Page 14 of Stealing Home

“Busy.”

“Busy good or busy bad?”

He considered it. “Busy tired.”

Diane hummed, and he knew exactly what was coming.

“You know you’re allowed to say no sometimes.”

Could he? Maybe. But every day off came with the same quiet fear. What if business slowed down? What if the phone stopped ringing? What if this was as good as it was ever going to get again? He’d never felt uncertain about the future before, never used to worry about finding work. His calendar had been booked eighteen months in advance, architects recommended him by name, and clients were willing to wait years for a house built by his company.

Then the fire came, and it devoured more than trees. Entire neighborhoods vanished beneath smoke and ash. More than a thousand homes were destroyed, including his own. Custom homes he’d spent months building collapsed into blackened foundations, some before families ever had a chance to move in. Equipment melted where it sat, and lumber yards turned into tinder as the fire took hold. By the time the evacuation orders were lifted, the only things left of his home and the business he’d spent a decade building were insurance paperwork and memories. Certainty belonged to other people now.

“Gavin?”

“I’m here.” Traffic finally moved, and he slowly eased the car forward.

“You disappeared for a minute there.”

He could hear the concern in her voice, and he smiled faintly. “Sorry. I was thinking about…” He trailed off.

“You don’t have to keep proving you can survive,” she said carefully.

“That’s not what I’m doing.” He knew he sounded defensive, and he took a deep breath. “I like the smaller jobs. They’re simpler.” On the other end of the line, his mother waited silently. “I fix a fence, and by dinner, it’s done. Remodel a bathroom, and in a few weeks, my responsibility is over. When I was building custom homes…” He trailed off. Even almost two years later, speaking about them in the past tense felt strange. “Those projects lasted eighteen months or more. So much could happen before they were finished.”

“You loved building houses,” Diane said quietly. “So why don’t you anymore?”

Gavin watched the rain start to fall harder, blurring the cars beyond the windshield. Because houses burned, businesses failed, and employees had depended on him, and everything had been too far gone to save. He knew why. He just wasn’t ready to admit that after he finally accepted he couldn’t rebuild the life he’d lost, he’d come to San Diego and built a different one instead. One with fewer moving parts, fewer risks, and nothing so precious that losing it would break him.

“Self-preservation isn’t the same thing as living.” The silence sat between them comfortably for a moment before his mother spoke again. “Do you remember what Grandpa always used to say?”

Gavin smiled. “Anything still standing can be repaired.”

“That’s right. Don’t forget that, sweetheart.”

Gavin’s throat tightened. He’d believed those words applied to everything when he was a kid.

He knew better now.

The traffic started moving for real, so he ended the call with a promise to touch base after the storm. By the time Gavin pulled into his apartment lot, the rain had picked up just enough to send people hurrying under umbrellas and jackets. Water pooled along the curb, dragging leaves and trash toward clogged drains. He shut off the engine and sat there, letting his head fall back against the headrest and listening to the truck’s engine tick as it cooled. He should go upstairs and find something to eat, maybe finish the estimates waiting on his laptop. Instead, he watched the rain and tried to shake off the conversation with his mother.

A sharp knock on his passenger window made him jump. Mrs. Alvarez, his elderly downstairs neighbor with neatly pinned gray hair and a habit of minding everyone else’s business, stood there under a red umbrella, glaring at him.

“You trying to scare me to death?” he asked as he climbed out of his truck.

“You’ve been sitting here for five minutes,” she said, walking around to meet him on the sidewalk. She handed him a plastic container.

“What is this?”

“Soup,” she said, her tone making it clear she thought it was a stupid question.

“Yes,” Gavin said patiently. “But why?”

“You don’t eat.” She poked him with one bony finger, hard enough to hurt.

He opened his mouth to argue, then snapped it shut. He held the warm container against his stomach, feeling the heat through his shirt as it settled in his chest. Soup was a stupid thing to get emotional over. But his mother had just spent twenty minutes gently pointing out everything he was avoiding, and now a seventy-year-old woman with a red umbrella had waited in the rain to tell him, not as gently, that she noticed him.

His throat tightened and he swallowed the emotion. “Thank you,” he said before heading for the elevator.