick fireplace that takes up most of the far wall.
The mantle is a single rough-hewn beam. Cobwebs drape from it like lace curtains.
I pull my notebook from my bag. The small one. Grid-ruled, spiral-bound, purchased in a three-pack from the office supply store on Ninth. I uncap my pen.
The main room is approximately fourteen by eighteen.
I pace it off, counting steps, then jot the measurements.
Ceiling height is generous. Nine feet, maybe nine and a half.
Good bones. The phrase my mother used when she walked through houses she couldn't afford, touching doorframes with reverent fingers.
Good bones, Sabine. Everything else is just work.
I write: Floors - sand and refinish. $800-1200. Materials only if we do labor ourselves.
The fireplace needs the mortar repointed. I crouch and run my finger along the joints between the bricks. Some crumble at the touch. Others hold firm.
Fireplace repoint - $400. Flue inspection - $150.
Jagger's shadow fills the doorway behind me. I don't turn around. If I look at his face right now, if I see whatever expression is living there, I will lose the thin thread of professional detachment keeping my hands steady on this notebook.
I move into the kitchen. Gutted is generous.
Gutted implies someone took things out with intention.
This kitchen looks like it was abandoned mid-thought.
Cabinet frames line the walls with no doors.
The countertop is a sheet of warped plywood laid over sawhorses.
A single copper pipe juts from the wall where a sink should be, capped with a rubber stopper.
Kitchen cabinets - custom build or prefab? Prefab: $2,400. Custom: $5,800. Countertop: butcher block, $600. Sink and faucet: $350.
I open the notebook wider and start a column system. Left column: item. Center: estimated cost. Right: priority level, ranked one through three. Ones are structural and safety. Twos are functional. Threes are aesthetic.
The well pump is a one. The roof is a one. The porch steps are a one, because that second step will snap under Jagger's weight within a week and the last thing I need is to file an insurance claim on a property this far from civilization.
Porch rebuild - full. $1,800. Lumber, hardware, labor.
His footsteps cross the main room. Heavy. Deliberate. The old boards groan under him in a way they didn't under me. He stops at the kitchen threshold.
"Sabine."
I flip to a fresh page and start the plumbing section. The copper is a genuine asset. Copper lasts. Copper is predictable. Copper does not surprise you with catastrophic failure at three in the morning.
"The well pump replacement, depending on depth and flow rate, runs between eight hundred and two thousand. We'll need a water test first. Sixty dollars at the county office. Non-negotiable. I am not drinking untested well water."
"Sabine."
"The roof." I tap my pen against the page. "Full tear-off and reshingle on a structure this size. You're looking at six to nine thousand, depending on materials. Metal roofing is more upfront but the lifespan is forty to sixty years versus twenty for asphalt. The math favors metal."
His hand covers mine. The pen stops. His fingers are enormous, warm, slightly rough along the knuckles. Green skin against my pale wrist. The runic tattoos pulse with a faint amber glow that makes the dust motes floating between us look like sparks.
I read the notebook. The numbers swim.
"You're staying."
Not a question.
I swallow hard. The grid lines on the page blur. I blink them back into focus.
"The total renovation budget, assuming we prioritize ones first and defer threes to next spring, is approximately fourteen thousand.
You paid nine for the property. Total investment: twenty-three thousand.
Current market comps in this county for renovated two-bedroom farmhouses on acreage are running thirty-eight to forty-two.
That's a sixty-five to eighty percent return on investment within eighteen months. "
His hand tightens over mine. Just slightly.
"The numbers work, Jagger."
Write at the top in careful block letters: RENOVATION SCHEDULE - PHASE ONE.
"Now show me where the water heater is, because if this place has a tank unit older than fifteen years, we're adding another line item."
I find the water heater in a closet behind the kitchen. Tank unit. The manufacturer's label is so faded I have to squat and angle my phone flashlight across it to read the date.
"Nineteen ninety-seven."
I write it down. Circle it, then circle it again.
"That's twenty-seven years old. Average lifespan on a residential tank unit is twelve."
I add it to the ones column. Priority one, subcategory A, underlined twice. Then I stand, brush the dust off my knees, and push open the back door.
Not a yard. Not anything that belongs to the word yard, which implies boundaries, a fence, maybe a property line you can see.
This is just land. Open, rolling, stupidly green land that stretches to a tree line so distant the trunks blur into a dark smudge against the sky.
Wildflowers grow in clumps and riots. No pattern.
No symmetry. Purple and yellow and a white lacy thing I don't know the name of, all tangled together like they argued about territory and decided to share.
A bird screams somewhere. Not sings. Screams. A raw, ugly, territorial sound that bounces off the hills and comes back doubled.
Something moves in the tall grass to my left and I flinch sideways, my shoulder hitting the doorframe. A fat brown rabbit bursts from the weeds, tears across the dirt, and vanishes under what used to be a porch. Its white tail bobs once. Gone.
I exhale.
And then I just stand there.
The wind moves across the field and the grass bends in a wave, all of it together, all at once, like the land is breathing.
The air tastes different here. Not clean, exactly.
Clean is sterile, filtered, the recycled office air pushed through HVAC systems I've been inhaling for eleven years.
This is the opposite. This air has dirt in it.
Pollen. The green bite of something growing and the sweet rot of something composting.
Every breath is a full inventory of living things.
My notebook hangs at my side. Forgotten.
I step off the porch.
The second step holds. Barely. I make a mental note and keep walking.
The grass comes up past my knees. My flats sink into the soft ground and I don't stop.
I don't go back for better shoes. I walk straight out into that field until the house is behind me and the sky is so wide and open above my head that I feel like I'm standing on the bottom of an ocean made of blue.
Something buzzes past my ear. Fat, fuzzy, aggressive. A bee as huge as my thumb. It circles my head twice and then bullets away toward the wildflowers, finished with me entirely, already on to better business.
I close my eyes.
The wind pushes my hair across my face. My bob is going to look like a disaster. The humidity out here is already doing unspeakable things to my ends.
I don't reach up to fix it.
This is the opposite of a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet is rows and columns.
Predictable inputs, controlled outputs. Everything in its labeled cell, every formula returning an expected value.
My apartment is a spreadsheet. My closet, organized by color value from lightest to darkest. My pantry, cans facing label-out.
My life, plotted on a timeline that runs in one straight line from responsible decision to responsible decision, each one flatter and quieter and safer than the last, until somewhere around year six I stopped being able to tell Tuesday from Thursday from Saturday.
Until the days blurred into a single beige line on a graph that never went up or down.
This field does not care about my graph.
A second rabbit bolts from the grass three feet to my right and I yelp, an actual yelp, and then I laugh.
The sound surprises me. Loud and sharp in all this open air.
It bounces off nothing. Gets absorbed by the grass and the dirt and the sky and the trees.
Nobody hears it. Nobody in the neighboring cubicle looks up with a pinched expression. Nobody shushes me in the break room.
I laugh again, just to hear it disappear.
Behind me, the porch creaks. Jagger's weight, enormous on those fragile boards. I picture him standing there, watching me ankle-deep in an unmanicured field, hair wrecked, flats ruined, laughing at rabbits.
The wind shifts direction and brings the smell of the tree line.
Dark earth. Pine. Something fungal and ancient beneath it.
Completely uncontrolled. No landscaping crew maintains these acres.
No HOA sends passive-aggressive letters about dandelion counts.
The land does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and it has been doing so for longer than my entire professional career.