Chapter 4
"Silas, you spent four hours under my floorboards—"
"I owed Clara," he cut in sharply.
He stood up in one fluid, towering motion, grabbing his tool tote and swinging it onto his shoulder as if it weighed nothing at all. He looked down at her from his full height, his expression unreadable once more.
"Besides," he added, his voice softening just a fraction, "the coffee wasn't terrible."
Before Nora could argue, he turned on his heel and pushed through the rear exit, stepping out into the foggy alley. The door clicked shut behind him, leaving the bakery abruptly, achingly silent.
Nora sat on the floor for a long moment, listening to his footsteps fade down the cobblestones. The space felt suddenly larger, colder, and far too empty.
She stood up, brushing the sawdust from her knees, and walked over to the counter where the green ledger rested under the lone pendant lamp. She opened it to page fifteen.
Beneath the instructions for the subfloor, in Clara’s sharp, slashing script, were three lines she hadn't noticed that morning:
*“He will try to walk away without taking your money. He will tell you he owed me. Do not push him on it, Nora. Silas pays his debts in timber and sweat, because it is the only currency he trusts. Just make sure you leave the alley porch light on when it rains. He works late, and the steps are slippery.”*
Nora traced the ink with the tip of her finger. A strange, prickling warmth bloomed behind her ribs—a mixture of deep, comforting gratitude and an unsettling, dizzying wonder.
How had Clara known?
Clara had been eighty-two, confined mostly to the upper apartment for her final two years, yet she wrote about Silas Vance as if she had been standing in the room with him yesterday. She knew the cadence of his voice, the exact weight of his pride, the precise amount of sugar he needed to drop his defenses.
Nora looked up through the rear window into the misty darkness of the alley. Across the narrow gap, the warm, amber lights of Silas’s workshop were still blazing, silhouetting his broad figure as he bent over a drafting table, moving with that tireless, quiet grace.
She walked over to the back door, reached for the wall switch, and clicked on the exterior porch light.
Across the alley, the silhouette at the drafting table paused. Silas looked up through the glass, his eyes finding hers through the fog, steady and watchful in the amber glow.
Nora didn't look away. And for the first time since the world had fallen apart, she felt like she was standing on solid ground.
By nine the following morning, the alley smelled of wet brick, raw pine, and the chicory-laced steam of two fresh coffees.
Silas didn't knock. He simply kicked the service door open with the steel-reinforced toe of his boot, his arms wrapped around a twelve-foot length of reclaimed yellow pine that had to weigh eighty pounds. His forearms were slick with rain from the crossing, veins corded like wire ropes beneath his tanned skin.
"Move the drop cloths, Davies," he grunted, not breaking stride.
Nora scrambled, kicking aside the canvas tarps she had laid out over the floorboards. "You could have warned me. I have blueprints spread out on the pastry slab."
"Blueprints don't rot," Silas said. He lowered the massive timber onto a pair of wooden sawhorses with a precision that didn't rattle a single windowpane. He stood up straight, rolled his shoulders, and reached behind his left ear for a flat carpenter’s pencil with a fluid, unconscious habit. "Where’s the coffee?"
Nora reached over the marble slab and handed him the thermos. "One sugar today. We’re running low on raw cane."
Silas paused, his pencil hovering mid-air. He looked down at the mug, then peered at her from beneath his dark, furrowed brow. The pale crescent of his scar caught the morning light filtering through the dust-streaked transom.
"Clara’s notes say two," he said.
"Clara isn't the one walking four blocks to the maritime grocer in the pouring rain," Nora countered, leaning her hip against the pastry counter and crossing her arms. "Adapt or suffer, Vance."
A slow, deliberate stillness settled over Silas. He looked at her mouth, then up to the dark curls she had pinned carelessly to the crown of her head with a brass drafting compass. Something hot and unshielded flashed in the gray depths of his eyes—so sudden and fierce that Nora’s ribcage tightened around her breath.
He unscrewed the lid, lifted the flask, and took a slow sip. He didn't flinch.
"Tastes fine," he murmured, his voice dropping into that quiet, chest-deep register that seemed to travel straight across the sawdust floor and lodge under Nora's ribs. "A little sharp around the edges. Suits the company."
"Get to work, grizzly bear," Nora said, her face warming despite her best effort to appear thoroughly professional.
For the next four days, Honeycomb Hearth became an orchestral pit of steel, grit, and wood grain.
Restoring an eighteenth-century brick hearth wasn't merely a matter of leveling beams; it was an archaeological excavation. The original chimney base had settled into the coastal clay, tilting the massive beehive oven three degrees toward the north wall. To sister the yellow pine onto the compromised floor joists, they had to work together in the cramped, dirt-smelling trench beneath the subfloor, their shoulders pressed tight in the shadow of the brick foundation.
"Hand me the half-inch spade bit," Silas muttered from the darkness below the timbers.
Nora knelt at the edge of the opening, reaching into the tool tote. "You're drilling too close to the sill plate. The grain runs diagonal there—if you hit a knot, you'll split the face."
Silas paused. The beam of his headlamp clicked off, and his face appeared in the rectangular opening between the floor joists. His jaw was black with soot, his hair damp and tangled, his chest rising and falling against the rough wood. He looked up at her with that infuriating, deadpan skepticism.
"Are you lecturing me on grain orientation, city girl?"
"I’m saving your yellow pine," Nora shot back, leaning down until their faces were barely ten inches apart. The air between them tasted of iron shavings, damp earth, and Silas’s clean, woodsy soap. "My firm retrofitted three historic brick mills in Lawrence. I’ve seen nineteenth-century heart-pine shatter like sugar glass when an overconfident contractor forced an auger through a growth ring."
Silas stared at her. His gaze wasn't on the timber; it was locked on her mouth, tracking the rapid, defensive motion of her lips.
Slowly, without looking away, he reached up through the floorboards. His large, calloused thumb found the curve of her jaw, his rough skin brushing against her cheekbone with startling gentleness. Nora froze, her breath seizing in her throat. His touch was warm, electric, sending a shuddering ripple down her spine that made her toes curl inside her work boots.
He swept his thumb across her cheek, turning his hand to show her the gray smear of soot he had just removed.
"You had a smudge," he whispered. His voice was thick, scraped raw.
