Laughter rippled around the table, easing the tightness in my chest.
“Serious talk can wait an hour,” Ethan said. “We just got here and inhaled half your pantry. I need to move or I’m going to fall asleep in my chair.”
Lucas kicked his boot against Gideon’s under the table. “And I, for one, am dying to see your to-do list.”
I made a face. “It’s in a notebook.”
“What’s the next project?” he asked cheerfully.
I hesitated, flipping mental pages. There were so many things wrong with this place it was hard to pick just one.
“The porch,” I said. “The middle step’s soft. Maude keeps warning people, but someone’s going to forget. And the railingleans like it’s trying to escape. Gideon and I worked on it, but there’s more to do. It’s … not exactly safe.”
Ethan’s expression brightened in a way that probably shouldn’t have reassured me as much as it did. “Structural? That I can do.”
Lucas cracked his knuckles. “Exterior work in coastal humidity? My favorite.”
“We’ll need to check the anchoring and the joists underneath,” Elias said, already in planning mode. “See how far the rot goes.”
Gideon brushed his knuckles down my arm. “You up for supervising?”
“Supervising?” I echoed.
“You heard the man.” Lucas winked. “You point. We build.”
I should have protested that it was my house, my responsibility, my project. But the truth was, the idea of watching these men swarm my sad, sagging porch like some kind of tactical home improvement squad was … weirdly appealing.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s fix the porch.”
Maude shooed us toward the door. “Go on, then. I’ll clear this mess before it hardens into concrete.”
Outside, the air was bright and a little too sharp, the sunlight bouncing off the sand and salt-streaked windows. The porch looked worse with four pairs of trained eyes on it—rail listing visibly, paint flaking in tired curls, that treacherous middle step giving a disgruntled creak when Ethan tested it with one careful boot.
“Yeah, that’s a lawsuit waiting to happen,” Lucas said.
“Or a broken hip,” Maude called from inside.
“Or a broken Hazel,” Gideon muttered under his breath.
My stomach did a small, traitorous flip at the way he said my name.
In what felt like seconds, they had a plan. Ethan disappeared under the porch with a flashlight, came back out pronouncing the underlying beams “salvageable with reinforcement.” Elias started rattling off measurements and load-bearing calculations that made my HR-brain go pleasantly fuzzy. Lucas was already halfway to the shed with Gideon, emerging moments later armed with tools I didn’t even know we owned: a circular saw that had probably belonged to my grandmother’s second husband, extra boards, a box of screws that looked older than I was.
They moved like they’d been doing this together for years. No wasted words, no jockeying for position. Elias marking cuts, Lucas sawing, Ethan lifting and holding while Gideon anchored.
“Let me help,” I said at one point, hovering uselessly with my notebook.
“You are helping,” Gideon said, not looking up from the screw he was driving in.
“How?”
“You’re right there,” he said simply. “And you’re not leaving.”
That landed somewhere deep.
“Here.” Lucas tossed me a pencil. “You can be official scribe. Write ‘porch: handled.’”
By the time the sun shifted from late-morning bright to something gentler, the porch looked … different. Still old, still weathered, but the kind of old you trusted. The railing stood straight and solid under Ethan’s test weight. The middle step no longer squished when I bounced on it; it thudded, reassuring and stubborn.
