“Centerpiece of the whole place. Stone, floor to ceiling.”
He made a face of mock reverence, like he was in a cathedral. “I’ll never want to leave.”
I watched him walk the perimeter, touching every stake as if blessing the ground. He stopped at the studio corner, the one I’d measured to catch north light. He stood in the middle of it, hands on hips, and closed his eyes.
I let him have the silence, listening to the sound of water and the wind rattling leaves in the oak. I wondered if he was already imagining the finished room—easel, shelves, the big table for sketching. When he finally opened his eyes, he caught me watching, and for a second neither of us moved.
After a moment, he walked back to where I stood, stopped just inside the “front door,” and put his arms around my waist. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “This is… real, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
He pressed his forehead to my chest. I put both hands on his back, then let them slide up to his shoulders, holding tight. I could feel the slow, deep drag of his breath.
“Thank you,” he said, voice muffled.
I didn’t answer. I just held him, the two of us standing in the middle of nothing and everything at once.
Eventually, he stepped back, leaving one hand hooked around my wrist. “You gonna let me help?” he asked.
“Not if you want the place to stay standing,” I said, but I squeezed his hand to show I was joking.
He smacked my arm, then smiled. “You’re lucky I like you.”
I watched him move through the frame of the house, already seeing where his energy would live in it—the way he’d fill the rooms with his sketches and music and the sound of his laughter.
I wanted to remember this moment, the two of us in the grass, the world not quite finished but close enough to touch.
“C’mere,” I said, pulling him back into my arms.
He came easy, body slotting up against mine like we’d been built from the same set of plans. Together, we looked out at the creek and the oak and the lines of string that would one day be our walls. The wind picked up, flapping the blue ribbons, and for a split second I saw the whole future laid out in front of us.
I rested my chin on Levi’s head, felt him relax into the hold, and knew that this was it. Foundation, framing, the roof of the sky above us. All the pieces were there.
Now we just had to build the rest.
Chapter Seven
~ Levi ~
We took Bo’s truck into town, mostly because he insisted his old Silverado was “a better vibe for construction site catering,” but also because the inside of the cab smelled like pine air freshener and fried chicken, which was better than the horse sweat and diesel of the farm trucks.
The new house wasn’t even livable yet—just a skeleton, really, but I already thought of it as “ours” in my head. Not “mine,” not even “Quiad’s project”—ours. The walls were up, the roof was on, and today the crew was hanging insulation while Quiad and Knox worked on the custom cabinets for the kitchen I’d sketched out in the margins of my English notebook.
I still got a little high every time I remembered that Quiad had actually used my drawing. He’d looked at it, eyebrows up, then said, “Nice lines.” Just like that, deadpan and simple, but I’d blushed so hard it took hours for the heat to wear off.
Bo caught me smiling at the window reflection and nudged my shoulder. “You’re grinning like a psycho, Hardesty. What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I lied, but he grinned wider, like he knew.
The drive into McKenzie River took us down the twisty main road, past the river and then into the grid of old houses and low brick buildings that made up downtown. The trees had finally filled in, so the whole valley smelled like pollen and moss, with little explosions of dandelion fluff drifting across the windshield.
Bo gunned the engine and coasted us into a diagonal spot in front of River’s Edge Diner, right between the town’s single police cruiser and the mail Jeep. “I’ll do the talking,” he said, rolling up his window with a flourish. “You just try not to drool on the pastry case this time.”
Inside, the diner was all chrome counters and old linoleum, a line of brown vinyl stools propping up a who’s who of locals: one end was the postman and a woman from the insurance office, the other a trio of construction guys who’d clearly never stopped for breakfast before this. The kitchen clattered and hissed with the sound of a dozen orders in progress. The air was thick with bacon grease, pancake syrup, and gossip.
Bo beelined for the counter, slapping the bell at the takeout register with unnecessary force. “Morning, Barb!” he called to the owner, who shot him a look, but immediately started packing up a dozen Styrofoam boxes from behind the glass.
I followed, hands stuffed deep in my hoodie pockets. I was nervous for no reason, probably just the leftover adrenaline from the jobsite and not anything else. But standing there, listening to Bo order an impossible number of “Egg McRivers” and “lumberjack specials,” I let myself drift.
