So, you're just squatting in my house, sanding my fireplace? Dean finally looked at her. He leaned his weight against the heavy oak frame. You paid the deposit for the restoration directly to my LLC. It cleared on Friday.
I have a job to do. If you want me out, say the word. But good luck finding someone to match this grain before Christmas. Claire tightened her jaw. She hated being backed into a corner, but she respected competence.
And looking at the 3 ft of immaculate honey-colored oak he had already exposed, he was very competent. Before she could speak, a small sound caught her attention. A soft, rhythmic scratching. She looked past Dean. In the corner of the cavernous, dusty room, sitting on a folded moving blanket, was a boy.
He looked about five or six. He wore a heavy wool sweater and thick, industrial-grade ear defenders. He had a clipboard on his lap and was intensely focused on dragging a blue crayon across a piece of construction paper. Claire stared. Is that a child?
Dean didn't turn around. That's Leo. This is an active construction site. It's an active wood workshop at the moment, Dean corrected mildly. Structural is shut down.
Plumbers aren't here until Thursday. Electricians are waiting on copper. It's just me and him. Does he not have a mother, a school, a babysitter? Claire's questions were rapid-fire, invasive.
She didn't care. Liability was a core tenet of her business model. Kids on construction sites were walking lawsuits. Dean's hands stopped moving. The silence in the room suddenly felt heavy, pressing against Claire's eardrums.
He set the scraper down on the mantelpiece. The metallic clink was abnormally loud. When he looked at her this time, the flat gray of his eyes had shifted into something cold and incredibly dense. His mother is dead, Dean said. The words weren't for sympathy.
They were a brick wall. His school had a half-day. My sitter has the flu. He sits on that blanket. He doesn't move.
He doesn't touch the tools. If his presence is a deal-breaker for you, Ms. Montgomery, I will pack up my truck and send you a cashier's check for the remainder of the deposit by tomorrow morning. Claire swallowed. It was a rare sensation, the sudden dry realization that she had overstepped.
She looked at the boy who hadn't looked up once, entirely consumed by his blue crayon. Then she looked back at Dean. He was already reaching for his tool belt, ready to unbuckle it. He meant it. He would walk away from a lucrative contract without a second thought.