Almost.
Instead, she turns toward the back bedroom. “There are gloves in the bathroom cabinet. If you’re staying, I’m putting you to work.”
I follow her down the hall before the part of my brain that still values self-preservation can object.
The next several hours turn into labor. The kind that burns through thought if you let it.
We board the broken window first. I drive the fasteners while she measures and holds the panel in place, the two of us bracing it together from opposite sides. The space is too tight for comfort. Her shoulder brushes my arm more than once. Each time, awareness moves through me fast and low before I lock it down again.
It’s just proximity. It means nothing. Still, I notice. The smell of her shampoo lingering under smoke. The way she bites the inside of her cheek when she concentrates. The faint linebetween her brows when something doesn’t fit the way she wants it to.
By noon, the front room is hotter than it should be, with the open windows doing nothing but circulating warm air. Sweat darkens the back of my shirt. Lark has pulled the borrowed sweatshirt off and knotted it around her waist over a worn tank top that leaves her arms bare.
I make the mistake of noticing the strength in them. Not delicate. Not soft. Built by use.
I drag my attention back to the pry bar in my hand and wedge it under a warped section of trim.
Rook trails us through every room, still anxious but less frantic now. He startles at loud noises. Shadows make him pause. Sudden movement sends him back toward Lark’s legs, but every now and then, he ventures a little farther from her. Sniffs around my boots. Watches me work with open suspicion instead of immediate distrust.
That’s progress, apparently.
At one point, he steals one of my gloves and takes off down the hall.
Lark hears me swear and turns just in time to see me follow a twenty-pound dog through a soot-streaked dining room with half a contractor bag in one hand and zero dignity left.
Her laugh catches me mid-stride. She stands in a shaft of dusty light near the parlor doorway with one hand pressed to her stomach and the other over her mouth, laughing hard enough that her shoulders shake.
And there it is. A different version of her than the one I’ve seen so far.
Not the woman with a hose pointed at a fire. Not the one standing rigid in my kitchen insisting she’s fine. Not the daughter carrying an old dream like it weighs more than a whole building.
Just… her.
Alive in the moment.
Unarmored for half a second.
I feel something in my chest shift hard enough to be uncomfortable.
Rook drops the glove, barks once, then trots back to her like he orchestrated the whole thing for morale.
I bend, pick it up, and look at both of them.
“You two are exhausting.”
Lark wipes at her eyes and takes a breath that still holds the tail end of laughter. “You chased him.”
“He stole from me.”
“He’s barely twenty pounds.”
“He has criminal intent.”
That gets me another laugh. Smaller this time. Softer. Worse in some ways because the second it fades, the room feels too aware again.
The air between us tightens. Somewhere down the hall, a board in the old floor pops as the house shifts around us, reminding me where we are and why.
I force my attention back to the work.
