I nodded. "Okay."
"Okay." She took another sip. "Now, do you have anything to eat in this house, or have you been surviving on sawdust and spite?"
Chapter 24
Ben
The wind was moving through the timber frame with a low, hollow whistle, enough to make me check my safety tether twice. I was thirty feet up on the roof deck, kneeling on fresh plywood that still smelled resin. We were sheathing the roof before the predicted snow squall hit at noon, and the pace was frantic.
It was Tuesday morning, and I was losing a fight with my own attention span.
I reached for the pneumatic nailer, lining up the next shot, and as I shifted my weight, I caught sight of Olivia below. She was standing near the garage entrance, clipboard in hand, talking to the lumber delivery driver. She reached up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, and the movement drew my eye up to her left hand.
The ring, I knew, was gone.
I'd noticed it first thing Monday morning, but twenty-four hours later, I still couldn't stop looking.
She'd pulled into the clearing at six-fifty yesterday, headlights cutting through the pre-dawn gray. I was already on the ground staging lumber, sorting it out in a cold that made mybleeding hands ache. She climbed out of her car, grabbed her thermoses, and headed straight for the garage.
But when she reached up to adjust her coat collar, the morning sun caught her hand and there it was. Or, rather, wasn’t. The gold was gone. In its place was a thin, pale band of skin. A ghost line where the ring had lived for eight years.
I'd stood there with a plank in my hands, staring at that bare finger until she disappeared inside the garage. Now I was up on the roof, trying to focus on sheathing panels and racing the weather, and all I could think about was that white band of skin.
"Boss, you got the next sheet ready?" Collins called from the opposite corner of the roof.
"Yeah, coming."
I dragged a four-by-eight panel across the deck, my shoulders screaming in protest. The pneumatic nailer provided the soundtrack—thwack-hiss, thwack-hiss—a rhythm that usually kept my brain from wandering to places it shouldn't go.
It wasn't working today.
Below us, Olivia was on the phone. Her tone was sharp and professional, that of someone tired of being told no. She'd been fighting with the roofing membrane supplier all morning, and from the sound of it, she was winning.
I risked another glance down through the open rafters.
She was pacing in the garage, phone pressed to her ear, her bare hand gesturing as she talked. Her hair was dusted with sawdust. Her jeans were muddy at the knees. She looked like she'd been born on this site, like she belonged to it now.
And I needed to stop looking at her.
"Boss!" Collins's voice cut through. "You gonna hand me that sheet or just admire the view?"
I looked over. The kid was grinning, that knowing look on his face that made me want to throw a framing hammer at him.
"Shut up and nail, Collins."
His grin widened, but he went back to work. We positioned the next sheet together, the wind trying to rip the plywood from our hands. We fired nails every six inches along the rafters, racing the gray clouds piling up on the western horizon.
The sky looked mean. We had maybe two hours before the weather hit.
That's when I heard the tires. I looked toward the driveway just in time to see a white Tesla, pristine and wildly out of place, pulling up next to Olivia's mud-splattered sedan. The door opened, and Chloe stepped out.
Ryan's sister, still with that crazy hair and with expensive boots that were about to be ruined by frozen mud. She had her phone pressed to her ear, talking animatedly as she stepped out, gesturing with her free hand.
Then her eyes found the garage, and then Olivia. She said something quick into the phone, then pulled it away from her ear and started walking toward the garage, her face breaking into a smile.
"Who's that?" Collins asked, pausing mid-nail.
"Ryan's sister."
