From outside came the low sound of the street. "You're right to say it," he said. Maya blinked. She had clearly prepared for pushback. "No, I mean it," he said.
"You're right to say it, and the fact that you did, that's the reason I know I can't be casual about any of this." He met her eyes. "I'm not casual about it, Maya. I haven't been from the start." She was quiet for a moment, looking at him the way she sometimes did when she was deciding whether to believe something.
Then something in her face settled. "Okay," she said. "Okay," he said. She stayed another hour, and by the time she left, she was talking at her normal speed again about a client who had hired her to redesign a bathroom and then changed the tile selection four times in 2 weeks. Ethan listened and offered opinions he was not qualified to give, and it felt mostly like a Tuesday.
But walking back to the workbench after she left, he understood something more clearly than he had before. What he was stepping into wasn't simple. It involved people who had already survived loss, who had built careful lives, and were not in the business of watching them get carelessly dismantled. He was not stepping into a romance. He was stepping into a family, and families, unlike cabinets, couldn't be sanded down and redone if you got the measurement wrong the first time.
He picked up the router and went back to work. Tasha showed up at the shop on a Thursday morning 3 weeks after Maya's visit. She came in the way she always entered spaces, as if she was already being filmed, one shoulder slightly forward, sunglasses pushed up into her hair even though it was overcast. She had built a following online the way some people built walls, post by post, audience by audience, until the performance had become the only self she knew. "I just want to talk," she said, which was his way she always began conversations.
She intended to control. Ethan was at the band saw cutting a panel for a bookcase. He finished the cut before he turned around. "Then talk." He said.
She looked around the shop with the expression she used when she was deciding how to frame something for an audience that wasn't there. "I heard you've been spending time with Maya's mother." "That's accurate." "Ethan." She tilted her head and her voice dropped into something softer, more intimate, a register she used when she wanted him to feel like they were sharing a private truth.