She looked at the house the way you'd look at something you were trying to memorize. The beams, the windows, the stone rising up the back wall. The light pouring through glass. All of it finished, beautiful, impossible. Her eyes moved across every surface, every corner, like she was saying goodbye to more than just a building.
When her gaze finally came back to me, her face had crumpled at the edges. Her throat worked as she tried to swallow whatever was rising there, and failed.
"Thank you," she whispered.
I nodded once. Small, but enough.
She walked out into the gold light of late afternoon, climbed into her white Range Rover, and drove away. I stood in the doorway and watched until her taillights bled into the trees and disappeared.
And something in my chest that had been clenched since January finally loosened its grip.
Chapter 32
Ben
I'd expected her to cry.
Not because Olivia cried easily—she didn't, I'd learned that in four months of watching her absorb things that would have flattened most people—but because Lucia had just walked through the house Ryan built for the both of them, and Olivia had let her. Had walked her through it herself. Room by room, quiet as a docent.
That had to cost something.
But she just stood in the doorway watching the Range Rover go, and when she finally turned back inside her face wasn't wrecked. It was something harder to read than that. Like she'd expected a fight and found a funeral instead.
"You okay?" I asked.
She looked at me. "I genuinely don't know."
Which was the most honest answer she could have given, so I left it there. She walked back into the living room and stopped in the middle of it, hands in her pockets, looking up at the ceiling. The beams. The joinery Ryan had drawn in notebook margins before he even knew what he wanted to build.
"It's done," she said. Not to me. Just out loud, like she was confirming it.
"Yeah," I said. "It is."
She turned slowly, taking in the whole room. The staged furniture, the fake lemons on the island, the light coming through those enormous windows going gold and flat as the sun dropped behind the hills.
"I keep waiting for something else to go wrong," she said.
"Nothing's going wrong."
"I know." She looked at her hands. "That's the weird part."
I understood that. We'd spent four months in crisis mode, lurching from one problem to the next—wrong orders, failed inspections, weather, money, the thousand small disasters that come with building something from nothing in an impossible timeline. The emergencies had become the rhythm. And now there was no emergency, just a finished house standing quiet around us, and neither of us quite knew what to do with that.
"Walt left a bottle in the garage," I said. "He always brings one for the last day of a job. Never drinks more than a measure."
She looked at me. "You've been saving that information."
"Since this morning."
Something moved across her face. Something in the neighborhood of a smile. "Go get it."
The garage was dim, the work lights off, the folding table still in the corner where Olivia had set up on day one. I found the bottle on the shelf above the pegboard, exactly where Walt had left it. Halfway down. Jameson, same as always.
I stood there for a second holding it, not moving.
The table still had her coffee ring on it. The blue folder she used for permits was gone, filed away somewhere, but the ring was still there. Four months of early mornings.
Tomorrow there'd be no reason to come back out here. No crew, no deliveries, no permits to chase. The listing would go live and strangers would drive up that gravel driveway and walk through these rooms deciding if they could picture their liveshere. And Olivia would go back to Oak Street, and I'd go back to my shop, and whatever this had been would just… stop.
