But this Skyler doesn’t call anyone; he moves.
When he steps into the mud, his boots sink an inch into the soft earth. Muscles in his back bunch and tighten through the thin fabric of his shirt. He grunts, a raw, guttural sound that would make Elaine Thompson faint into her tea. With a coordinated heave, he helps the worker slide the timber into its bracket.
I find myself leaning forward, my grip on the edge of the lumber stack tightening until a splinter pricks the ball of my thumb.
They finish the placement, and the worker claps Skyler on the shoulder.
This is where the real surprise hits.
A second man is gesturing toward the stairwell framing, his voice raised over the din of a nearby compressor. He wants to skip a reinforced brace to save time on the drywall schedule. In the past, Skyler would have nodded. He would have weighed the social cost of a confrontation against the structural integrity of the house and chosen the path of least resistance every single time. He was a man who let his mother dictate the color of his wedding flowers; he wasn’t going to argue with a contractor about a brace.
But the man standing in the dirt today is different.
“No,” he says. The word isn’t loud, but it has weight to it. “We aren’t skipping it. The load-bearing capacity for that landing is non-negotiable. If you skip the brace, the stairs settle in five years. I’m not signing off on a house that starts to tilt before the mortgage is half-paid. I’m sure Mike and Diego will agree.”
The contractor argues something about the budget and the timeline, but Skyler cuts him off. Not in a jerk way, or pulling rank, but in a way that shows his morals are immovable.
“We do it right, or we don’t do it at all,” Skyler says. “Those are the specs. You want to argue the math, go get your calculator. Otherwise, get the brace.”
The contractor glares, then mutters something under his breath and heads toward the supply trailer.
I realize my mouth is agape. I snap it shut, the dryness in my throat a sharp reminder of how long I’ve been holding my breath. My heart is doing a strange, frantic rhythm.
I keep thinking about the man who let Elaine throw my father’s handmade cedar boxes into a dumpster because they weren’t “appropriate.” I think about the man who sat in silence while his father insulted my career, my family, and my worth as a human being.
That man is gone. Or maybe he was never there to begin with, just a skin Skyler was trying to shed for thirty years.
In a quick, decisive stroke, he pulls a pencil from behind his ear and marks something on the wood framing.
I shift my weight, my heels grinding into the gravel. I came here today to be a professional, to be the social worker who manages her client’s transition into a new home.
But it’s hard to ignore a man who is currently rebuilding himself out of sawdust and spit.
Leaning my head back against the stack of wood, I feel the rough grain catch in my hair. I was supposed to be the one who had it all figured out, the one who walked away. I found myidentity in a bookstore and a social services office, assuming I was the only one capable of change.
But looking at Skyler now, he’s laughing. It’s a genuine, unforced sound I haven’t heard since our second date, before the gravity of the Thompson name sucked the air out of the room. He and another worker have their heads bent over a junction box.
My grip tightens on the clipboard, the plastic cold and clinical against my palm. Surprise doesn’t cover it; I’m unsettled. Seeing him like this makes our failed relationship feel like a fever dream, reducing the villain I’ve been hating to a cheap caricature.
So I don’t move. I don’t call out. I remain behind the wood, a spy watching a stranger with a familiar face hammer out a new version of himself.
“You checking up on our architect? Or just making sure the lumber doesn’t grow legs?”
The voice is a low, gravelly rasp that vibrates through the wood stack. I jump, my clipboard nearly clattering to the ground as I spin around.
Diego is standing a few feet away, casually leaning against a support post for the porch. He’s a burly man with hands that look like they could snap a two-by-four in half or gently cradle a bird. Right now, they’re tucked into the pockets of a dusty work apron, and he’s watching me with amused curiosity.
“I’m observing,” I say, my voice coming out a little too defensively. I adjust my blazer, trying to summon the professional composure that’s currently hiding in my shoes. “For my client. Mrs. Delgado wants to make sure the timelines are holding.”
Diego grins, a flash of white teeth in his weathered face. “Timelines are solid. That boy over there doesn’t sleep. I thinkhe’s trying to finish this house before the first frost just out of spite for the weather.”
He gestures toward Skyler with his chin. Skyler is currently thirty feet away, arguing with a measuring tape.
“He’s something else, isn’t he?” Diego steps closer, lowering his voice just enough to bypass the roar of the machinery. “You see a lot of things on these sites. Most guys who show up looking like him—expensive haircut, posture that says they went to a school with a Latin name—don’t last the week. They want the photo op. They want to hold a hammer for five minutes and then head back to their lofts to write a blog post about the ‘dignity of labor.’”
I look at Skyler’s sweat-soaked shirt. “And Skyler?”
“That guy’s the real deal,” Diego says, and there’s a note of genuine respect in his voice that makes my heart do a strange, uncomfortable flip. “Found out a couple of weeks ago he’s a trust fund kid. Some Thompson dynasty or something. Word is he walked away from all of it. Every dime.”
