"Character?" I offer.
"Yes." She points at me. "Character. It needs character."
"That's your dad's job, kiddo."
"Dad doesn't know how." She says this with the affectionate certainty of someone who has accepted a parent's limitations and moved on. "He picked everything out from catalogs. It all matches too much."
I look at her. "Too much?"
"Everything is the same color gray." She wrinkles her nose. "It looks like a fancy hotel where nobody actually lives."
I think about the ranch house as I've seen it in passing. She's not wrong. Beckett has expensive taste and excellent instincts for business and approximately zero instincts for making a space feel lived in.
The furniture is beautiful, cold, and arranged with the precision of someone who read an interior design article and followed the instructions exactly.
"What do you want me to do about it, Maisie?"
She gives me the look. The one that says she finds my question genuinely baffling. "Help me fix it."
"I'm not an interior decorator."
"You made the bunkhouse feel like home."
I open my mouth. Close it. The bunkhouse argument is actually a reasonable one and I resent that she's eight years old and already knows how to make a reasonable argument.
"Does your dad know you're doing this?"
"It's a surprise."
"Maisie."
"He'll like it." She says it with complete unshakeable confidence. "He needs things on the walls and real stuff on the shelves and maybe some plants. People who need to slow down need plants. My grandma says so."
I look at this eight year old sitting on my fence rail telling me about the therapeutic benefits of houseplants and think that Maisie Wilder is going to be an absolutely formidable human being in about fifteen years.
And the world is not remotely ready for her.
"One afternoon," I say. "That's all I'm giving you."
She drops off the fence rail and lands in the dirt and grabs my hand and starts pulling before I've finished the sentence. For someone who weighs about sixty pounds she is surprisingly effective at moving people who are not planning to be moved.
"Maisie. I need to finish the supply order."
"It'll be there later."
"That is not how supply orders work."
"Laney." She stops and looks up at me with those big serious eyes. "The house looks sad. We can fix that. Supply orders don't have feelings."
I stare at her for a moment.
"Fine," I say.
She grins and pulls me toward the ranch house and I tell myself I'm doing this for Maisie and not for any other reason whatsoever and I almost make it three steps before I know that's not entirely true.
The ranch house is exactly as sad as Maisie described.
It's a beautiful space. High ceilings, big windows, warm wood floors that catch the afternoon light and do something genuinely lovely on it.
