Celeste steps back and lets me in.
The house in daylight tells a clearer story than at two in the morning. Small, early sixties, updated in pieces by people who meant well over the decades. I can see three different eras of work in the kitchen alone. The office holds a secondhand desk, good laptop, corkboard covered in maps and printed data, uses a dedicated outlet added after the fact, and not well.
I don't talk while I work. She doesn't fill the silence, which I notice. Most people get uncomfortable when a stranger goes quiet. She moves around the kitchen with her laptop open, glancing over occasionally with something closer to curiosity than anxiety.
I find the crawlspace access in the utility closet.
The crawlspace is two feet of clearance, old insulation, damp soil. And something else — underneath the smell of dirt and age, the smell of burned insulation from a past electrical fire. Probably also not on the inspection.
The smell takes me back before I shake my head. This is not a rig. Pete is three years gone. I am under a bungalow in Silver Ridge and I will finish this assessment.
I find what I came for. I come back up through the hatch and sit on the utility room floor with my forearms on my knees.
After a minute I get up and go to the kitchen table with my notebook.
"Aluminum wiring throughout, the panel's original, service entry is undersized," I tell her. "Someone added circuits in the kitchen and the back bedroom. Neither is up to code. The panel needs replacing. New copper throughout." I look at my numbers. "Materials and labor at full rate— twelve thousand, give or take."
She goes pale. I can see the muscles in her neck and jaw tense up. "I don't have twelve thousand right now."
"I know." I look at the house around me. The work she's done on it. "I'll do it at cost if you help with the labor."
She looks at me. "Why."
“The alternative is this house burns down eventually."
She sits with that. "When do we start?"
"Tomorrow morning."
So we start. And we keep going.
Celeste learns fast. She has a technical background so it’s somewhat expected. I show her something once and she does it right. She asks about the physics of it, the reasoning behind code requirements, why one approach is safer than another. She doesn't perform the interest. She actually has it.
On the third day, she tells me about Vancouver.
We're running new wire through the wall cavity in the hallway, her holding the pull string while I feed from the other end, and she starts talking the way some people do when they're focused on something else.
She had a business. A tech consulting firm she'd built over three years, a partner who was also her boyfriend, a man named Darren who had access to everything. Clients, contracts, the research she'd developed. When the relationship ended he took all of it. Filed paperwork, worked his connections, and by the time the legal dust settled there was nothing left to claim.
"He didn't even want the business," she says. "He just didn't want me to have it."
I don't say I'm sorry. She's not telling me for sympathy. "So you started over," I say.
"So I started over." She feeds the string through and I catch it on my end. "Somewhere he'd never look. Rural internet research isn't exactly his world." A pause. "There's a real story inthis valley. People running businesses on connections that drop three times a day. Kids doing homework at the library because there's no signal at home. I'm documenting it. Building a real picture of it."
I think about trust. About working alongside someone in conditions that require it, and what it costs when you find out it was one-sided. I don't say any of that. I’m no good with words.
"Wire's through," I tell her. "Move down to the next stud bay."
She looks at me. Something in her expression says she heard more than I said.
"Show me how to strip this end," she says.
By the end of the week we have a rhythm. She works at her desk in the mornings, we work on the house in the afternoons. I bring coffee. She cooks dinner, usually quick, practical meals at the kitchen table and neither of us pretends this is a purely professional arrangement anymore. Neither of us says that out loud either. We're both people who let things be what they are without naming them.
On Friday we're working in the narrow gap between the exterior wall and the old radiator, a space barely wide enough for two people. Her shoulder presses against my arm. I can smell her shampoo and sawdust and the coffee from an hour ago.
She's threading the cable end through the access hole and she turns to ask me something, I can see her starting the sentence, her mouth opening, and then she stops.
