CHAPTER TWELVE
RYAN

I didn’t mean to say that.

I’ve been awake since four-thirty running that particular sentence on a loop, which means I’ve spent two and a half hours staring at the ceiling of my childhood bedroom doing math on something I cannot fix.

Who said I was talking about the dance?

It just came out.

That’s the problem with Dani Wright. She’s always had this specific way of getting in under the wire before I can stop it and apparently ten years and a completely different life didn’t change that. She asked one question and I answered… out loud. Now I have to go stand in a building with her for eight hours and pretend I didn’t tell her the most honest thing I’ve said since I came back to Oak Valley.

Hell, since I left Oak Valley.

I haven’t been honest with myself since.

But it’s fine.

I’m a professional. 

And I’ve managed worse.

This will be fine.

I give up on the ceiling at five-fifteen and make my way downstairs because lying in the dark pretending to sleep in a building full of things that need doing is its own specific kind of misery. The inn is quiet as I tap the button on the coffee pot. It’s that particular stillness where even the wood stops settling. After the smell of coffee has fully merged with the smell of drywall, plaster and old wood, I take my coffee and open my laptop.

The day’s sequencing is the first thing. It’s what I should’ve been working on instead of going to Bottom’s UP! But here we are. Now I’ve got Dale on the east corridor. Matt on the second floor landing. Elijah on the wainscoting in the sitting room and Jake running between all three, which works until Dale finishes early and has an open wall with nowhere to go because Brent hasn’t cleared the structural notes yet and that’s half a morning gone.

I rework the schedule until it doesn’t do that.

Add a note to call Rowdy before seven about the Friday delivery. If the materials aren’t there when Dale needs them the schedule’s going to be tanked.

By six-forty the coffee is cold and the room is still dark except for the thin haze coming in off the east windows, which proves her point about the light without her having to be here to make it. I stand in the middle of the floor and study the east wall. There’s something pulling at the edge of my memory but I can’t find whatever it is. It’s like stifling a brain sneeze. The thought is almost there, but not quite yet and I can’t pull it the rest of the way forward. 

I take my cold coffee and go find my grandfather.

He’s in the kitchen, apparently summoned by the smell of fresh coffee. “Did your father ever talk about the dining room?” I ask.

He looks up from his mug. “Once or twice. Said it wasn’t finished.” He wraps both hands around the mug. 

“No?”

He scratches at the hint of a beard showing up since he hasn’t shaved yet today. “He had something planned for the east wall, but I don’t remember what it was.” He shakes his head slowly. “Never got to it. Money ran out before he could finish everything he wanted to do.”

“Do you know what it was?”

He shrugs and shakes his head. “There are boxes in the back storage room,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“A bunch of his records. I think he had plans and drawings in there. Your grandmother and I put them back there when we ran out of space in the office for them.” He pauses. “Never occurred to me you hadn’t seen them.”

I set my mug down and go find the boxes.

There are four of them stacked against the back wall of the storage room behind a box of Christmas decorations and what appears to be every instruction manual my grandfather has ever received for any appliance since 1987. I pull them all out into the hallway and go through them on the floor because there’s no table back here and I’m not waiting.

Financial records in the first one. I go through it fast.

Correspondence in the second. Supplier invoices. A letter from the county. My great grandmother’s handwriting on the back of what looks like a grocery list.

Third box.

Floor plans. Elevation drawings. Page after page in the same hand I’ve been reading on the county scans for two weeks. I go through them one at a time until I get to the second to last page and stop.

The east wall. Full page. And up high, above where the wainscoting would sit, a sketch. Long and horizontal. Dimensions noted on each side. And next to it, one small mark.

A dollar sign with a line through it.

I look at it.

Look at the dimensions.

Look at where it sits on the wall relative to the ceiling structure.

Why would you put a window there? That high, that narrow, that far above eye level. It’s not a view window. It’s not decorative. It’s—

Oh.

I sit back on my heels on the storage room floor with a hundred year old sketch in my hands and the dining room right down the hall and Dani’s words clawing at my memory.

He had a plan for the light.

I study the drawing on my way back to the work area. It could work. I grab a pushpin from the supply tray and attach the drawing to the project board, right next to the skylight rendering Dani left there two days ago. I stand back and look at both of them for a second. Her idea and his idea, side by side, a hundred years apart, solving for the same thing.

Then I pick up my phone and call Rowdy because it’s after eight and if I don’t sort the delivery before the crew arrives Jake’s going to make it everyone’s problem for the rest of the week.

Rowdy picks up on the second ring. “You’re calling early.”

