"Yeah," I said. "Me too."
The silence that followed was different from the others. She was looking at me and I was looking at the ceiling and I was acutely, painfully aware of exactly how close we were sitting. The line of her shoulder. The way her hair had half-escaped whatever she'd tied it back with this morning. Her hands around the mug, the pale band on her left finger that had been there for months now, the ghost of a different life.
I knew what I wanted to say.
I'd known for weeks. It wasn't complicated, it wasn't even particularly eloquent. Just true, the way true things usually are. Simple enough to say in one breath if I could just get out of my own goddamn way.
Instead I heard myself say:
"What you did out here?—"
She looked at me. Waiting.
"Four months ago you didn't know a framing nailer from a finish nailer, and by March you were catching code violationsbefore the inspector did. That delivery driver—" I almost smiled. "He didn't know what hit him."
Something shifted in her expression. She kept looking at me.
"And today. What you did with Lucia. Walking her through the house like that—" I shook my head. "That took something. That took a lot, actually. You should know that."
She was still watching me. Hadn't moved. Hadn't said anything.
"I just—" I turned the mug in my hands. "I wanted you to know that. Before the listing and the sale and all of it. Whatever comes next. You should know what you did here."
Silence.
"Ben," she said.
"Yeah."
"Why don't you just say it?"
I looked at her. "Say what?"
"Whatever it actually is." She held my gaze, steady. "I know you're doing the speech. I've seen you do the speech — Collins, Frank, the tile guy who screwed up the bathroom twice. You close out the job, you say the right things, everyone goes home feeling good." She paused. "I'm not an employee. I’m not a contractor."
My mouth opened. Nothing came out.
"I don't need a pat on the back," she said, quieter now. "I need—" She stopped. Looked down at her mug. "I don't know. Something that isn't this."
The fire wasn't lit. The house was dark and warm and completely still around us and I was sitting six inches from her on a subfloor we'd laid ourselves and I knew exactly what I wanted to say and I still couldn't say it.
"Liv." My voice came out rough. "It's just— it's messy. All of it. Ryan, the house, everything that happened out here. I don't want to… I don't want to be another thing that hurts you."
She stared at me.
And then something in her face changed all at once, like a temperature drop.
"I'm a grown woman." Her voice was low and controlled, which was worse than if she'd shouted. "I'm not Ryan's wife. I'm not a member of your crew. I'm not—" She stopped. Drew a breath. When she spoke again it wasn't controlled at all. "I have spent years being managed and protected and decided for and I am sotired, Ben. I am so tired of people deciding what I can handle?—"
She caught herself.
Pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling.
"I'm sorry." She set the mug down carefully on the floor. "You don't deserve that. I need a minute."
She got up and went into the dark of the house, toward the living room. Her footsteps crossed the subfloor, slow and deliberate, and then stopped.
I stayed where I was, back against the stone, staring at the two mugs on the hearth and the half-empty bottle of Jameson and the mess I'd just made of the one moment I'd been given.
