The Load-Bearing Wall

AIRowling

An AI-authored novel. Generated end-to-end by the AIRowling pipeline — no sentence written or edited by a human.
waive.online/static/library

Chapter 1

The fluorescent lights hummed at a frequency Steve had learned to ignore, the same way he'd learned to ignore the pile of unpaid vendor invoices sitting on his desk, the same way he ignored the fact that it was barely Tuesday and he'd already checked his email fourteen times. He stood in aisle seven of the Flagship Store, clipboard pressed against his ribs like a shield, and counted boxes of drywall anchors.

One. Two. Three. Four.

He liked counting. Counting was honest. A number either matched or it didn't. There was no ambiguity in arithmetic, unlike the silent treatment from his son, who hadn't spoken to him directly in three weeks except to demand the charger or complain about the Wi-Fi, or the look Marla gave him—sharp, assessing, as if he were a spreadsheet she couldn't reconcile.

Doug came around the corner pushing a cart loaded with return merchandise, his uniform shirt hanging loose on a frame that had shrunk ten years but refused to accept it. He smelled like Old Spice and peppermint, the cologne-and-candy combination that had been his signature since the nineties.

"You're doing the deep count again," Doug said. Not a question. He'd been saying it for six months.

"It's Q2 inventory prep. Corporate wants accuracy to the decimal."

"The decimal." Doug shook his head. "Steve, it's screws. It's not the Rosetta Stone."

"These are toggle bolts. Different load-bearing ratings depending on drywall thickness. If we ship the wrong spec to a contractor—"

"—they'll call us back and we'll send the right ones. We've been doing this forty-two years, kid. I think we can handle a wrong shipment of metal pieces."

Steve marked his clipboard. He wanted to say something sharp. He wanted to say you don't understand supply chain optimization or if you'd just use the new scanner app instead of walking around pretending the barcodes are a conspiracy. But Doug was sixty-two and had been here since the store opened in 1981, and Steve's mother had hired him personally because she said he had "good hands." So Steve said nothing and counted.

Five, six, seven, eight.

The ceiling above them was a grid of acoustic tiles, water-stained in places, some missing entirely to reveal the metal t-bar framework beneath. Steve had filed three work orders for roof repair in the last six months. Each one had been forwarded to regional, then to corporate facilities management, then to a queue labeled PRIORITY_LOW that Steve suspected no one ever opened. He knew this because he'd logged into the portal himself last Thursday and seen the queue. Twelve items ahead of the roof. All of them fluorescent light ballasts in stores that sold less annual revenue than the cost of replacing the ballasts.

"Heavy rain yesterday," Doug said, leaning against a display of extension cords. "Saw some pooling near the east loading dock."

I'll have Mei-Lin Chen check the gutters. She's been meaning to—

Steve." Doug's voice dropped half an octave, a register reserved for confessions and bad news. "That roof hasn't been touched since '78. The shingles are older than you are."

"I know the building's age, Doug."

"No, you don't. You know the warranty dates. You know the depreciation schedule. You know the square footage and the foot traffic metrics and the conversion rates from window shoppers to buyers. You don't know that the trusses are cedar and that the original contractor put in extra bracing because the foreman's kid used to ride his bike through the parking lot and he didn't want a sheet of tin to fall on her head."

Steve stared at him. Doug was looking up at the ceiling now, his face tilted toward the water stains as if searching for a draft of warm air.

"How do you know that?" Steve asked.

"My dad was the foreman." Doug tapped his temple. "I remember her. She grew up. Had kids. I saw her at the grocery store last year. He was a good man. He built things to last."

The hum of the fluorescents seemed louder. Steve looked up at the tiles, really looked at them, and noticed for the first time how many were sagging. Not dramatically. Not in any way that would show up on a safety inspection report. Just enough—half an inch, maybe—that if you pressed on them they'd give. Like teeth with decay underneath enamel that looked fine.

