I wanted someone else to check the boiler, to deal with the plumbing, to figure out if the roof leak was just a leak or a metaphor for my life.
Just once, I wanted to be the one handed a room key and told to relax.
2
Sebastian
“I HAVE A FLIGHT TOcatch, so we’ll need to keep this quick,” I said, matching Rene’s pace as we headed toward the conference room.
She shot me a knowing smile. It used to mean something else, years ago, but that was behind us. These days, she was engaged, and I was long past my playboy phase, whatever that even was.
If someone had told me back in high school that I’d one day be working at NASA and turning down dates, I wouldn’t have believed them. Back then, I was the quiet kid. A round, red-cheeked, sci-fi and action figures fan. The kind of guy teachers loved and girls overlooked.
But sometime after college, an action figure body sprang out of me all at once. I got stronger and grew into my height. The shift surprised me as much as anyone.
“Jesus, you have veins now,” Ruby—who had known me since high school—had said the first time we ran into each other again at twenty-five.
We’d had one night that defied logic and turned into a decade of something undefined. She lived in Coral Bay,managing her family’s inn, and I saw her whenever I came home to California to visit my parents in Blueshore, the nearby town we were both from.
Neither of us pretended this could be anything more.
I had my career in another state. She had her no-relationship rule.
“Sawyer, we’ve got a problem with the structural specs on the service module,” Moore opened as soon as I stepped into the room, then went on with the specifics.
The conference room smelled faintly of burnt coffee and recycled air, the hum of the servers next door filling the quiet seconds between discussions. It buzzed with tension, but I was used to it. Stress was background noise in this job, and staying calm was part of the design.
“If the service module’s configuration has shifted, we need to rerun the load-bearing analysis before it compromises the structure,” I said, pulling up the models on the wall screen. “That’s why you looped me in, right?”
Being a structural engineer in Houston, I’d heard more than my fair share of “Houston, we have a problem” to last me a lifetime.
But God, I loved my job. An awkward kid’s dream come true.
THE FLIGHT TO CALIFORNIAwas uneventful. I answered a few emails, reviewed updated load simulations, and tried to ignore the guy next to me who insisted on narrating his entire Netflix show out loud to his girlfriend.
When I landed, I picked up the rental car and headed down the coastal highway toward Coral Bay, cracking the window open to let in the sea breeze. The ocean looked different here—wilder, looser. The roads curved like they didn’t care about efficiency, only about being beautiful. California never changed. But I always noticed the changes in me when I came back.
I didn’t stop by my parents’ place first. I’d already texted my mother that I was coming into town, but might be a little late. She’d written back a smiley face and a,“Let me guess: Coral Bay?”
I replied with a thumbs up.
My parents knew Ruby and her family. They all still lived in Blueshore. They understood instinctively that Ruby and I had a thing going, but held off asking about it or about what relationships I did or didn’t have in Texas. My father was keen on me settling down with “a nice woman and a few kids,” but my mom shushed him with a patient “He should do whatever makes him happy.”
Sometimes, I did just that when I got home to California—drove straight to Coral Bay, knocked on Ruby’s door, and got my fix for a few hours. Then I’d head to Blueshore, already showered and changed, ready to be the good engineer son they were proud of.
BLUESHORE WAS SMALLand sleepy, its shoreline the only draw. Coral Bay had more bustle, hidden beach coves, pastel-fronted shops, and a promenade that came alive onwinter weekends and all through summer. The town curved like a crescent with the bay, its clear shallows dotted with coral beds that gave it its name.
The inn bearing the town’s name looked the same as always when I reached it—beachfront charm wrapped in a garden, a wide deck, and tall trees casting sun-dappled shade, the main house’s yellow paint slightly weathered from too much salt in the air, and vines Ruby let climb wild on purpose. One corner of the roofline looked suspicious, and I made a mental note to check it before I left.
I parked behind a pickup with a local contractor’s logo on the door and got out. Before I even reached the inn’s front steps, I heard her voice.
She hadn’t seen me yet. She was in jeans and her least-favorite jacket—the one she threw on to deal with off-hours guests’ complaints, her curls piled on top of her head in the way that always made her look like she had better things to do than impress anyone.
But she’d always been impressive. Long before she was pretty in the world’s eyes. Her wit or her beauty, whichever you saw first, did the job.
Now she was mid-argument with a contractor who clearly underestimated her.
“I’m telling you, it’s not simple water damage,” Ruby said. “The whole wing reeks of damp plaster. If you don’t have the expertise, fine. But don’t act like you’re doing me a favor by lowballing the work.”
