"I took a sabbatical. Indefinite." I walked toward my trunk, the gravel crunching under my boots.
"An archivist taking a sabbatical during the busiest filing month of the year?" He followed me, his footsteps heavy. "What did you tell your supervisor?"
I stopped and looked at him. "I told them I had family business that required my full attention. Which wasn't a lie."
The truth was, the thought of sitting in that climate-controlled basement at the town hall, filing death certificates and land transfers for strangers, made me want to scream. I couldn't go back to a quiet office while my own life was being foreclosed upon. Out here, the air bit at my skin and the mud threatened to swallow my boots, but at least it was real. Every beam was a problem I could see; every debt was a number I could track. In the archives, I was a ghost among ghosts. Here, I was a woman trying to hold onto the ground beneath her feet.
I popped the lid. The interior light revealed my arsenal: two industrial-sized thermoses, a laptop in a rugged case, a mobile hotspot, a crate of color-coded folders, a space heater still in its box, and an insulated cooler packed with sandwiches I'd made at three in the morning because I couldn't sleep and needed something useful to do with my hands.
The crate held everything I'd gathered over the last week: permits from the county, invoices Ben had gotten from Lucia, copies of inspection reports. Three days of rebuilding the paper trail for a project that had been running on nothing but Ryan's ego.
Ben looked at the trunk, then at me. There were shadows under his eyes. "What is all this, Olivia? You're setting up an office in a garage with no walls?"
"Think of it as a command center," I said, lifting the crate of folders. The weight of the paper felt reassuring. "We need to get roofing permits pulled this week—we can't dry in without them.There's an outstanding invoice from October at Miller's Lumber that's blocking our account. And the county needs updated contractor information before they'll process anything new."
He opened his mouth to argue, the words visible for a second before he swallowed them. I saw the moment his defense crumbled, replaced by a weary sort of resignation. He looked at the folders, then at the structure behind us.
"I just... I don't know if this is healthy. Being out here every day, surrounded by all of this." He spoke softly, his voice dropping into a plea. He was trying to protect me from the very mess he was trying to save me from, and for a second, the look in his eyes made my breath hitch. It was the same steady, focused gaze he’d had at the funeral, but now it was directed solely at me.
"I’m staying, Ben. Get used to it."
He let out a long, ragged exhale that clouded in the cold. He didn't say anything else. He just reached into the trunk, grabbed the folding table and the space heater, and headed toward the house. I grabbed the thermoses and followed him, watching the way his shoulders braced against the wind. He moved with a practiced, heavy grace, a man who understood the weight of wood and steel better than the weight of words.
By eight o’clock, I’d claimed the unfinished garage bay.
The space heater hummed in the corner, fighting a losing battle against the open air, but it kept the worst of the chill from my joints. My laptop was open, the hotspot blinking a steady green like a heartbeat. I stood at the edge of the concrete slab, wrapping my hands around a steaming cup of coffee, watching the first truck rumble up the gravel drive.
It was a forest-green F-250, the fenders encrusted with salt and mud. The man who climbed out was stocky, wearing a heavy, oil-stained coat that looked like it had seen twenty winters. I recognized him immediately: Frank. He’d been at Ben’s thirtieth birthday party years ago, standing by the grill and arguing with Ryan about the best way to seal a deck. Ryan had wanted to talk about how it looked; Frank had only cared about whether it would last.
He just nodded at Ben and headed for the lumber pile, his movements slow and methodical.
Two more trucks arrived in quick succession. A younger man jumped out of one, moving with a restless, frantic energy that suggested he was already behind schedule. The other driver was older, moving with a pronounced limp that made his gait uneven. Walt. I remembered him from that same party; he’d spent the whole evening showing Ryan pictures of a timber-frame barn he’d finished in Vermont. Ryan had been polite, but I remembered the way he’d checked his watch while Walt talked about the joinery.
Now, Walt was here to finish what Ryan had started.
I watched them gather near the frame, their voices low and gravelly as they looked at the plans spread across Ben's tailgate. Ben said something I couldn't hear, then gestured toward the garage. Toward me. Three heads turned in unison.
Walt just nodded once, slow and steady. Frank glanced toward the garage, his eyes landing on me with a sharp, measuring curiosity.
I raised my coffee cup in a silent salute, my hand perfectly still.
Frank didn't smile, but he gave a slow, deliberate nod before turning back to the wood. The younger one jogged over, hand extended.
"Collins," he said, breathless. "Good to meet you, Mrs. Hartley." Before I could respond, he was already heading back to his truck, ready to start unloading.
I was the widow to them. The woman whose husband had nearly buried them all along with her. They didn't know if I was a liability or an asset yet. They were waiting to see if I’d be a distraction or the person who helped Ben keep this impossible promise. They were Ben's men, loyal to a fault, and I was the variable they hadn't accounted for.
I sat down at my table and opened the blue folder labeledPermits. The paper was crisp, the ink dark and definitive. I was back in the archives, in a way. I was looking for the trail, the proof, the way forward. I had work to do, and a million-dollar skeleton to clothe.
Beyond the garage, I heard the first sharp crack of a hammer meeting a nail. It sounded like a starting pistol.
Chapter 20
Ben
Icould see her from the ridge beam.
She was sitting at her folding table in the garage bay, backlit by the weak glow of her laptop screen. Every few minutes, she'd lean forward to type something, her fingers moving fast, then sit back with her coffee. She'd been at it for two hours straight—handling permits and invoices, making phone calls I could hear in fragments when the wind shifted.
