CHAPTER SEVEN
DANI

Ryan is already at the inn when I get there. I know it’s him because no one in Oak Valley drives  a Porsche. He’s parked right up against the curb, tires squared, nose aligned with the edge of the sidewalk like he adjusted it twice before shutting the door. Mine is right behind his but the tail end is crooked and sticking out just enough to be noticeable because I got distracted mid-park mentally replaying last night’s porch conversation, specifically the way his blue eyes caught the light from the headlights of the one car that drove past on its way to Main Street.

Something in my gut tells me that mister button-down and blueprints isn’t going to be open to negotiation on his conditions now that we’ve both had time to sleep on it and I’m already bracing for the impact of today.

Through the front windows I can see him in the lobby, sleeves rolled to his forearms, blueprints spread across the table. They’re laid out cleanly with their edges lined up, corners weighed down with blocks of wood. Most people use digital files but this guy’s still on paper, which tells me everything I need to know about this version of him. The one I don’t know anymore.

I stand there a second longer than necessary, Maggie’s seasonal roast coffee warming my palm through the cutesy disposable cup. He hasn’t noticed me yet. He’s too focused on the plans. One hand is braced on the table, the other’s moving across the plans in short decisive motions. Pen tucked behind his ear.

It shouldn’t work for me, but it does.

Oh no. No. No. No. Not doing that. Ew.

I take a sip of coffee that’s still too hot and burn my tongue a little. Good. I can focus on that instead of how his sleeves pushed up like that accentuate his forearms.

Shit.

I lower the cup and stare at the steam curling up from the lid like it’s personally betrayed me.

Get it together.

The door sticks when I push it open, letting out a long complaining groan that echoes through the lobby.

Ryan looks up immediately. Eyes to my face, then to the coffee, then back again like he’s taking inventory. “You’re late,” he says.

I blink. “It’s eight forty-seven.”

“Yes,” he replies. “Late. We start at eight.”

“The crew might start at eight. I’m not on the crew,” I remind him as I step inside. The door thuds shut behind me. The lobby smells different in the morning, less damp but more dust and old wood. Sunlight slants through the tall front windows, catching on floating particles and making the place look almost enchanting.

I gesture at the table where there’s an old blanket wadded up like a makeshift pillow. “Did you sleep down here?”

“No.”

“You sure? Because this looks like the camp site of someone who woke up before the sun to assert dominance over a building.”

He ignores that. “I wanted to review the plans before we started. I mIght’ve fallen asleep in the process.”

I walk closer, stopping at the edge of the table. The blueprints are meticulous. Measurements scribbled in the margins. Sections flagged. Notes written in neat controlled handwriting that does not belong to someone who enjoys surprises. I have to stifle the laugh that bubbles up from a memory of his sixteenth surprise birthday party. Oh, he was mad when he saw half the graduating class jump out from behind the bowling alley return racks. I drop my tote beside his plans. Paint chips slide out. My sketchpad lands half on top of one of his pristine drawings.

His eyes flick to the corner where a charcoal smudge blooms.

“My bad,” I say, flipping open the sketchpad. 

He scoffs and grumbles something that sounds distinctly like a curse as he tries to swipe the charcoal away. It doesn’t work.

I scan the blueprints in front of him and find the wall that’s taken up permanent residence in my brain immediately. Right in the middle of his floor plan, sitting between the entry and the back of the lobby obstructing the valley view, which is the single best feature of this entire building and the architecture has it completely buried.

I tap it. “This has to go.”

He doesn’t look up. “It stays.”

“Ryan.” I tap it again. “The valley view from the back windows is the reason someone drives forty minutes off the highway to stay here. You’ve got it completely walled off from the entry.”

Now he looks up. “That wall anchors the original floor plan. Remove it and you change the historical footprint.”

“Guests don’t pay to look at a historically accurate wall.”

“No.” He straightens up and crosses his arms. “But they don’t come back to a building that doesn’t know what it is either.”

He glares at me.

I match his glare and raise him a scowl.

I open my mouth.

Close it.

He’s not wrong.

I hate that he’s not wrong. I came in here fully prepared to be right about everything and he has picked the one wall in this entire building that I can’t just bulldoze past with a mood board and a strong opinion and he knows it and he’s not even smug about it, which is somehow worse.

Jake, from his position in the stairwell where he has apparently been standing long enough to have developed opinions about the acoustics, says nothing.

Smart man.

“The view is still the view,” Ryan says, quieter now, like he’s actually thinking it through and not just defending a line item. “We can address how guests access it without compromising the structure that tells them where they are.”

“How.”

“I don’t know yet.” He looks at the wall on the plans. “But removing it isn’t the only solution.”

I look at it too.

