CHAPTER FIVE
DANI

I can’t sleep. This is not unusual. I have a complicated relationship with sleep that my doctor calls anxiety and I call a personality trait, but we’ve agreed to disagree. What is unusual is the specific quality of the not-sleeping, which was less tossing-and-turning and more staring at the ceiling running ideas for a building I have no business thinking about at two in the morning. I reach for my phone and tap the screen.

Oh, my bad.

Three in the morning.

I give up entirely on the vague concept of sleep and do what any reasonable person would do, which is make coffee and open a new project file on my laptop, pulling reference images for a design concept board.

Except then I find a reference image of an original botanical wallpaper pattern from a 1920s Victorian restoration project in Missouri—cream and sage with copper accents that would pull the east corridor of the inn together in a way that would make people slow down when they walked through it—and I tack it to the cabinet above the coffee maker and spend twenty minutes pulling complementary tile samples for the guest bathrooms and then somehow it’s four fifteen and I have a full preliminary concept board open in a tab that I was definitely going to close but haven’t yet.

It’s research. And maybe a little professional curiosity.

That’s it.

Professionals do not, however, have a pit of anxiety settling deep in their gut over a job they took yesterday. That’s something else entirely and I am choosing not to examine what.

I glance at my tablet, which is covered in color coded sticky note tabs. The Nashville paperwork has been in my inbox for eleven days. I know this because my email app just sent a notification. Received 11 days ago. Would you like to respond? So cute. Just like a disappointed friend peeking over my shoulder. I’ve been making direct eye contact with that same stupid email notification every single morning for eleven days but not doing anything about it.

That’s not normal and I know it.

A new email notification pops up.

Re: Residency Agreement — Signature Required.

I let out a long exhale and tap to open it.

Hi Dani,
Just a quick follow-up on the agreement we sent over. We need your signature before we can finalize your onboarding packet and confirm your housing placement. 

Your start date is firm, so we want to make sure everything is squared
away well before then!

Respectfully,
Julie Matthews

This poor woman. She has absolutely no idea she is emailing someone who has been awake since three in the morning making concept boards for a building in the town she’s supposed to be leaving.

I scroll to the final page in the document.

The signature line sits there looking extremely unbothered about all of this.

I however am extremely bothered and I don’t fully know why. This is the exact thing I’ve been working toward. Six months of conversations and portfolio reviews and a video conference call, plus Deck putting his name behind mine and now it’s right here. I’m one signature away from this being real, and I can’t make my hand do the thing.

Behind my laptop, tacked to the cabinet above the coffee maker where I put it last night without thinking about it, is the reference image I pulled of the Victorian restoration project in Missouri.

The squirrel Sophie got me is perched on the counter next to the coffee maker, still staring at me with its beady judgmental little eyes.

I look back at the signature line.

I’m good at this. I’ve done it eleven times in eleven different properties, color-storied my way through eleven different lives and walked out clean every time. I source the materials and curate the fixtures then hand it to someone else to live in. I never have to see how it ends, which in my experience is better than the alternative.
The inn is just the twelfth one.

I don’t need to see how it turns out.

Jesse and Marge have family to watch out for them.

Not that they’ve been doing a great job of that.

Who am I to talk? I haven’t checked in on them once since Ryan left town.

I hate myself for that.

Just a few blocks away for years and I just… kept walking. Kept my head down. Kept moving the way I always do, like if I walked fast enough past the things that reminded me of him they’d eventually stop doing that.

They have not stopped doing that.

So what was the point of avoiding it?

Ugh!

The signature line is still waiting.

Right. Okay.

I sign the document and hit send before I lose the nerve again. The laptop lid closes harder than I meant for it to as I stand and walk over to the window in my kitchen. The early morning light is doing something soft and copper-toned over the rooftops, which is genuinely unfair given my current emotional state, as I tap the brew button for my third cup of coffee.

My phone buzzes. 

Sophie sent a message.

I tap the screen to open the chat.

Sophie: Did you sleep?

Me: Define sleep

Sophie: Dani

Me: I signed the nashville paperwork, so… there’s that.

Three dots bounce in the bottom corner of the screen.

Then disappear.

Reappear.

Disappear again.

They reappear, again.

Sophie: Proud of you. 

Me: Thanks.

I put my phone face down on the counter and reach for my coffee mug. It says not all who wander are lost (but I might be), which Sophie thought was hilarious when she gave it to me but now it’s starting to feel a little personal attacky. But isn’t that what friends are for? I chuckle quietly to myself and take another sip as Oak Valley slowly wakes up just outside my window like it has all the time in the world and isn’t worried even a little bit about whether I stay or go.