A thin line of dust trickled from the seam where two beams met, coating the linoleum in a fine gray snow. One of the metal t-bars groaned under the weight of wet insulation, bending imperceptibly but permanently, the way a knee bends when the ligament is already torn and you're just waiting to find out.

"Maybe we should get the roof looked at," Steve said.

"We should have gotten it looked at in 2003. And 2011. And 2016." Doug pushed off the extension cord display and started rolling his cart down the aisle. "Come on. Let's finish this section before lunch. I'm thinking chili dogs."

He ran the numbers in his head again. If they closed the back warehouse, they could afford the roof. They could keep the front alive, even if the body had to shrink. He pushed the thought away. Closing the warehouse meant laying off three people. It meant admitting defeat before the fight had even begun.

Steve followed. He told himself it was because Doug was right about finishing the count. He told himself it was because skipping a section would throw off the totals and he'd have to come back and double-count anyway. But the truth, which he acknowledged only in the private chamber of his mind where he kept things he wouldn't say out loud, was that Doug talking about his father made Steve feel something he couldn't name, and staying close to Doug felt like staying close to something solid in a world that had become increasingly difficult to stand on.

They reached aisle nine. The store was quiet except for the distant clatter of Mei-Lin reorganizing the paint department somewhere to their left—Steve could hear her humming, a tuneless sound that indicated concentration. The afternoon sun filtered through the high clerestory windows, casting long rectangles of gold across the linoleum. Everything was ordinary. Everything was exactly what a Tuesday should be.

Then the roof groaned.

It wasn't loud at first. A low, resonant sound, like a cello string bowed too hard, vibrating through the floorboards and up through the soles of Steve's shoes. He stopped. Doug stopped. They looked at each other.

"Do you hear that?" Steve said.

"Hear what?"

The groaning grew louder. It wasn't one sound anymore—it was many, layered on top of each other, the sound of metal bending and wood splitting and nails pulling free from joints that had held for decades. The acoustic tiles above them began to tremble as slow motes of dust drifted down, catching the sunlight like gold leaf.

"Move," Doug said. His voice was flat and certain, the way a man's voice becomes when he stops thinking and starts acting.

They ran.

Steve ran toward the nearest exit, his clipboard flying from his hands, his shoes slipping on the suddenly slick linoleum—water, he realized, water dripping from above. Doug ran the opposite direction, toward the back, toward the paint department where Mei-Lin was working. Steve shouted her name but the sound was swallowed by the noise, which was now a roar, the sound of a building tearing itself apart from the top down.

He turned and ran back. Not away—from. Toward Doug. It wasn't a decision so much as a reflex, the same way you reach for a railing when you stumble, the same way you grab a child without thinking. Doug was under the eastern span, near the lighting fixtures, and the ceiling was coming down in sections, great sheets of tile and insulation and something darker and heavier that Steve didn't want to identify.

"Doug!"

His father's voice answered, distant and calm, and then Steve understood that Doug wasn't in danger. He was moving with purpose, guiding Mei-Lin and two stock associates toward the emergency exit, his arm around Mei-Lin's shoulders, his voice cutting through the chaos like a blade.

Steve turned toward the front. The main entrance was visible through the haze of falling dust, bright with afternoon light. He could make it. He could be out.

Something caught his eye—a shape in the debris, a hand reaching up from beneath a collapsed section of ceiling, fingers splayed, palm facing outward in a gesture that might have been a wave or might have been a plea.

Doug.

Steve ran toward it.

The world narrowed to the space between him and Doug, to the dust filling his lungs and the heat of the collapsing structure pressing down from above like a hand on his shoulders. He dove. He grabbed Doug's wrist. He pulled.

Doug pulled back. He shook his head. He pointed—not away, but deeper into the store, toward the hardware section, where the ceiling had caved in completely and the space beyond was dark and impossibly vast.