He’s right that it anchors something. I knew that when I walked in, which is why it’s been living in my brain since yesterday and why I came in this morning ready for this exact fight. The wall is doing a job. It’s just doing the wrong job.

Neither of us is willing to budge on this and we both know it, which is the most irritating possible outcome of this conversation. “Fine, we’ll revisit that one later but it stays flagged.”

“It was already flagged.”

“Different flag,” I say.

Something moves at the corner of his mouth that looks suspiciously like a smile before he clamps it back down. He looks back at the plans and I toss a paint chip directly onto the blueprint.

“That’s green. Green is not an approved color,” he says.

I roll my eyes and go back to sorting through my samples. “There is no approved palette.”

“There should be.”

I look up at him. “That’s where we’re going to have problems.”

He exhales slowly, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. “We agreed to conditions.”

“Great. I love conditions. Mine say I don’t touch your structural drawings without asking and you don’t touch my material or color choices, period. Which means,” I tap the paint chip, “this stays.”

He huffs something under his breath but I can’t hear it.

“For the duration of this project, I need to be able to make design choices without you micro-managing.”

“That’s… fine. Efficient.”

“And my other condition is no replacing things that don’t need replacing,” I tell him. “Not when restoration is possible.”

That gives him pause for some reason. I genuinely thought he’d be on board with that one. He glances around the lobby. His gaze catches on the stairs, the banister worn smooth by hands, the light catching the imperfections instead of hiding them. “You’re going to slow this down,” he says.

“I’m going to keep it from feeling forgettable to guests. Because if it feels disposable or forgettable, no one comes back.”

Ryan straightens like maybe that one got to him. He looks back at me, something shifting behind his eyes. Almost like he’s recalibrating.

I flip my sketchpad open. “Before you ask, I’m not redoing the trim in composite.”

“That would save time.”

“It would also look like you bought it in bulk.”

“That’s not a technical objection.”

“It is to me.”

He runs a hand through his hair, letting his gaze drift back to the plans like they might take his side. “We’re on a tight timeline.”

“I know,” I say. “But you’re treating this place like it’s a problem to solve.”

“It is.”

“It’s a place people are going to walk into when they’re tired,” I say. “When they don’t want to think. When they want to put their bags down and feel like they’re allowed to exist for a minute.”

He stills and shuts his mouth for long enough I glance over at him to make sure he didn’t slither away without my noticing.

Nope.

Still there.

I tap the page. “If everything here looks temporary, they’ll feel temporary too.”

Jake’s voice floats in from behind me. “She’s not wrong.”

Ryan glances past me toward the stairwell where Jake is leaning with his arms crossed watching us like this is better than cable.

“You two always gang up on people this early?” he asks.

“Only when they deserve it,” Jake says cheerfully, walking over and clamping a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “You don’t have to change the whole project. Just listen to her.”

Ryan glances back at me. “You’re asking me to slow down?”

“Not really.” I shake my head. “I’m just asking you to not rush the parts that actually matter.”

Ryan exhales slowly, eyes moving around the lobby. When he looks back at me something in his expression is different. Something that looks like he’s actually seeing the room instead of the blueprint of it. “Okay,” he says. “Show me.”

“You show me,” I say.

His brow furrows. “Show you what?”

“A wall that’s actually ready. Something finished enough that the paint won’t be wasted on a wall that’s getting knocked down tomorrow.”

“The walls aren’t prepped.”

“I know. That’s why I’m not painting yet. It’s just a color test.”

Jake throws a thumb over his shoulder. “Back hallway near the service stairs. Drywall’s done and ready.”

“Perfect,” I say.

The hallway is narrower, quieter. No windows, just borrowed light from the lobby and the hum of power tools somewhere upstairs. I tape off three clean rectangles, deliberate, careful. Ryan watches closely.

The green goes on darker than expected. Moodier. Honest.

I add the cream.

Then the accent is a special mixture I had Rowdy work up. It’s a metallic copper that catches the light just right.

We step back.

“The green feels heavier here,” Ryan says.

“No direct light. It’ll read calm, not cold.”

Jake squints. “That cream works better than the eggshell you had planned, Ry.”

Ryan nods once. “It does.”

I glance at him. “Was that an agreement? From Ryan Calloway? Before nine a.m.?”

“It was an observation,” he says, biting back a grin that shows up anyway. “But yes.”

I smile.

Jake claps his hands once. “Compromise. Before coffee number two.” He wipes a fake tear from his eye. “I think I’m gonna get emotional.”

Ryan looks at the wall, then at me. “Document the final choices.”

“I will,” I say, pulling my tablet out and opening the project file. The one that has forty-seven more decisions in it than I had any business making before I was officially on the clock. “I may not handle the process the same way you do but I’m not incompetent.”

