Chapter 7: Fixing What You Can Reach

The cottage absorbed silence in a way Ivy hadn't expected. Two days in, she'd stopped trying to fill it. There was work—there was always work. She had the spreadsheets open across the kitchen table, columns of her severance balanced against the fixed costs of staying here: property tax, insurance, the contractor bills that would mount. She could see six months clearly. The seventh month was a question mark in a font she couldn't read.

The truck pulled up at nine-thirty on a Wednesday. Through the window, she watched a man in his early thirties step out—fit in the practical way of someone who used their body for work, not for show. He had a cordless drill on his belt and an easy smile that probably worked on most people.

"You must be Ivy," he said when she opened the door. "I'm Cam. Noah's got me on the electrical."

She'd expected Noah. She hadn't known she was expecting Noah until the moment it wasn't him.

"Right. Come in."

Cam was the kind of person who filled space without demanding it. He moved through the cottage like he was reading it, already cataloging what needed to happen, but also actually looking at things. He spent two minutes just studying the back bedroom.

"Okay," he said. "So basically, this is a mess, but it's a fixable mess. Noah already pulled permits. I'm going to run new wire through the walls, update the panel, get you some outlets that don't spark."

"Do they spark often?" Ivy said.

"Enough that it's a fire hazard. Let's not do that."

He worked methodically, and she found herself drawn back into the room every hour or so with coffee or to ask a question she didn't quite need to ask. Cam talked the way some people breathed—continuously, without apparent effort. He asked her about the city and how long she'd been here and what made her want a place with a century of wiring behind the walls. She answered in smaller words than he used, but she answered.

"So you got out," he said around noon, feeding wire through a hole he'd cut. "Just said okay, enough."

"Something like that."

"That's brave or stupid and I genuinely can't tell which."

Ivy found herself smiling. "Jury's still out."

"What are you going to do with it?" Cam asked, running more wire. "The cottage. You keeping it, selling it, flipping it?"

She thought about it. "I don't know yet. Maybe keep it. I like it better when I'm not thinking about leaving."

He glanced back at her. "Yeah? You sound like you might stay."

She almost corrected him, but something stopped her. The truth was she hadn't let herself think past October. Hadn't let herself imagine a version of this story where she didn't leave. "Maybe," she said quietly.

By four in the afternoon, Cam had most of it done. He was testing circuits when the second truck pulled up. Ivy knew it was Noah from the weight of her own attention shifting, like a compass finding north. She didn't move from the kitchen table where she was pretending to work.

He came inside without knocking, moved past the kitchen without making eye contact, and went straight to the back bedroom. She heard him speak to Cam—heard Cam's easy laugh in response—and then heard them both in the cryptic shorthand of two people who'd worked together before. Words like "good ground" and "load bearing" that might as well have been in another language.

Cam left at five. She watched him pack his truck from the window, and then there was no sound except the random creak of the old house settling and Noah moving in the back room.

He came out at five-fifteen, already knowing—somehow—that she hadn't eaten.

"Come on," he said. No preamble. No apology. "Let's go."

"I'm not—" she started.

But he was already pulling his keys from his pocket, and she found herself standing and grabbing her bag like she'd agreed to something he hadn't actually asked.

The Anchor Diner sat at the corner of Main and Spruce, a narrow box of a place with red vinyl booths and a counter that had probably been chrome in 1987. Berta Souza was wiping down the register when they came in. She was in her sixties with the kind of direct gaze that came from decades of reading people through the aperture of pie orders and coffee cups.

"Well," Berta said. "Looks like you two found something to agree on."

She didn't say it kindly or unkindly. She said it like a weather report.

They took a booth by the window. Noah sat across from her like they'd been doing this every day for a year. Berta brought coffee before they asked and left two menus, already moving toward the next thing.

Ivy stared at the specials board written in marker, black letters against a white background, the same items listed every day she'd ever been here: meatloaf, baked cod, roast chicken. The menu in front of her was laminated and worn soft at the corners. She studied it like it contained the answer to something important.

"They're the same every day," Noah said quietly. "The specials. Berta just rewrites them so people think they're choosing."

"That's depressing."

"Or it's kind. I haven't decided."

She turned the page anyway. Her eyes moved across chicken teriyaki, Greek salad with feta, turkey and avocado on wheat. None of it was what she wanted. She wasn't sure what she wanted anymore. The menu had become a place to look that wasn't at him.