Steve didn't understand. Then he did. Doug was telling him to go. To get help. To find someone who could pull him out properly.

"No," Steve said. He dug his heels into the linoleum. "No. I'm not leaving you."

Doug's face was gray with dust. His eyes were bright. He said something Steve couldn't hear over the groaning, something that might have been go or might have been I love you or might have been both. He squeezed Steve's hand once, hard, and then let go.

Steve stood there for one second. Two. Three. The ceiling above Doug gave another terrible crack, and a beam shifted, and Steve knew—if he stayed, he would die, and if he went, Doug might live.

He ran.

He ran past the paint department where Mei-Lin stood frozen, her arms full of color swatches, her mouth open in a silent scream. He ran past the checkout lanes where customers were scattered like pins, some crying, some filming, all of them moving in directions that had nothing to do with each other. He ran out the front doors and into the blinding afternoon sun, his lungs burning, his ears ringing, his hands shaking so badly he couldn't zip up his jacket.

The parking lot stretched before him, vast and ordinary, cars parked in neat rows under a sky that had no idea anything had happened. Steve fell to his knees. He put his forehead against the warm asphalt and breathed. He breathed in the smell of hot tar and gasoline and cut grass, and he thought of Doug's hand in his, and he thought of the roof, and he thought of the twelve work orders in the PRIORITY_LOW queue, and he understood, with a clarity that felt like violence, that he had been counting screws while the building fell apart above his head.

Sirens wailed in the distance. Somewhere behind him, the store continued to settle, its bones shifting and settling into a new shape, a shape that would never be what it had been. Steve closed his eyes. He waited for the paramedics. He waited for the police. He waited for whatever came next, which was nothing he had planned for and everything he needed.

The fluorescent lights inside the store went out one by one, clicking into darkness like a row of teeth being pulled, until only emergency exit signs remained, their green glow painting the chaos in an eerie, underwater light.

And Doug, pinned beneath the eastern span with his elbow broken and his ribs bruised and his left boot crushed, laughed. He laughed because the pain was sharp and immediate and therefore manageable, because Steve was alive, and because for the first time in forty-two years he was going to have to ask someone else to count the screws.

Mei-Lin stood in the parking lot clutching her color swatches, watching the smoke curl from the roof like a signal fire, and thought about how she would organize the aftermath, imposing the same rigid grid systems she used to manage the paint department on this chaos, because if she didn't organize it, she would have to feel it, and feeling it would break her.

Steve sat on the curb with his head in his hands and tried to remember the exact number of toggle bolts in aisle seven. He got to eleven before he stopped. Eleven out of an unknown total. An incomplete count. A number that meant nothing without the rest of the data. He thought about this for a long time, while the sirens grew louder and the world rearranged itself around him, and he understood that some things cannot be counted. Some things can only be survived.

The afternoon light shifted. The shadows lengthened. The store, which had stood since 1978, which had housed millions of transactions and countless small human dramas—arguments over prices, discoveries of forgotten tools, the quiet satisfaction of fixing something that was broken—settled into its new shape. Steve watched it happen from the outside, through the shattered front windows, and he felt something he hadn't felt in years: the sensation of standing still while everything around him moved, of being powerless in the face of forces larger than himself, of having to trust that the people inside were stronger than he was.

He was wrong about that, eventually. But not yet. Not in this moment. In this moment, he was just a man on a curb, counting nothing at all, watching his life collapse in real time and realizing that counting had never been the point.

The point was the people. The point was the hands. The point was the cedar trusses and the extra bracing and the foreman's daughter who grew up and had kids and rode her bike through the parking lot and lived.

Steve opened his eyes. The paramedics were approaching. He stood up. His legs shook. He brushed the asphalt from his pants and walked toward them, his footsteps uneven, his breath ragged, his mind empty of numbers for the first time in twenty years.

Behind him, the store exhaled—a final, settling groan, like a beast curling into sleep—and then silence.

The silence was worse.

