Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
DELANEY
For a second I don't remember where I am.
Then the smell hits me. Cedar and old books and the faint, persistent ghost of lavender, and I remember everything in the right order this time. Not the wrong order, not piece by piece like a crime scene. Just I'm here. I came here. I chose this.
That's different from every other morning this week.
The cottage is full of the gray-gold light of early morning in October, coming through windows that probably haven't been cleaned since April.
The mug is still on the kitchen shelf where I left it last night, after I finally stopped crying and made tea and sat at the table for a long time doing nothing productive and everything necessary.
My laptop is still open on the table. The document with What I'm Keeping at the top, still empty below the title.
That's fine. It doesn't have to be written yet. It just has to exist.
I find the bathroom, find my bag, find the fact that Elise kept spare toothbrushes in the cabinet under the sink because she was the kind of person who thought about what guests might need.
I brush my teeth with a toothbrush still in its packaging that's probably been here for two years and feel an absurd wave of gratitude toward a woman who isn't here to receive it.
Thanks, Elise, I think. For all of it.
The cottage is cold.
Not dangerously — it's October, not January, but the particular cool of a house that hasn't been heated in months.
I find the thermostat, the original kind with a dial and no digital display and turn it until I hear the furnace decide to participate.
It makes several opinions about this known before settling into a steady hum.
While the heat thinks about it, I make coffee. There's a can of Elise's ground coffee in the freezer still sealed, and a coffeemaker older than some of my college textbooks but functional. I stand in the kitchen while it works and look around the room properly for the first time.
The cottage is small. I mean this in a good way — not cramped, just intentional.
Every room is sized for actual living rather than for impressing people.
The kitchen has the original cabinets painted a soft white, open shelving on one wall where Elise kept her mugs and her cookbooks, and a small ceramic bowl of sea glass she'd collected on the one trip to the coast she took every year.
The living room has a fireplace that probably works, a sofa that's deeply comfortable in the slightly collapsed way of furniture that's been sat on by someone who loved it, and bookshelves on every available wall.
It's the opposite of the house in Raleigh, which Jason and I spent three weeks choosing finishes for and which always looked like it was trying to be photographed.
I pour my coffee. I stand at the window above the sink and look out at the garden.
It's gone a bit wild. Elise slowed down in the last few years.
I knew that, and you can see it in the uncut edges and the roses that need pruning and the section of the back wall where something is pulling away from the foundation.
But the structure is still there. The bones are still there.
You can see exactly what it was and what it could be again.
Good bones, I think, and then I think about the contractor who's coming this morning, Ethan Mercer, check my phone for the time.
8:47 a.m.
I have just over an hour.
I look down at myself. Clothes I drove here in. Yesterday's blazer, which I apparently cannot stop sleeping in. Hair that requires immediate intervention.
Right. Okay. We're going to be functional human being by ten o'clock. That's the goal.
I am a functional human being by ten o'clock.
Marginally. The bar is not high. But I've showered, I'm in clean jeans and a sweater, my hair is doing something reasonable, and I've had two cups of coffee. Given that six days ago my life ended in a hotel room on the eleventh floor, I'm choosing to call this a win.
At 9:58, I hear a truck.
I hear it before I see it — the particular sound of a work truck, not a commuter vehicle, slowing down on the street outside. I move to the front window without examining why, and I see a dark green pickup pull up to the curb. Clean, but not new. A Mercer Custom Homes decal on the door.
The man who gets out is not what I expected.
I don't know what I expected. Someone older, perhaps.
Someone with a clipboard and the professional remove of a person doing a job.
He's got a clipboard, technically — a tablet in one hand — but the rest of it doesn't match that image at all.
Tall. Black hair, a little longer than precise, the kind that looks like it doesn't get cut on a schedule because there are more interesting things to think about.
Work clothes — boots, Carhartt jacket, and he moves the way people move when they're completely comfortable in their own bodies, not performing it, just in it.