“Wednesday partial,” I say. “Can you do it?”

A pause while he checks something. “Yeah. Give me the quantities.”

I read them off. He reads them back. We’re done in four minutes, which is the most efficient conversation I’ve had since I got back to Oak Valley and I appreciate it more than I can say.

I update the sequencing, add the Wednesday delivery, move Dale’s east corridor timeline forward a day and send Jake an updated note.

Done.

I pour the last of the coffee into my mug. It’s been sitting long enough that it’s more of a concept than a beverage at this point but I drink it anyway and try to avoid thinking too hard about how Dani’s late.

Not by much. 

Twenty minutes. 

Dale arrives first. He comes through the door with his toolbelt half-fastened. “That fitting situation,” he says, already moving toward the east corridor. “If Rowdy’s order doesn’t come in before—”

“Wednesday,” I say.

He stops, glances over his shoulder at me with his eyebrows pulling together.

“Already called him,” I say.

He stands there for a second like he’s waiting for the catch. When there isn’t one he makes a sound somewhere between satisfied and annoyed that he didn’t have anything to complain about after all and disappears down the hall.

Matt comes in two minutes later with his speaker already going and a coffee that smells significantly better than mine. Maggie’s is etched on the side of his disposable cup. I make a mental note to try it. He drops his bag, looks at the project board, steps closer. Reads the note under the sketch. Looks at the dining room doorway then back at the sketch pinned to the board on the wall. “Huh,” he says, picking up his bag and hauling it upstairs.

Elijah comes in behind him, two fingers up at me in a wave without breaking stride, already heading toward the back of the inn.

Jake follows them through the doorway and adjusts the tape measure clipped to his belt as he makes his way across the room. “Morning,” his voice echoes through the room as the board catches his attention. “Is that what I think it is?”

“My great grandfather’s original plans for that wall.” I nod toward the east wall.

He nods and tilts his head slightly as he studies it. “We could add framing that in to Friday. Shouldn’t take more than an hour or two to cut the hole out.”

I nod and glance at the time on my phone’s screen. 8:11. 

She’s late.

I don’t have time to get distracted, I remind myself but it’s pointless. I’m still listening for the sound of her car. I’ve been listening for it since I came downstairs. Is she avoiding me because of last night?

I shouldn’t have said that.

We were getting along just fine.

Okay, that’s a stretch but it was working.

All I had to do was keep it together until the end of the project.

I pick up my tablet. 

8:19. Ugh!

I place the tablet right back where I found it and go to find Dale.

He’s in the east corridor with his head inside the wall cavity, muttering something at the copper fittings that would make my grandma blush and my grandpa let out a loud guffaw.

I crouch down beside him on the floor, shining the light from my phone into the opening and in the direction he’s pointing.

“See it?” he asks.

“Uh huh. I see it.” The original pipe is closer to the stud than the drawings showed, which means Dale’s routing is going to have to come in at a different angle or we’re going to have a problem later on after the wall closes.

“Give me a minute,” I say.

He shrugs and pulls himself back from the cutout in the wall. “Every minute spent is another one added to the end of the project.”

“Thank you so much for that, Dale.” A groan falls out of me as I reach for my phone, tapping to open the cloud folder with the schematics. I’m still cross-referencing them to what we’re actually seeing inside of the wall when I hear the front door open and close with a heavy thud. 

She appears in the doorway and looks at me on the floor with dust on my shirt and my tablet propped against the baseboard and Dale standing over me with his arms folded. “Did you fall?” 

Dale snorts.

“I’m working,” I say.

“Uh huh.” Her eyes go to the dust on my shirt. Back to my face. “How’s that going?”

“Fine.”

“Fine?” Dale echoes. “You call this fine?” he scoffs and flings his arm in the direction of the wall while turning to look at Dani. “This pipe is sitting two inches off where the drawings said it would be and I’m standing here waiting on this guy,” he jabs one thumb over his shoulder in my direction, “to tell me what he wants me to do about it, while my coffee gets cold and my knees remind me I’m not twenty-five anymore and—”

“Route it through the soffit,” I say, pushing myself up off the floor and dusting my pant legs off.

Dale freezes mid-sentence. “That’s what I’ve been waiting on?” he says.

“That’s what you’ve been waiting on.”

He groans and shakes his head, dropping back down to his knees in front of the wall. “I’ll figure it out.”

Dani is still standing in the doorway with her coffee in hand and trying not to spill it as her body fights back against the laughter she’s trying not to let out. 