When she bent to read the small print on the lunch combinations, she felt his hand settle between her shoulder blades—warm through her shirt, specific, deliberate. He kept it there for perhaps two seconds. Long enough for the muscle under her skin to register the weight and temperature. Long enough for her breath to catch in a place she couldn't name. Then it was gone.

She didn't turn around.

"Turkey," he said. "With avocado."

She ordered turkey and avocado. He ordered meatloaf and mashed potatoes—the same thing, she understood, that he always ordered. They sat in a kind of silence that wasn't empty. It was more like the silence before something speaks.

"Why didn't you come this morning?" she said.

"Sent Cam instead."

"I know, but why."

He was quiet for a long time. He turned his coffee cup in its saucer, back and forth, like he was winding something up.

"I wasn't sure you wanted to see me," he said finally. "Still not sure. But I sent Cam so you'd have someone there. So you wouldn't spend the whole day alone."

She thought about this. Thought about him calculating what she might need and then executing it in the only way he knew how—practical, indirect, leaving room for her to say no without it being obvious that she was being taken care of.

"I've spent two days alone," she said. "I'm good at it."

"I know you are."

"Then why."

"Because alone and choosing alone aren't the same thing."

Berta brought the food. She set down Ivy's plate with its carefully portioned turkey and fresh-sliced avocado, and Noah's plate with its butter-yellow mashed potatoes and dark brick of meatloaf that probably had been cooking since five that morning. No judgment. No comment except the one she'd already made.

Ivy cut through the turkey slowly. She could taste the brine and the bake, could taste that it had been made well, with attention. Around them, the diner held the late-afternoon weight of almost-closing, the light through the windows going soft and amber.

"Cam asked me what made me leave the city," she said.

"What did you tell him?"

"That I had a panic attack." She paused. "I didn't mention that you were there. That you watched me sit in a trash room and shake."

Noah didn't move. His fork hung suspended above his plate.

"I didn't want him to think that was why," she continued. "Like you were the thing that pushed me out. You weren't. You were just there."

"Was I?"

"Were you what."

"There?" He finally ate a bite of meatloaf. "Or just a thing that happened in a room?"

She didn't have an answer to that. She didn't have an answer to most of what was happening. Two weeks ago she didn't know this man existed. A week ago she knew him like she knew a door frame or the crack in a ceiling—something solid and unquestioned. Yesterday she'd told him how much his words had cost her and meant it. Today she was eating a turkey sandwich across from him because he'd handed her her bag like she'd already agreed, and she'd gone with him because it was easier than explaining why she wouldn't.

"You said some things to me," she said quietly. "Before you left yesterday."

"I know."

"You said I was using you."

"You are."

She looked up. His face was tired. Genuinely, bone-tired, the kind that came from work that had to be done and things that were broken and nobody getting what they needed.

"Not in the way you meant," she said.

"Maybe not. But Ivy—" He set his fork down. "You came here to be alone. And I came here because you were alone. And we're both operating like that's a solid plan and not just two people doing what they know how to do."

"What do I know how to do?"

"Push away. Work. Not ask for help."

"And you?"

"Show up. Fix things. Not say what's actually happening."

She cut through her avocado. The knife was dull and it took force. "So what is happening?"

"I don't know," he said. "That's the thing."

She pushed food into her mouth to have something to do that wasn't looking at him. The sandwich was excellent. The diner was quiet. Outside the window, the light was going gold and soon it would be dark. She had no idea what time it was or what came next or why she'd gotten in his truck or why her shoulder blade still felt warm.

"I don't know why I'm here," she said.

He looked directly at her then, and something in his face shifted—a door opening, maybe, or closing. It was hard to tell the difference.

"Same reason I am," he said.

She let that stand. She didn't ask him to explain it. She just ate her sandwich and drank her coffee and sat in the booth across from him as the diner emptied out, and Berta folded up her apron, and the light outside went from gold to blue to dark.

When they finally stood to leave, she felt the small shock of his hand on her lower back, steering her toward the door. Outside, the air had cooled. Main Street was emptying—the few lingering walkers heading home, the storefronts going dark. They walked toward his truck without deciding to walk in that direction, and she found herself wondering if this was how staying began. Not with a declaration. Not with someone asking you to promise. Just with one moment of not pulling away, followed by another.

He unlocked the truck and she got in. On the dashboard, face-down, was his phone. The screen lit once as the door closed—a name she didn't recognize, and then the word missed beside it. Three times.