Chapter 2

The parking lot smelled like wet concrete and whatever chemical the paramedics had sprayed near Steve's boots. He sat in the driver's seat of his pickup truck with the engine off, hands gripping the steering wheel at ten and two the way he'd been taught since he was sixteen and his dad had sat in the passenger seat correcting his grip. His knuckles were white. He didn't notice.

Behind him, the store stood like something that had been punched in the face and was trying very hard to pretend it wasn't hurt. The north wall was intact. The roof over the electronics section had pancaked into a jagged fan of corrugated metal and drywall dust that caught the afternoon light like ground glass. Steve watched it. He watched it for a long time. He tried to count the visible damage the way he counted boxes of drywall anchors—methodically, systematically, each item catalogued and filed away—but the numbers wouldn't come. There were no numbers here. Just the shape of what he'd broken.

His phone buzzed on the passenger seat. He didn't touch it. It buzzed again. Then again. Fourteen times today already. He'd checked his email fourteen times before the roof fell. He'd checked it while standing in aisle seven holding a clipboard he wasn't using. He'd checked it while waiting for Doug to finish his inventory count in aisle nine. He'd checked it while the ceiling above him began to sing that low groaning note that meant something was giving way somewhere, and he hadn't looked up because he was reading a vendor notification about delayed shipments of shelving brackets.

The phone stopped buzzing. The silence was worse than the buzzing.

Steve leaned his forehead against the steering wheel. The plastic was warm from the sun. He pressed harder. He wanted to feel something other than the hollow ache behind his ribs, the one that had been growing for years and had finally cracked something open when the roof came down. He kept pressing until his nose was flat against the plastic and his breath fogged the windshield in small, irregular clouds.

He started crying.

It wasn't dramatic. There was no sobbing, no loud heaving of the shoulders. It was the kind of crying that happens when a man has held his breath for too long and finally lets it out and discovers he's been holding more than breath. Tears tracked through the dust on his cheeks—drywall dust, probably, from the collapse—and his mouth opened slightly on each exhale like he was trying to breathe through a wound. He kept his hands on the wheel. He kept his eyes closed. He sat in the truck and cried in the parking lot of a store that used to belong to him and now belonged to insurance adjusters and structural engineers and people whose names he didn't know but who would decide whether three generations of his family's livelihood survived the afternoon.

Behind him, a car door closed.

Steve didn't turn around. He heard the footsteps—heavy, uneven, familiar. Doug. Doug moved like a man who had spent forty-three years walking through a hardware store, navigating aisles stacked shoulder-high with things he could identify by sound alone. The footsteps stopped at the driver's window. Steve felt Doug's shadow fall across the passenger seat.

"Steve?"

Steve wiped his face with the back of his hand. It came away gray. He tried to smile. It didn't work.

"I'm fine," he said. His voice sounded wrong—cracked, too high, like someone else's voice that had been borrowed and returned damaged.

Doug didn't say anything for a moment. Then he said, "Boy, you're sitting in your truck in the middle of the parking lot crying like a schoolboy and telling me you're fine."

Steve looked at him through the open window. Doug stood there in his blue work shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, white hair catching the late afternoon sun. His hazel eyes were soft in a way Steve rarely saw them. Soft and worried. The way a man looks at something he's known for decades and realizes he doesn't understand it at all.

"I didn't mean to—" Steve started. He stopped. He couldn't finish the sentence. He couldn't say I didn't mean to break the roof. He couldn't say I didn't mean to fail you. He couldn't say I didn't mean to fail myself.

Doug reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He looked at them, looked at Steve, and put them back. He'd quit five years ago. He still carried the pack like a talisman.

"You want me to call your wife?" Doug asked.

"No." Steve shook his head. "Not yet."

"Your boy's here."