“Come here,” I say, taking a quick step forward, closing the distance between us. “There’s something I want to show you.”

The doorway is narrow. She doesn’t move back and I don’t ask her to. I freeze for just a moment when my hand brushes against her skin as I try to move past. I suck in a breath and catch the same scent I’ve been trying not to think about since last night. Her eyes meet mine.

Dale curses from inside the wall behind us.

Something shifts in her expression as I move past her in the doorway.

I clear my throat and move past her into the hall. “Come on,” I say, already walking.

“Okay,” she says.

She stops short in front of the board.

I pause right next to her.

She looks at the sketch for a long moment. Her eyes move between the dimensions and the dollar sign with the line through it that my great grandfather must’ve scribbled when he realized he ran out of funds for the project. Then at the skylight rendering pinned right next to it, her rendering, the one she built at whatever hour of the morning and left here two days ago.

“Where’d you find it?” she asks.

“In the storage room. It was in one of the boxes with his old records.”

She looks at the plans and the crude drawing with the way he imagined it would fit into the room. I watch her do the same math I did on the storage room floor at six this morning, working it through without saying anything.

“It’s not a skylight,” she says with a smirk tugging at the corner of her lips.

“No,” I say. “It’s not.”

She sucks in a breath and lets it out slowly as she goes back to studying the wall.

“But it’s what he always wanted for that room.”

“Yeah,” she says with a slight nod. “And it’s better.”

She looks at the sketch one more time. Then she uncaps her chalk and turns toward me. “I think I have an idea.” She doesn’t wait for me to respond. She moves to the east wall with the chalk in her hand like the conversation is already over, which it probably is. She stands in front of the wall for a second, reading it. Then she reaches up and marks the same dimensions from the sketch, or near enough. “There,” she says. “That’s your window.”

“Okay?” I feel my eyebrows pull together as I wait for whatever drop she’s planning.

“But…” 

There it is.

She steps back, letting her head tilt just enough for her hair to fall over her face as she studies the space. “You’ve got all this wall below it,” she says, brushing the stray strands away from her face with one hand as the other gestures toward the space adjacent to the proposed window. “Which right now is just a wall.”

“That’s generally what walls are.”

She looks at me sideways. “What if it wasn’t?”

I study the space she’s focused on and try to see what she sees but come up empty. “What are you thinking?”

She steps back and looks at me, something about the quiet that follows makes me forget for a second that I’m supposed to be looking at the wall. “He had a plan for the light and the money ran out before he could get there.” She caps the chalk and reaches up without thinking, twisting her hair off her neck and pinning it with the chalk like she’s done it a thousand times, which she probably has and which I have absolutely no reason to still find distracting. “But I don’t think the window was the whole plan. I think the window was just the beginning of it.”

“A mural, maybe?” She looks at the wall like she’s waiting for it to give up its answers. It doesn’t.

“Below the window?” I say, mostly just thinking out loud.

“All the way across…” she says, following the way the sun filters in through the other widows. “Something that makes people stop when they walk through the door. Something they can’t find anywhere else. They’ll have to stay in Oak Valley for it.”

I look at the wall.

I look at the sketch.

I think about my great grandfather running out of money before he could finish what he started, the dollar sign with a line through it in the margin of a hundred year old drawing, the thing he wanted for this room that nobody remembered until six o’clock this morning.

“Something permanent,” I add.

She nods, emphatically. “Something that grows,” she says. “So it’s never actually finished. So every person who comes through here gets to be part of it.” She spins on her heel and when I look down she’s right there. Close. So close I have to fight the urge to follow through on what I wanted to do last night on the dance floor. “I’m going to need to know your great grandfather’s story,” she says as a rose color slowly creeps up her cheeks. “And your grandparents’,” she adds quickly, turning back to the wall. “And anyone else who’s ever called this place something.” She starts sketching a rough shape, loose and fast. “Whatever goes on this wall has to be specific to this inn and nowhere else. Otherwise it’s just paint.”

I watch her work.

She draws the way she does everything, like she’s already certain and the rest of us are just catching up. The shape coming up on the wall is a tree. Wide at the base. Branches reaching toward where the clerestory window will sit.

“Roots,” I say.

She pauses. Looks at what she drew and laughs to herself. “Ray got to you too?”

“Ray gets to everyone eventually.”

“Roots,” she says through a sound that’s almost a laugh as she goes back to the sketch.

An uncomfortable feeling settles in the pit of my stomach as her voice mixed with that word wraps itself around my throat. 

I can’t do this. “I’m going to find Jake,” I say, already heading for the lobby.