The baseboards had arrived. When Claire finally came downstairs at 7:00 a.m. Holding a cup of instant coffee she had made using a camp stove in the gutted kitchen, the dynamic in the house had shifted. Not the physical space, but the atmosphere. She felt like an intruder in her own home.
She walked to the library. Dean was already measuring and cutting long strips of baseboard, his face a mask of total concentration. Leo was back in his corner, awake, wearing his earmuffs, carefully eating a bowl of dry cereal while lining up a fleet of plastic toy trucks. Claire stood by the doorway, sipping the terrible coffee. She watched them.
In the boardroom, Claire was a predator. She understood leverage. She understood weakness. She looked at people and calculated what they wanted and how she could withhold it until they gave her what she needed. It was a game of perpetual motion, but watching Dean, her usual metrics failed.
There was no leverage here. He didn't want anything from her except a cleared check for his labor. He wasn't trying to impress her. He wasn't trying to intimidate her. He was simply existing, doing exactly what he said he would do.
"You missed a spot," she said, her voice softer than she intended. Dean stopped the tape measure. He looked at where she was pointing, a small dark patch near the base of the fireplace. "Knots in the wood," he said, not looking up at her. Just running a thumb over the dark patch.
Burls. It's where the tree got damaged while it was growing. The grain twists around the injury to heal itself. Makes the wood harder to cut, but it's the strongest part of the board. You don't sand out a burl.
You polish it. He went back to measuring. Claire stared at the dark knot in the oak. The grain twists around the injury to heal itself. The metaphor was painfully obvious.
Yet, it struck her square in the chest. She thought about her own injuries. The father who abandoned her when she was eight. The mother who drank herself to death when Claire was in college. The ruthless climb to the top of Vanguard Logistics, stepping on anyone who got in her way, encasing herself in a shell of untouchable wealth, so no one could ever leave her or hurt her again.
She hadn't twisted around her injuries to heal. She had just paved over them with concrete. She looked at Leo. The boy had finished his cereal and was now trying to open a small plastic thermos, likely filled with juice. His small hand struggled with the tight lid.