Walt had told me not to be the guy who waits. Frank had told me to figure it out. Collins, in his roundabout way, had said the same thing. I'd stood in this house that night after they all left and had nothing to say to any of it, which probably meant they were right.
That was weeks ago. I still hadn't moved.
The thing was, I knew what I wanted. That part wasn't complicated anymore. What was complicated was the twenty minutes that had just passed—Lucia walking through these rooms, Olivia walking beside her. The whole weight of Ryan still settling over everything like dust that wouldn't quite clear.
Maybe tomorrow. Maybe when the house sold and the debt was gone and there was nothing left of his mess between us.
Or maybe I was just good at finding reasons.
I picked up the bottle and went back inside.
We probably shouldn't have drunk this much.
That thought arrived somewhere around the fourth pour, when Olivia was laughing so hard she had to set her mug down before she spilled it. We were sitting on the kitchen floor, backs against the cabinets, legs stretched out on the subfloor.
"He saidaesthetically motivated," she managed. "Those were his exact words. Frank's face?—"
"Frank's face," I agreed.
It had been nothing, really. Three weeks ago, Collins had tried to argue that the cabinet hardware should be repositioned two inches to the left for—his words—aestheticreasons. Frank had looked at him the way you'd look at a dog that had just triedto sit in your chair. The argument had lasted forty minutes and achieved nothing except Collins learning seventeen new ways Frank could express contempt without raising his voice.
She'd missed most of it, on the phone in the garage, and I'd filled her in after the crew left. She'd been pulling on that thread all evening.
"And then Walt," she said, catching her breath. "Walt just—he didn't even look up. He just said 'son' and went back to sanding."
"That's all Frank needed."
"That's all Frank ever needs." She shook her head, still smiling. "Someone to agree with him silently."
I poured another measure into her mug. She didn't stop me.
We'd eaten at some point. I'd found half a sleeve of crackers in my jacket pocket from God knows when, and Olivia had produced a slightly battered granola bar from her bag with the triumphant expression of someone discovering buried treasure. We'd split both, sitting cross-legged on the floor of a house worth over a million dollars, eating stale crackers in the dark.
"Collins told me about the truck," she said, after a while.
I closed my eyes briefly. "Of course he did."
"The building." She was trying not to smile. "He reversed into the building."
"Just the bumper."
"He said that too." She pulled her knees up to her chest. "You never said anything to him about it?"
"What was there to say? The bodywork alone was four grand. Other car was another two. Building was—" I shook my head. "It was bad."
"Most bosses would've?—"
"He knew what he did." I shrugged. "Saying it out loud doesn't fix the dent."
She was quiet for a moment, turning her mug in her hands. Outside, the dark had settled completely over the clearing, the tree line invisible now against the sky. The house held the warmth from the day, just barely.
"I'm going to miss them," she said. "And not just them. I’m going to miss… this."
I looked at her.
She laughed, short and a little disbelieving, like she'd surprised herself. "I know. I can't believe I'm going to say this about a house that almost took everything from me, but—" She shook her head. "I'm going to miss this fucking house."
I looked up at the ceiling with its high beams, the joinery Ryan had figured out in notebook margins. From here you could see straight through to the living room, the dark mass of the fireplace rising up the far wall.