He looks at the scope of what’s already in the file. “Clearly.”

I put the tablet away and follow Jake back toward the lobby.

Matt is on a ladder doing something to the wiring in one of the walls. He’s got safety glasses pushed up on his forehead and a pencil behind his ear when he glances down at me. “Hey Dani,” he says. “Good to see Jake brought in the brains.”

“And the style,” I say, looking at the conduit he’s already run along the upper wall. “You’re centering the sconces?”

“That’s where his plans said to put them.”

I frown at the blueprints that are already annoying the hell out of me and we just met this morning. The way the morning light is coming through the window at the end of the corridor, hitting the plaster at an angle means centered sconces are the single most boring way he could’ve chosen to handle the lighting in here. I turn and face Ryan who’s standing right behind me with a scowl on his face. “If you center them you kill the shadow play the original architecture is doing. The walls aren’t square. You noticed that right?”

Matt comes down one rung. Looks at the wall. “Huh.”

“Offset them eight inches toward the window end. You’ll get layered light instead of flat.”

He looks at where I’m pointing. Looks back at the conduit he’s already run. I can see him doing the math on whether this is going to be a problem.

“How much do you need to move?” I ask.

“Not much,” he says slowly. “Might actually be cleaner that way anyway. The stud placement’s been fighting me.”

“Then we both win,” I say.

He nods once and goes back to fiddling with the wiring inside the wall. “I’ll adjust the run.”

Elijah is in the sitting room off the lobby, which has a section of wainscoting along the south wall that Ryan’s plans have flagged for replacement. He’s got his hand on it when I walk in. I stop in the doorway.

“Hold on,” I say.

He looks up.

I cross the room and crouch down, running my fingers along the bottom rail. The paint is thick—four, maybe five coats—but underneath it the wood is solid. Tight grain. Old growth. “Is this salvageable?” I ask.

Elijah doesn’t hesitate. “Yeah. It’d take a while to strip it down but it’s good wood.”

“Better than new?”

“Significantly.”

“Then it needs to stay,” I say. 

“I’ll pull the replacement order,” Elijah says, already putting down his pry bar.

“That’s a line item,” Ryan says from behind me. I don’t have to look to know he’s standing there with his arms crossed over his chest.

“It’s also a line item that comes off the replacement budget and goes back in your pocket,” I say. 

“How long will that take?” Ryan asks.

“A couple days at the most,” Elijah says.

From behind Ryan, a voice says: “She’s right.”

We all turn to see Jesse standing in the hallway with a thermos in one hand, looking past Ryan at the wainscoting like he’s seeing something he forgot was there. “Your grandmother picked that out,” he says. “We drove to three different mills.” He looks at Ryan. “It needs to stay.”

Ryan looks back at the wainscoting and sighs. “Fine,” he says.

Jesse nods once, satisfied, and heads back down the hall toward the kitchen. I hear him tell someone that there’s coffee on if they want it.

I don’t look at Ryan as I make my way out of the small room. Dale’s mumbling from the main bathroom about a plumbing situation that has apparently been developing since sometime in the nineties and still has strong feelings about being addressed. I spend twenty minutes moving through the guest rooms on the second floor, standing in different spots, watching where the light goes and what it does when it gets there.

Ryan eventually finds me in the third room on the east side, standing completely still in the middle of the floor. “What are you doing,” he says.

“Watching.”

“Watching what?”

“The light,” I say, motioning for him to come closer. “Look.”

He moves to stand next to me, which  is when I realize I’ve made a tactical error because there’s nothing between us. And why does he still have to use the same body wash he used at seventeen?

Great.

Now I’ve now lost track of what I wanted to say about the light.

I point at the wall anyway.

 He looks around the room. At the walls, the window, the floor. “I don’t see anything.”

“Give it a second.”

He does.

The familiar woodsy scent makes my breath stop short in my chest. I always loved when it lingered long after he’d left. It was like a piece of him was always there with me because just about the time the scent started to fade, he showed back up with his grandma’s cookies and a puppy dog expression about some homework assignment that was giving him fits.

Until one day it evaporated completely.

The light moves. Slow, almost imperceptible, the shadow from the window frame tracking across the plaster as the afternoon shifts. It catches the texture of the wall and for just a moment the whole room feels warmer.

“Oh,” Ryan says.

“Every room does something at a particular hour,” I say. “I need to know what this one does before I choose its palette. Otherwise I’m just guessing.”

He’s quiet for a moment. “That’s not in any design brief I’ve ever read.”

“No?” I say. “It should be.”

He looks at the wall for another second. Then he pulls out his digital pen and makes a note in the margin of his tablet.

I don’t ask what it says, but something tells me it’s going to be about light.