“For what?”
“Water heater out at Lark’s house. It’s been dead for six weeks. Bad thermocouple, shot heating element.” I picked up the bag from the counter. “She’s been showering in the barn the whole time because it went out and she never called anybody to fix it.”
The words came out with more bite than I’d planned. Or maybe exactly the bite I’d planned. The woman fed sixty animals before she fed herself, trained therapy dogs that changed people’s lives, and she’d been walking to the barn in the dark every morning because her water heater needed two parts that cost twenty-three dollars and fifty cents.
Beckett’s grin dropped. He set his coffee cup on the counter, and his jaw tightened the way it did when something hit close to a nerve he didn’t talk about.
“So what the hell has she been…? The barn,” he said. “She’s been showering in the barn?”
“Yep. Every damned morning.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and stared at the floor for a few seconds. When he looked up, the grin was gone and what was underneath it was harder than most people ever saw from Beckett Sinclair.
“That’s not right,” he said quietly. Then he picked up his coffee cup, and the weight in his face eased back behind the usual warmth but it didn’t disappear.
No, it wasn’t fucking right. “Yeah, I’m working on it.”
He nodded. “Good.”
“What has Warrior Security been up to?” I asked.
“The usual. Lachlan’s keeping us busy.” He shrugged, and the grin came back but didn’t fully commit. “Or you’d know that if you hadn’t ditched us for alpaca duty.”
“Al Pacacino is a demanding boss.”
“I don’t doubt it.” He lifted his coffee cup in my direction. “Good to see you, man. I’ve got to run.”
“Yeah. Good to see you too.”
He went out, and the door groaned shut behind him. I gathered the parts and headed to my truck.
The drive back to Pawsitive took twenty minutes on the road south from town. I drove with the window cracked and the bag on the passenger seat and a steadiness in my body that had been absent for months. I’d slept last night. Really slept—Tova beside me, the rest of the night unbroken after she’d pulled me out of the nightmare. I could feel it in my hands, my shoulders, the way my jaw wasn’t clenched for the first time in weeks.
I had a plan today. A thermocouple, a heating element, and a woman who was going to have hot water in her house by lunch.
I pulled into the lot at Pawsitive and parked close to Lark’s place. I could hear music from inside as I came up the steps—something with fiddles and a woman’s voice I didn’t recognize.
I went in through the side door and found her at the kitchen table with paperwork spread in front of her, a pen behind one ear and another in her hand. She looked up.
“Back already? That was fast.”
“Murphy’s had everything.” I held up the bag. “It’ll take me an hour, maybe less.”
“And then I’ll have hot water? In my actual house? Like a person who lives in the twenty-first century?”
“That’s the goal.”
She pressed both hands flat on the table and closed her eyes for a second. “I might cry. I’m not going to, but I want you to know the option is on the table.”
I didn’t even try to stop my smile. “Duly noted.”
I went to the utility closet and got to work. The space was barely wider than my shoulders: the water heater on one side, exposed pipes running up the wall on the other, a narrow strip of floor between them. I shut off the gas supply, disconnected the old thermocouple, and started threading the new one into the bracket.
Lark appeared in the doorway. She leaned against the frame with her coffee and watched me.
“So what was actually wrong with it? In terms a five-year-old can understand.”
“The yucky thermocouple failed.” Did five-year-olds use the wordyucky? “It’s a sensor that tells the gas valve the pilot light is on. When it goes bad, the valve shuts down as a safety measure. I’m replacing that and the heating element, which was corroded.”