So why am I suddenly feeling homesick and I haven’t even left yet?

---

The hardware store smells exactly like it always has. Motor oil, sawdust and something metallic that I have never been able to identify and have decided is just the smell of my father’s life choices manifesting in the air. The bell above the door announces my arrival the way it has my entire life.

Rowdy is behind the counter with one earbud in, talking in the clipped efficient way that means it’s business. He holds up one finger without looking up, which is the universal sign for I’m on a call and the Wright specific sign for please behave yourself for thirty seconds.

I last about ten.

My finger flicks the key chain rack next to the register, spinning it faster and faster each time it makes a full circle. I try to force my eyes to lock in on one of the printed keys, this one has a black and white checkerboard print that looks a lot like a pair of shoes I have in my closet. He shoots me a look that could strip paint when one of hooks gives and about twenty keys dump themselves on the counter.

I smile sweetly at him.

“I’m going to have to call you back,” he says into the phone, pulling the earbud out with the resigned energy of a man who knew this was coming the moment the bell went off. “That was a supplier call,” he says, sweeping the keys off the counter with one hand as they land in the cupped palm of the other.

“If they can’t handle a little background noise they don’t deserve the contract,” I say.

“What do you want?” he groans, reaching under the counter and pulling out another hook for the spindle style display and loading each key onto it, one by one.

“Nothing,” I say with a shrug.

He stares at me with a blank expression on his face. 

“What? I can’t visit my brother?”

“You can visit your brother when you want something from your brother or when you want to bother your brother,” he says. “Which one is it today?”

“Bother,” I snort. “I was bored.”

He grunts his appreciation for the fact that he is my distraction from boredom and goes back to putting the keys back in their rightful place on the display. “How long are you staying?”

“Until I’m satisfied.”

“Great.”

I pull myself up onto the counter the way I have been doing since Dad opened this place. Rowdy’s been telling me to get off the counter for just as long. Just like clockwork, he opens his mouth. I point at him and he closes it. 

Small victories.

“You signed the Nashville thing yet?” he asks.

I nod, slowly. “This morning actually.”

He looks at me for a second. “Good.”

“Why good?”

“Because you’ve been making that face about it for two weeks and now maybe you’ll stop.”

“I haven’t been making a face.”

“Dani.” He braces himself against the counter with both hands and leans forward, so his face is inches from mine. I have to fight the urge to poke his nose. “You made the face at Sunday dinner. You made the face at Gus’s bar the other night. You made the face yesterday at Jake and Sophie’s flip.”

My nose wrinkles up. “You weren’t at the flip.”

He rolls his eyes and lets out a long sigh. “I drove past and saw you standing in the driveway looking at your phone with… wait for it,” he adds, holding up one finger, “the look.”

“I was checking my email.”

“You were making the face at your email?”

I spin the key chain rack again.

“Knock it off,” he says, reaching out to stop the keys midspiral.

The bell above the door goes and we both look up and Jake walks in with his phone in hand and all the charisma of a man who has seventeen things to do and just remembered an eighteenth.

He sees me.

Something passes over his face that I recognize and I wonder if this is how Rowdy feels everytime he sees me enter a room. That thought makes me laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Rowdy asks, glancing at me with face all smushed together.

“You,” I clap back without hesitation as I hop down off the counter and walk toward where Jake’s scrolling on his phone.

“Hey,” he says way too casually for my liking.

“Hey,” I say. “Why do you look like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like,” I wiggle my finger in front of his face, “that.”

He holsters his phone and looks over my shoulder at Rowdy. “Tell me you’ve got half inch copper fittings in the back,” Jake says. “Dale’s been calling every supplier in a three county radius and nobody’s got enough in stock to finish the inn’s plumbing.”

Rowdy straightens up and blows out a breath through his teeth. “How many do you need?”

Jake pulls up something on his phone and reads off a number that makes Rowdy wince.

“I’ve got some,” Rowdy says, already moving toward the stockroom door. “Don’t know if I’ve got that many. Give me a few minutes to count what’s back there.” He mouths That face. at me as he backs his way through the swinging door.

I hate my brother sometimes.

He disappears through the door and Jake waits until it swings shut behind him before he turns to me “So about the inn,” he says.

I shake my head and hold up both hands. “Jake—”

“Just hear me out.”

I close my eyes for exactly one second. “Don’t start with me Jake.”

