The bones of the place are wonderful. But Maisie is right about the rest of it. Everything matches in that careful deliberate way that says money was spent, thought was applied and nobody actually lives here yet.
There are boxes half unpacked in the corners. A bookshelf with books arranged by height rather than any system that suggests someone actually reads them. A kitchen that looks like it came out of a showroom and hasn't been properly broken in yet. Photographs still leaning against the wall instead of hanging on it.
Maisie moves through the space with the decisive energy of someone who has already done this in her head and is now just executing the plan.
"Bookshelf first," she says. "They go by what you like, not by how tall they are."
"Does your dad know you feel strongly about this?"
"Dad organizes everything by size. It's a whole thing." She starts pulling books off the shelf and making piles on the floor by some system I can't immediately identify. "These are his favorites. These are ones he bought because he thought he should read them. These are ones he actually read twice."
I look at the piles. "How do you know which is which?"
"The ones he read twice have bent spines." She holds one up. "See?"
I crouch down beside her and look at the pile of twice-read books. They're a mix. Some ranch history, which makes me feel something I'm not ready to look at directly. Some fiction. A few that look like they've been carried in bags and read on planes and lived with rather than just owned.
We work through the bookshelf together and somewhere in the middle of it I stop thinking about it as a task and just do it, the way you do when something becomes unexpectedly absorbing.
Maisie talks while we work, telling me about their old house in San Francisco, about her school and her friends and the way her dad used to come home late and eat dinner alone in the kitchen because she was already asleep.
She says it without sadness. Just as a fact. But it lands somewhere quiet in my chest and stays there.
We've moved on to the photographs when I hear the front door.
Beckett stops in the doorway of the living room and looks at the rearranged bookshelf and the photographs laid out on the floor and Maisie sitting in the middle of it all with a picture frame in each hand and me crouched beside her holding a hammer I found in the kitchen drawer.
He looks at me.
I look at the hammer like I'm surprised to be holding it.
"Surprise," Maisie says cheerfully.
Beckett looks around the room slowly. Something moves across his face that he doesn't try to hide quickly enough. It's there and gone in a second but I see it. Something that looks a lot like a man who hasn't had anyone take care of his space in a very long time and doesn't quite know what to do with it.
He clears his throat. "You rearranged my books."
"By preference not height," Maisie says firmly. "It's better."
He looks at the shelf for a long moment. "Yeah," he says quietly. "It is."
He looks at me again and I realize I'm still holding the hammer and I have absolutely no idea what to do with my face right now.
"I was going to start dinner," he says. "You want to stay?"
Maisie answers before I can open my mouth.
"Yes," she says. "She does."
Beckett Wilder should not be allowed to cook.
Not because he's bad at it. That would be easier to deal with. He's actually competent in the kitchen in the same way he's competent at most things he decides to apply himself to. It is carried out with a confidence that is only occasionally warranted.
He moves around the kitchen like he knows where everything is, which he does because he organized it himself, and he cooks with the focused attention of a man who takes even casual things seriously.
It is deeply inconvenient.
Maisie lasts through the salad preparation before announcing she needs to check on Rowdy and disappearing out the back door with the transparent strategy of an eight year old who thinks she's being subtle.
