The house on Maple Street in Portland had been standing for ninety years, and Nora was fairly certain it was about to outlast her patience. What she hadn’t expected was that the man she’d been carefully avoiding for three years would be standing in the kitchen doorway, holding a crowbar and looking just as unhappy to see her.
Daniel set the crowbar against the counter with a clank that echoed through the empty rooms. “Your grandmother didn’t tell you.” It wasn’t a question.
Nora dropped her overnight bag on the dusty floor. “She told me the house needed work. She did not mention a co-renovator.”
Her grandmother, Edith, had left the Victorian house to both of them in her will — to Nora, her granddaughter, and to Daniel, the neighbor’s son who had spent more summers here than in his own home. The condition was simple and infuriating: they had to restore it together before either of them could sell or keep it. Four weeks. One house. Two people who had never quite figured out how to be around each other without something aching.
The first morning was all business. They divided the rooms like a treaty. Nora took the upstairs — the two bedrooms, the narrow bathroom with its clawfoot tub. Daniel took the ground floor — the kitchen, the living room, the sagging front porch. They communicated in task lists left on the kitchen counter, careful and polite as strangers.
But the house had other ideas.
By day three, the plumbing in the upstairs bathroom had decided to surrender entirely, and Nora found herself standing in the hallway in her socks, soaking wet, holding a wrench she had no idea how to use. Daniel appeared at the top of the stairs, took one look at her, and pressed his lips together very hard in a way that was clearly him not laughing.
“Don’t,” she warned.
“I’m not,” he said. He was absolutely laughing on the inside. She could tell by the way his eyes went warm and bright, the same way they always had.
He fixed the pipe. She made coffee. They sat on the floor of the hallway drinking it, backs against opposite walls, and for a little while the silence between them felt almost comfortable.
Almost.
The thing about Nora and Daniel was that there had always been something unfinished between them. Three summers of slow, careful friendship that had tilted, once, into something more — one evening on the back porch, fireflies in the yard, his hand finding hers in the dark. And then she had left for London for a job that felt like her whole future, and he had stayed, and neither of them had found the right words to bridge that distance.
Three years later, the words still hadn’t come. Instead, there were paint rollers and sanding blocks and the occasional argument about whether the kitchen cabinets should be white or a soft sage green.
“White is timeless,” Nora said, on her knees in front of the lower cabinet with a screwdriver.
“White shows every mark,” Daniel said from behind her, mixing paint. “Sage is warmer. It feels like a home.”
She turned to look at him. He was watching her with that steady, patient expression she had never fully known what to do with. “You always cared too much about how things felt,” she said.
“And you always cared too much about how things looked,” he replied. But his voice was gentle when he said it.
They painted the cabinets sage.
By the second week, the careful distance had begun to erode in the small, daily ways that close quarters always managed. She learned that he drank his coffee black and hated the radio in the morning but always turned it on by noon. He learned that she worked better in silence but hummed to herself without realizing it, always the same half-dozen songs. They started leaving two cups out instead of one. They stopped knocking before entering a room.
One evening, Nora was up on a ladder in the living room, trying to peel back the last of the old wallpaper — a faded pattern of pale blue flowers that Edith had loved. Her arm ached. The paper was being stubborn. And without a word, Daniel appeared beside the ladder, reached up past her, and pulled a long strip free in one clean motion.
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