“I’m not starting anything.” He pulls his phone back out and turns the screen to face me. There’s a project scope document open and even at arm’s length I can read enough of it to know it’s not a consult. “Full interior design lead. Layout, finishes, fixture spec, sourcing, all of it. Ryan’s locked in on the structural side but the interior is—”

“I signed the documents for Nashville this morning.”
He starts again without missing a beat. “It needs someone who knows what they’re doing, Dani. Not someone I find in the next forty-eight hours who’s going to treat it like any other job.”

I look at the screen then back up at him. “I signed the Nashville paperwork this morning, Jake.”

“I know.”

“This morning. Like four hours ago.”

“I know.” He doesn’t even flinch. “Twenty days. That’s all I need. Gets you out of Oak Valley before your start date with a full ten days to spare.”

“You have never hit a deadline in your life,” I remind him.

He scoffs and runs his hand through his hair. “That’s irrelevant.”

“It’s really not.”

He looks back at me with the face of a man who genuinely believes what he’s saying. That’s the problem with Jake. He’s not trying to sell me something. He actually believes it’ll take twenty days. He has thought every single project we’ve ever worked on together was going to take the amount of time he said it was going to take and he has been wrong every single time but he never stops believing it and I find that both admirable and genuinely insane.

“Jake,” I say, backing away slowly. “The two day Mercer kitchen turned into two weeks.”

“The permits were—”

“The flip you and Sophie just closed on, six months.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “That was actually good for the extent of the work that it needed.”

“Except for the fact that you told me it would be one month.”

“That was different.”

“The Alderman bathroom was eleven days.”

“Okay that one—”

“Eleven days. For a bathroom, Jake.”

He opens his mouth.

“The accent wall at the Pryor flip,” I say. “One afternoon turned into six weeks.”

“That drywall situation was completely unpredictable—”

“The jobs are always unpredictable. That’s the problem.”

He closes his mouth.

I cross my arms. “So when you tell me twenty days—”

“Then we add a buffer,” he says. “Okay, worst case, twenty-five. But Dani—”

“Twenty-five days still cuts into my start date.”

“You can leave even if it’s not finished yet.” He takes a step closer, lowering his voice like the hardware store is full of people who care about this conversation, which it isn’t. It’s empty, but Rowdy is definitely listening through the stockroom door so the instinct isn’t wrong. “The inn needs someone who sees it for what it was supposed to be. Someone who remembers it. Not some city contractor coming in here and making it look like any other social media perfect aesthetic.”

I look at the project scope again. At the line items I can already see blowing past their budgets. At the guest bathroom tile situation I was researching at four in the morning. “Ryan’s actually on board with me helping with this project?” I ask, which is not a yes but it’s also not a no and Jake clocks that immediately.

“Ryan needs it done,” Jake says simply. “He’s got his own deadline he’s working against.”

That doesn’t answer my question, but instead of arguing with him I think about all the times I passed the inn without stopping to check on the people inside and my gut twists into a knot.

“I signed the Nashville paperwork,” I say again. Quieter. More to the room than to Jake.

“And Nashville will still be there in twenty-five days.” He pulls the phone back and tucks it in his pocket. “But that inn won’t be the inn much longer if we don’t do something about it now.”

The stockroom door swings open and Rowdy backs through it carrying a box that he sets on the counter with a thud. He looks at Jake. “Got enough for the first phase. I can have the rest ordered by Friday if you can wait on the second rough-in.”

“Friday works,” Jake says.

Rowdy starts counting fittings out onto the counter and dropping them very loudly to the point I strongly consider throwing something at the back of his head because I’m trying to think. But I can’t think about it here. “I’ll think about it,” I tell Jake, picking up my bag. “That’s the best I can do right now.”

“I need an answer tonight,” he says. “If it’s not you I have to start making calls and whoever I find isn’t going to—”

“Tonight,” I say. “I’ll let you know tonight.”

I head for the door.

“Dani.” Jake’s voice stops me with my hand on the handle. “You already know what that building needs. You knew it the second you walked through the door.”

I push through the door without answering.

The bell announces me on the way out.

From behind the counter Rowdy calls out, “Face!”

I hold up my middle finger as I keep walking, letting the door close behind me. As I stand on the sidewalk, waiting for the light at the crosswalk to change, Jake’s project scope flashes through my head. I glance up and see the inn watching me from across the Square and about a dozen things pop out at me that I didn’t see on Jake’s scope. “Damn it,” I mutter to myself as the light changes and I start walking.

I don’t know where I’m going yet, but I can’t just stand still or the guilt on either side of my decision will swallow me whole.