He pushed through the door and walked back out into the cold, and I sat there alone at the narrow counter, looking out at the dark road.
Chapter 30
Olivia
The house ate May whole.
We painted the interior in a haze of primer fumes and rollers that left my shoulders aching for days. I learned the difference between eggshell and satin, between cutting in and back-rolling, between the kind of tired that sleep fixes and the kind that just lives in your bones until the job is done.
Ben and I moved around each other like dancers who'd learned the steps but forgotten the music, always polite, always careful. He'd hand me a paintbrush without meeting my eyes. I'd leave his coffee on the sawhorse in the morning and disappear before he could thank me. We were professionals. Strangers. Something I didn't have a name for yet and wasn't sure I wanted to find.
The subs came in waves. Tile guys for the bathrooms, their radio playing something in Spanish while they worked on their knees for hours, setting each piece with the kind of patience I didn't have. The countertop templater with his laser measure and his clipboard, calling out numbers to his assistant. The electrician who showed up to install the fixtures and spent twenty minutes lecturing Frank about wire gauge like Frankhadn't been doing this for thirty years. We nodded, paid them, and kept moving.
Ruth showed up on a Tuesday in early June.
She didn't call ahead. She just pulled into the clearing in her sedan, climbed out wearing an old flannel shirt and a pair of gardening gloves, and asked where we needed her. Ben looked at me. I looked at Ben. Neither of us knew what to say.
"Landscaping," Walt said from the porch, where he was installing the railing spindles. "Could use someone to rake the beds while we get the sod down."
Ruth nodded once and walked toward the pile of topsoil like she'd been invited.
After that, she came three times a week. Never asked, never explained. She just showed up in the morning with a thermos of coffee and her gloves and worked until the light failed. She planted the foundation shrubs, spread the mulch, weeded the beds until they looked like something out of a magazine. The work was the conversation, and somehow that was enough.
The nights were harder.
I'd drive home with paint in my hair and dirt under my nails, and the house on Oak Street would be waiting, dark and silent. The same house I'd lived in for eight years, but it didn't feel like mine anymore. It felt like a museum exhibit of a life I used to have.
I'd stand in the kitchen where Ryan used to make coffee, where we'd planned vacations and argued about paint colors and talked about the future like it was something we could control. And I'd try to remember what he'd been thinking that last night. Whether he'd been driving to Lucia to end it or to end us.
I didn't know.
I'd probably never know.
And somewhere in the long stretch between May and June, I realized I didn't need to.
What I needed was harder to name.
I'd catch myself watching Ben across the clearing, the way his hands moved when he was setting trim, the quiet focus he brought to every small task. I'd notice the moment his shoulders relaxed when Walt made him laugh, or the way he'd look at the house sometimes like he couldn't quite believe we'd actually done it.
And I'd think about Collins at the gas station.Takes him a while to decide. But once he does.
Was I waiting? Or was I just afraid to want something that might not want me back?
I didn't know that either.
By mid-June, the house was close.
The appliances went in. The staging furniture arrived on a truck and two guys in polo shirts spent a day arranging it like we were setting up a magazine shoot. A bowl of fake lemons on the kitchen island looked so real I almost grabbed one.
The photographer came on a Thursday. She walked through every room with her tripod and her camera bag, murmuring about light and angles. I stood in the driveway and watched her work, and for the first time I could see it the way a buyer would see it—beautiful, finished, ready for someone else's life to begin.
The crew had packed up and left by five. Ruth had driven off an hour before that, her sedan disappearing down the gravel drive with a wave through the window. The photographer finished, loaded her gear, and promised the shots by Monday.
It was just me and Ben in the clearing, the late afternoon sun turning everything gold.
"Looks good," Ben said, coming to stand beside me.
"Yeah."
