I didn't treat you the way you deserved the other night. I was polite, but I wasn't. I wasn't genuine. And that bothers me. He hadn't expected that.
Of all the things she might have said, that was the one he hadn't prepared for." "You were fine," he said. "I wasn't." Her voice was steady, but there was something underneath it. The sound of someone saying a true thing they'd been avoiding. I spent most of that dinner waiting for you to show your hand. Waiting to find out what you were actually after.
And And you didn't. A pause. That confused me more than if you had. Marcus looked out the windshield at the quiet street. A dog crossed slowly from one yard to another.
A porch light flickered on somewhere. I helped your father load a truck, he said. That's all that happened. I know that now. Emily said, "I'm just I'm not good at accepting that at face value.
I haven't been for a while. He wanted to ask why." He didn't. "You don't owe me an explanation," he said instead. "No," she agreed. "But I wanted to give you one anyway." Another pause shorter this time.
"My father would like to know if you'd consider taking on a project, not charity. Real work. We have a property outside town, an older farmhouse on the Caldwell land that's been sitting empty for years. He wants it restored. He asked specifically for you.
Marcus thought about his schedule. The Abernathy job. The widow on Red Bud Lane who'd been waiting 3 weeks for him to get to her fence. I'd need to see the property first, he said. Of course.
And I'd need to give you a real number. I don't discount because of He stopped. Because of us, Emily finished. I was going to say because of the situation, Marcus said carefully. She was quiet for a moment.
Then unexpectedly, she said, "Good. My father would be insulted if you did." Something in Marcus' chest moved just slightly. "All right," he said. "Send me the address. I can look at it Saturday morning.
I'll meet you there," she said. He waited for her to hang up first. She did after one more pause that lasted just long enough to mean something and not long enough to say what. Marcus sat at the curb for another minute in the dark. Then he drove home and helped Lily with her reading and did not mention the phone call and told himself again that he was not thinking about Emily Caldwell.
He was getting worse at believing himself. Saturday arrived the way Georgia Saturday's due in the fall. Cool and bright. The kind of morning that makes everything look like it was recently cleaned. Marcus got Lily settled with breakfast, and a book told his neighbor, Mrs. Greer, he'd be back by noon, and drove the 12 mi to the address Emily had texted him the night before.
The farmhouse sat back from a gravel road at the end of a long drive lined with old fence posts that had leaned gradually in every direction over the years. The house itself was a wide singlestory with a wraparound porch built solid in the bones but worn at the surface. Peeling paint, a sagging section of roof over the east-wing windows that had warped in their frames. The kind of house that had been built by someone who cared and had been neglected by someone who didn't have the time. Marcus had been standing in front of it for maybe 5 minutes, notepad out, when he heard the crunch of gravel, and turned to see Emily Caldwell stepping out of a black sedan.
She was dressed differently than the dinner practical this time. Dark jeans, a plain jacket, her hair was down. She looked less like someone who ran meetings and more like someone who'd grown up on land and hadn't entirely forgotten it. She walked toward him directly without hesitation and extended her hand. "Thank you for coming," she said.
"Thank you for the project," he said. They shook hands. Her grip was firm. she held it a half second longer than a casual handshake required. They both let go at the same time. So she said, looking at the house, "How bad is it?" "I don't know yet," Marcus said.
"Walk with me." They walked the perimeter first. Marcus talked through what he was seeing, not to impress her, just the way he always worked, narrating the problem aloud, to organize it in his head. Emily listened without interjecting, but she wasn't passive. She asked the right questions at the right moments, not surface questions, structural ones. What would fail first?
What would cost the most? What could wait and what couldn't? You know, construction, Marcus said somewhere around the back of the house. I know business, she said. Which means I know which questions to ask about things I don't know.
He glanced at her. She was looking at the roof line, not at him. Your father built his company from the ground up," Marcus asked. "He built it from nothing," she said. "And there was a particular weight in the word nothing." "When he started, we lived in an apartment with two rooms.
He worked 18-hour days for 4 years before the company made enough to be stable. I did homework on a folding table in the living room." She paused. People look at what he has now and assume he was always this. He wasn't. Neither was I.