Steve turned. He hadn't heard Owen arrive. He shouldn't have been surprised—Owen moved with the ghostly silence of someone who spent twelve hours a day wearing noise-canceling headphones, filtering out a world that was always too loud. Owen stood ten feet away, phone raised, screen pointed directly at Steve's truck.

Steve spun around, startled by a presence he hadn’t sensed. It wasn’t surprising; Owen had mastered the art of moving silently, gliding through the noisy world like someone accustomed to blocking out the world with noise-canceling headphones. Ten feet away, Owen held his phone up, the screen aimed squarely at Steve’s truck, the red recording dot blinking with steady, accusatory rhythm. At Steve.

"What are you doing?" Steve said. His voice was sharp now, defensive, the jargon-laced panic of a man who reaches for control and finds only empty air.

Owen lowered the phone slightly. His expression was unreadable—the flat, neutral mask of a teenager who had perfected the art of appearing uninterested in everything while secretly caring about every single thing.

"Just filming," Owen said.

"For what?"

"Mom's going to see this," Owen added, almost casually, the way a kid mentions he'd already sent a text. He didn't seem to think about it. He just filmed. That was the thing about phones now—they made everything feel temporary, like you could capture a moment and drop it back into the world like a stone skipped across a pond. Except stones sank. Videos didn't. They multiplied.

Steve felt the cold dread of being witnessed by an audience that never sleeps. It wasn't just Owen watching him. It was everyone Owen knew, and everyone they knew, and strangers who would find it weeks later and scroll past without stopping. The idea of it sat in his chest like a stone.

Owen shrugged. "For my TikTok. It's going to be good."

Steve opened the truck door and stepped out. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else—weak, trembling, not quite connected to his body. He walked toward Owen with the slow, deliberate movements of a man who knew that sudden motion might make something worse break.

"Give me the phone," Steve said.

Owen tilted his head. "No."

"Owen—"

"It's just a video, Owen. Nobody's gonna—

"Give me the phone."

Owen's expression shifted. Something flickered across his face—confusion, maybe, or the dawning realization that his father wasn't joking. That this wasn't a game. That the man who had spent fifteen years teaching Owen to never show weakness was currently standing in a parking lot with tears on his face and a voice that sounded like it was breaking.

"Dad, I'm just—"

"Give me the phone, Owen. Now."

Owen hesitated. Steve could see the calculation happening behind those brown eyes—the rapid assessment of risk versus reward, the same calculus Owen applied to every decision in his life. Give up the phone and lose leverage. Keep it and risk losing something bigger. Owen made his choice. He extended the phone, arm straight, screen facing away from Steve like he was handing over a weapon.

Steve took it. His hands were shaking so badly he almost dropped it. He looked at the screen. The video was still recording. A red dot pulsed in the corner. Steve's own face filled the frame—hunched in the truck seat, forehead against the steering wheel, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. The angle was perfect. Or terrible. He couldn't tell which anymore. Perfect angles made good videos. Terrible angles made honest ones. This was both.

Steve turned the phone off. He handed it back to Owen without looking at him.

"Go home," Steve said.

"Dad—"

"Go home, Owen. Tell your mother I'll call her later."

Owen didn't move. He stood there, phone in hand, watching his father with an expression Steve couldn't parse. It wasn't anger. It wasn't disappointment. It was something quieter and more complicated—something that looked like pity, which was the worst possible thing a fifteen-year-old could offer his father.

"You're weird," Owen said finally. Then he turned and walked away, his sneakers scuffing against the wet asphalt, his shoulders hunched against the cold wind that had picked up since noon.

Steve watched him go. He wanted to call him back. He wanted to say sorry. He wanted to say I'm not okay and I don't know what I'm doing and please help me figure out how to be a father when I've spent my whole life figuring out how to be a manager. But the words stayed lodged in his throat, thick and useless, the way they always did when it mattered most.

Doug was still standing by the truck. He hadn't moved. He'd seen everything.

"You alright, boy?" Doug asked again.

