Then Rivet shoves her nose between us with the shameless determination of a dog on a mission, and Maple laughs and steps back and the moment goes.
I undercharged her on the second invoice. Not by accident. Deliberately, line by line — hours short, materials at cost, one section of work that doesn't appear at all. I sit in the truckafterward and look at the numbers and cannot manufacture a professional explanation.
Rivet puts her paw on my arm.
"Don't," I say.
She rests her chin there instead. Wrench leans over from the back seat and drops his whole head on my shoulder.
"Not you too."
He breathes on my neck. Warm, patient, entirely unhelpful.
I look at the invoice. I look at the house. The kitchen window is lit up gold and I can see her moving past it, just her silhouette, the line of her through the glass.
"It's a job," I tell them.
Rivet waits. Wrench shifts his jaw on my shoulder and sighs.
"And she's, ah, fuck." I stop again. This is not a thing I do, sit in trucks describing women to dogs. "She looks like something out of a different era. The dresses, the earrings. Lipstick at seven in the morning to hand me tools in a house with no heat." I shake my head. "She's got this mouth."
Rivet tilts her head.
"I'm not — that's just a fact. That's an objective observation."
Rivet looks at Wrench. Seriously. I’m being ganged up on here.
"She laughed today," I say, looking at the invoice. "I've been in a lot of houses. I've never once cared what a room looked like when the light changed. She cares.” I look at the lit window again. The silhouette moving past it. "She knows this house the way you're supposed to know something you love."
The kitchen light is still on. She's stopped moving past the window. She's standing at the counter, I think, the way she does when she's working something out.
I start the truck.
Rivet watches the house until it disappears behind the tree line, wagging her tail.
three
Maple
Ipushhimfora real number on Wednesday morning because I am a project manager and I have been avoiding this one since day one.
He's across the kitchen table from me with his notebook — handwritten, small precise columns, a shorthand I've mostly decoded by now. I've made coffee. Rivet is under my chair. I stopped commenting on this yesterday.
He slides the estimate across the table.
I know how to read a trades estimate. I know what labour costs, what materials run, what margin looks like. What he's handed me is deliberately low — not incompetently, elegantly. Hours listed as partial when I watched him work them in full. A materials line with no markup. Work I know happened because I was there when it happened, absent entirely.
I look up. He's watching me read.
"This is low," I say.
"It's accurate."
"It's accurate for part of the work."
He holds my gaze. Says nothing.
I decide not to have this fight today. "I'll have the draw schedule ready by Friday." He nods. We leave it there.
