Five
Good Bones… Bad Situation - Finn
Well… this is a shitshow.
The thought echoed in my head as I dragged the old metal toolbox across the basement floor.
The basement smelled of 140 years of Boston winters. The foundation walls were thick and uneven, patched by different hands across different decades. Copper pipes rattled overhead every time someone moved upstairs.
Solid construction, though. Built before contractors started cutting corners—before hollow-core doors and the shortcuts that made modern houses look pretty and fall apart fast.
Good bones.
I’d take that right now.
Libby hovered a few feet behind me, her fingers working the cuff of her cardigan.
She was a little shorter than Fiona—five-four, maybe five-five—with a soft, rounded build that settled at the hips and midsection the way a house settles into its foundation. Her oatmeal-colored cardigan, pilled raw at the elbows, a loosethread dangling from the left cuff she kept worrying between her fingers, stretched slightly across her stomach and hung off her shoulders like it had given up trying to fit her years ago. Dark hair, pulled back into a bun that had mostly lost the argument with gravity, with whole sections coming loose, gray-streaked wisps plastered to the damp skin at her temples and the nape of her neck. No makeup. The circles under her eyes weren’t today’s; they had a settled, sunken quality that had moved in permanently, an exhaustion that stopped being acute and became chronic.
Frumpy.
That’s the word my brain supplied. I let it sit there for a second and felt vaguely like an asshole about it. Not wrong—simply an observation that said as much about me as it did about her. She looked like a woman who’d stopped thinking about how she presented to the world somewhere around the time she’d started raising a teenager alone and holding everything together with both hands and no help. There was something almost stubborn about it, as if she’d decided, consciously or not, and stuck to it.
I didn’t know if I respected that, or if it made me sad.
My mind wandered while I worked.
Notmytype. The thought, laced with its usual confidence, simply sat there, doing less work than it normally did. I’d always gone for women who seemed like they were running late to something more important. Libby was softer, older, a decade-plus ahead of me at minimum. A woman I would have clocked and moved past without a second thought on any other day, in any other version of the world that had existed even two days ago.
But her eyes.
She looked at me directly—a bright, vivid green that didn’t quite fit the picture I’d already assembled. I met her gazefor half a beat, watching her sort through the toolbox, before looking away. I looked back. Her eyes noticed everything but gave nothing away. I wasn’t sure if that was kindness or simply a long-ingrained habit—the difference, I’d learned, was harder to spot than most people admitted. I returned to the toolbox.
“You sure that’s the right box?” she asked, her voice tight with nervous energy.
“It’ll do.”
I popped the lid. Inside were decent tools: a hammer with good weight, a handsaw that still held its teeth, framing nails, and a screwdriver with a handle worn smooth from honest use. Her husband knew what he was doing.
A few pieces of scrap pine leaned against the wall. I pulled them free, one by one, checked for rot, and stacked the usable ones on the workbench.
Then I spotted them: two eight-foot two-by-fours, tucked behind a forgotten tarp. Leftover from some long-abandoned project. Pale wood. Warped, but they would work.
“Score,” I muttered.
“What?” Libby asked, stepping closer.
“Nothing. Just got lucky.”
I grabbed both boards and carried them to the cellar doors. Old double doors, set at a forty-five-degree angle against the foundation wall, opened out to a concrete stairwell. An entry point someone with no survival instinct would find.
I measured the span by eye, positioned the first two-by-four horizontally across both doors, and braced it against the frame.
The first hammer strike cracked through the basement like a gunshot.
Bang!
I winced. The sound bounced off the stone walls, amplified by the enclosed space, and rolled upward through the floor joists into the house above.
