Page 41 of At First Spark
“Drink water,” I say.
Her brow lifts. “Was that an order?”
“That was common sense.”
“Sounds exactly like an order.”
“Maybe your hearing got damaged in the fire.”
She narrows her eyes. “Maybe your personality did.”
There she is. The sharp edge. The quick answer. The version of her that doesn’t let a thing land without giving one back.
It should make this easier.
We break for lunch because I make us.
That fight looks exactly like the others—her insisting she doesn’t need a break, me ignoring her and walking to the truck anyway.
Fifteen minutes later, I come back with two sandwiches from the deli near Main, chips, bottled water, and one of those peanut butter cracker packages. The same ones I keep at home that I noticed her eyeing this morning.
I hand them over on the back porch steps while Rook hovers between us, suspicious but hopeful. She takes the sandwich. Then the crackers. Looks at them. Looks at me.
“You’re irritatingly observant.”
I sit one step below her and unwrap my own lunch. “I get that a lot.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
That earns me the smallest smile.
We eat in the heat and the smell of old smoke and wet wood, looking out over a yard still scarred from the fire line.
For a while, neither of us talks.
Then she says, “My father used to pack me sandwiches exactly like this when he took me to jobs with him.”
I turn slightly toward her.
She doesn’t look at me when she says it. Her eyes stay fixed on the far fence line, on the blackened edge of grass near the carriage house, on something that isn’t here anymore.
“He hated eating on sites,” she says. “Said it slowed him down. But he always brought enough for both of us anyway.”
“What kind of jobs?”
Her fingers tighten once around the paper wrapped around her sandwich. “Restorations. Historic homes. Inns. Old churches. Anything with enough damage to scare reasonable people.”
A ghost of something moves through her expression.
“He said new builds were for people who wanted to control outcomes. Old places were for people who respected stories.”
That hits me harder than I expect. Probably because I understand that more than I should. Not the restoration part. The respect. The willingness to stand in front of something damaged and decide it’s still worth the work.
I look toward the house behind us.
Toward the open windows, the stripped-back hall, the room she slept in because there was nowhere else.
