His parents' house had always been perfect at Christmas. Understated. His mother would hang a single, elegant wreath on the front door—nothing excessive. Inside, a tasteful tree with matching ornaments in silver and white. Sophisticated. Refined.
Homemade was not sophisticated. Homemade was embarrassing.
He remembered being seven years old, coming home from school with construction paper chains. Red and green loops, held together with too much glue. He'd been so proud of them.
Until he’d shown his mother and she’d explained why it wasn’t going on the tree.
It was a lesson a child needed to learn.
Lauren's version of Christmas was homemade everything.
Lauren humming carols while she hot-glued felt to God knows what.
All that effort, all that construction, all that…joy.
Tom's hands stilled on the keyboard.
Foundation failure happened when the ground beneath couldn't support what you were trying to build. When the load was too much, or the soil wasn't right, or you'd miscalculated something fundamental from the start.
You could have perfect walls, perfect framing, a roof that would last decades—but if the foundation was wrong, the whole thing would crack.
Tom rubbed his face hard.
His phone buzzed. He grabbed it too fast, but it wasn’t Lauren.
Tom set the phone down and stared at his monitor. The foundation plan stared back at him, half-finished and full of gaps.
Everything built on the foundation. Get it wrong and the rest didn't matter—the structure would fail eventually, stress cracks spreading through every wall until the whole thing came down.
Tom typed a number into the spec sheet—foundation depth, eighteen inches.
The office noise pressed in around him. Someone was talking about New Year’s plans. Someone else was complaining about traffic. Normal sounds from people whose foundations were solid, whose marriages weren't cracking apart.
He pulled up the soil report and forced himself to focus. Load-bearing capacity. Frost line depth. Drainage considerations.
But all he could think about was Lauren's voice, full of hurt as she'd shoved that quilt at him. The empty squares at the bottom, waiting for a future.
Tom stared at the incomplete plans on his screen.
What if Lauren was serious? What if she wasn’t coming back?
Had he really hurt her that badly?
You couldn't fix a foundation once the structure was built on top of it. You could try to shore it up, add supports, reinforce weak points—but if the base was fundamentally wrong, eventually everything would fail.
He'd thought their foundation was solid. Five years of marriage. A house. A life built together.
He wouldn't—hecouldn't—just accept that it was over.
He foundhis brother in the break room. He sat down heavily across from him.
“So the client wants more natural light in the master suite," Jake said. "But they're also concerned about privacy from the neighbors. I was thinking if we?—"
“What if I fucked up?” Tom interrupted.
Jake set down his coffee. "Is this about Lauren?"
Tom rested his head in his hands. "I have no idea what I'm doing, Jake. I thought the flowers would fix things. I thought if I just gave her space to calm down, she'd see she was overreacting."
