Chapter 3
"She refused to replace it?" Nora asked, leaning against the counter with her arms folded, watching the way the muscles in his back shifted beneath his henley.
"Said modern proofers lacked humidity soul," Silas said without looking up. A faint trace of humor colored his voice. "She kept a copper pan of boiling water on an electric burner inside a wooden cabinet for ten years. It worked, but it rusted the floor anchors to hell."
Nora smiled, though an ache tugged behind her ribs. "She didn't mention the copper pan in the ledger."
Silas paused. His hand stilled on the timber. He looked up, his gray eyes locking onto the green book sitting on the pastry counter beside Nora’s elbow.
For a second, his posture went completely rigid. His jaw worked, a muscle leaping beneath his stubble as he stared at the worn green cloth. He looked at it not with curiosity, but with an intense, reverent sorrow that seemed far too heavy for a neighbor who had merely shared an alleyway with an old baker.
"She left you a book?" he asked, his voice carefully neutral. Too neutral.
"Three hundred pages of one," Nora said, tapping the spine. "Every supplier, every temperamental pipe, every eccentric neighbor. She even told me how you take your coffee."
Silas swallowed. He slowly rose to his feet, wiping his dusted palms on his canvas apron. He didn't come closer to the counter, but he didn't look away from the book either.
"Clara was thorough," he said quietly.
"She was omniscient," Nora corrected, feeling a swell of protective tenderness for the volume. "I spent five years in design school learning about dead loads and structural cantilevers, and Clara managed to diagnose this floor from beyond the grave with three sentences and a cup of dark roast."
Silas’s chest rose and fell in a deep, silent breath. He looked at Nora, his gaze dropping to the ink stains on her fingers, then rising to meet her eyes. There was an ocean of unspoken things sitting behind his expression—things that made Nora feel suddenly, completely exposed, as though he weren't looking at a stranger who had moved in from the city, but someone he had been watching from a distance for a very long time.
"She worried about you," Silas said. The words came out low, rough around the edges, entirely devoid of his earlier cynicism.
Nora stiffened slightly, caught off guard. "Did she?"
"Every day," he said simply. "Whenever the mail came from Boston. She’d hold up those architectural magazines you sent her—the ones with the sleek glass buildings that look like ice cubes—and she’d shake her head. She said you were building cages for people who forgot how to breathe."
Nora’s breath hitched. A prickle of heat stung the backs of her eyes.
It was true. In all those polished phone calls from her high-rise office, Nora had tried so hard to sound successful, triumphant, indestructible. She had sent Clara glossy firm brochures featuring multi-million-dollar lobbies she had detailed, desperate to prove that leaving Oakhaven had been worth it. She had never admitted that those lobbies made her feel like a ghost haunting someone else’s wealth.
"She never told me that," Nora whispered.
"Clara didn't believe in telling people what was wrong with them," Silas said, stepping closer. He stopped just two feet away, the scent of him—wood shavings, raw sugar, and clean rain—washing over her senses. "She believed in giving them the tools and letting them figure it out when they got tired of being bruised."
Nora swallowed hard. Up close, the silver scar above his brow was even more striking; it gave his face an asymmetric vulnerability that contrasted fiercely with his broad frame and calloused hands. She had to tilt her head back to hold his gaze.
"Is that what you're doing?" she asked, her voice barely louder than the hum of the old fluorescent tubes overhead. "Giving me tools?"
Silas looked down at her. His eyes darkened, the hazel flecks catching the afternoon light. A muscle ticked in his cheek.
"I'm keeping your floor from caving in, Davies," he murmured, his voice dipping into that gravelly cadence that sent a shiver straight down her spine. "The rest is up to you."
He turned back toward his tool tote before she could respond, picking up an eighteen-inch pry bar and a heavy steel mallet.
"Grab the flashlight from my bag," he ordered, the gruff craftsman returning so swiftly it made Nora’s head spin. "And hold it steady under this sill. If you drop it into the crawlspace, you're crawling under the spider webs to get it."
"I am an architect, Vance," Nora shot back, kneeling down beside him on the dusty floor, her knee brushing against his thigh with accidental, incendiary friction. "I don't drop tools."
"We'll see," Silas muttered, but as he bent over the floorboards, Nora caught the distinct, undeniable curve of a smile playing at the edge of his mouth.
***
They worked through the afternoon until the coastal fog rolled in off the bay, turning the streetlamps outside into fuzzy, amber halos against the gray twilight.
It was grueling, dirty work, but Nora hadn't felt so alive in years. While Silas worked the hydraulic jack beneath the main support beam, easing the massive oak sill back into level an eighth of an inch at a time, Nora measured the deflection with her laser level, calling out the millimeters with crisp precision.
Whenever she barked a measurement, Silas would grunt, adjust the release valve with microscopic care, and swear softly under his breath when the old wood shrieked in protest.
They moved around each other with an eerie, unearned rhythm. When he reached for a wedge without looking, Nora was already pressing the cedar shim into his open palm. When the heavy beam finally settled onto its new temporary footing with a massive, shuddering groan, both of them let out a simultaneous sigh of relief that dissolved into a shared, breathless laugh in the dim light of the bakery.
Silas sat back against the brick hearth, wiping sweat and plaster dust from his brow with the back of his forearm. The movement pushed his hair back, leaving a streak of white chalk across his temple.
"Not bad for an office worker," he conceded, breathing heavily.
"Not bad for a grizzly bear," Nora countered, sitting cross-legged across from him, her canvas trousers completely gray with centuries-old dirt.
Silas chuckled—a low, rumbling sound that vibrated right through the floorboards between them. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the blue thermos, and unscrewed the cap. It was empty, but he held it between his palms anyway, his thumbs tracing the dented metal rim.
"The joist will hold for the night," he said, his tone shifting into the steady cadence of a professional. "Tomorrow we’ll sister a new four-by-eight beam alongside the damaged section. I have some seasoned yellow pine in the shop that’ll match the grain of the original subfloor."
"How much do I owe you?" Nora asked, reaching instinctively for her legal pad.
Silas’s face closed down instantly. The warmth vanished from his eyes, replaced by that stubborn, granite wall. "We're not doing that."