I watch him look at the cottage.
Not the way you look at a job site. The way you look at something you're already understanding, already reading.
His eyes go to the roofline first, then the fascia on the north side, then back down to the front porch foundation, where there's a slight settling, I'd noticed and worried about and added to the mental list. He finds it in about four seconds.
Then he looks up and sees me at the window.
I step back. Then decide stepping back is ridiculous and step forward again. I raise a hand in a wave that's about forty percent more awkward than I intended.
He gives a brief, easy nod and what appears to be a slight twitch of the lips, and heads for the front door.
"Ms. Hart," he extends his hand when I open the door where light blue eyes make contact. Firm grip, brief, no performance. "Ethan Mercer. Thanks for getting back to me."
"Sorry it took so long." I step back to let him in. "It's been a week."
"No problem." He comes inside and does the thing I noticed from the window — the reading-the-room thing, the way his attention moves through the space with quiet, systematic interest. He notes the coffeemaker, the open shelving, the ceiling in the corner where there's a faint brown stain I've been looking at since I woke up.
"I appreciate you being here for the inspection.
Makes it easier to explain things in person. "
"Is that the leak?" I ask, pointing at the ceiling stain.
"Probably where it's been coming through, yeah." He's already looking up at it. "The source is going to be higher— could be the dormer flashing, could be the soffit. I'll know more once I'm up there." He glances at me. "I can walk you through what I find if you want or just put it in the report."
"Walk me through it, please,” I say. "I want to understand what I'm dealing with."
Something shifts in his expression, not a smile exactly, but something adjacent to it. An approval he's not performing. "Good. Most people don't ask."
"Most people probably don't want to know."
"That's the problem," he says, and turns toward the back of the house.
He spends forty minutes on the roof. I spend those forty minutes doing something I haven't done in a week, which is work.
Real, focused work. I open the Durham brand audit on my laptop at the kitchen table and actually concentrate.
The furnace is doing its job now; the coffee is holding, and there's something oddly stabilizing about the sounds from above — footsteps on the roof, methodical and unhurried, the occasional sound of something being examined.
Someone is taking care of a problem.
It doesn't have to be my problem to feel good about.
He comes back through the front door at 10:43, which I know because I checked when I heard the truck door. He's carrying the tablet, and there's a small piece of what I now recognize as original aluminum gutter in his hand.
He sets it on the kitchen counter without asking and pulls something up on the tablet.
"Okay," he says. "The good news is that the structural framing is sound.
Whoever built this in 1947 knew what they were doing.
" He turns the tablet toward me so I can see the photos.
"The bad news is the flashing around the rear dormer needs full replacement — it's the original, which means it's seventy-seven years old and it's been holding on through stubbornness and spite alone.
" He points to the next photo. "The soffit on the north side has some rot.
Not critical, but it needs to come out before it gets worse. "
"And the gutters?"
He holds up the piece of aluminum. "This happens when you leave 1980s gutters on a 1947 cottage for forty years."
I take it from him. It's light, and when I apply the slightest pressure, it gives in a way gutters are not supposed to give. "So, they're done."
"They're very done," he says, and there's something so matter of fact about it — they're very done — that I almost smile.
Almost.
"What's the timeline?" I ask.
"Flashing is a week's work, maybe less depending on the weather.
Soffit repair I can run concurrently. Gutters we can do at the end.
" He names a number that's fair, I can tell it's fair the same way I can tell when someone's overselling me, which is a skill you develop when you've sat in enough client meetings.
"Materials and labor. No markup on the materials. "
I look at him. "That seems low."
"It's accurate," he says simply.
I eye the estimate on his tablet for a moment. Then I look up. "Can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"You texted me that the inspection was free. The estimate is fair to the point of being suspicious. Is this a thing you do? For people Mags sends you?"
The almost-smile becomes something slightly more definite. Not a full smile, a contained one, like he's rationing it. "Mags doesn't send me people."
"She told me you were the one to call."