Steve shook his head. He couldn't speak. He got back into the truck, closed the door, and sat there with his hands on the wheel again, staring at the place where Owen had disappeared between two rows of compact cars.

The wind carried the smell of rain. Steve closed his eyes. He thought about the drywall anchors he'd been counting. Four. Three. Two. One. The numbers came back slow, reluctant, like guests arriving late to a party they weren't sure they were invited to. He counted them anyway. He always counted them. It was the only thing he knew how to do when the world stopped making sense.

Behind him, the store continued to settle. Small sounds—pings and cracks and the occasional groan—rose from the wreckage like a language Steve was only beginning to understand. He sat in the truck and listened to it, letting the sounds fill the spaces where his composure used to live.

When he finally started the engine, the radio played a commercial for a mattress store. Steve turned it off. He drove home in silence, his hands steady now, his face dry, his mind already moving through the calculations that would determine whether the store survived, whether his family survived, whether he survived any of it at all.

He didn’t know about the video Owen had uploaded. He didn’t know that by midnight it would have three thousand views, or that by morning it would have thirty thousand, and by the end of the week it would have three million, and that the caption would read simply: my dad crying in his truck lol.

He didn't want to know any of that, because ignorance was the only mercy left to him. He drove home and parked in the driveway and sat in the truck for another ten minutes, listening to the house breathe through its windows—the refrigerator cycling on, the furnace kicking in, the quiet domestic machinery of a family that had stopped speaking to each other months ago and was only now discovering that silence had become permanent.

Steve opened the door and stepped onto the driveway. The grass was wet. The sky was the color of wet concrete. He walked toward the front door and pushed it open, stepping into the kitchen where the bills were piled on the counter and Marla's manuscript drafts were stacked in a tower beside the sink, and where the coffee pot sat cold and empty, and where everything smelled exactly the way it had been smelling for months—stale and unresolved and waiting for something to happen that neither of them knew how to ask for.

The kitchen smelled like stale coffee and the particular sourness that came from leaving paper on a counter long enough for humidity to warp the edges. Steve stood in the doorway with his left hand on the frame, right hand holding a mug that had gone cold twenty minutes ago, and watched his wife sort through the tower of her own manuscript drafts the way a librarian might sort through returned books—checking spines, noting creases, deciding what belonged on the shelf and what belonged in the bin.

She didn't look up when he entered. She never did anymore, not the way she used to. Before, Marla would turn toward sound—the click of the front door, the rumble of the truck idling in the driveway, the specific cadence of his boots on the linoleum that told her whether he was coming in happy or coming in tired. Now she sorted in silence, and the silence had become its own language, one Steve hadn't bothered to learn.

"The bills are on the left," he said. His voice sounded wrong in the small room—too loud, too flat, the way a man speaks in a church he doesn't believe in. "I called the regional office this morning. They want a damage assessment by Friday."

Marla's fingers paused on a page. She was reading her own words back to herself—sentences she'd written months ago, when the world still operated on a schedule she could predict. Steve caught a fragment: the architecture of absence. He looked away. He wasn't supposed to read that. He hadn't been supposed to read any of it for weeks, but sometimes late at night, when the house settled and the refrigerator kicked on and he couldn't sleep, he'd pull one of the drafts from the stack and read a paragraph or two, the way a tourist reads a museum plaque without understanding the exhibit.

"Friday," she said. Not a question. An acknowledgment. She placed the page on top of another page, aligned the corners precisely, and set the growing stack aside. Then she reached into the folder beside her elbow and pulled out a document that was thicker than the bills, stapled in the upper left corner, typed on paper that cost more than the printer paper Steve used for inventory lists.

She set it on the counter between them.

Steve stared at it. The document had a header he recognized—legal letterhead, the kind of paper that implied someone else would read it and care about what was inside. He didn't want to touch it. He wanted to pick up the mug and drink the cold coffee and pretend he'd misheard her and go back to the store and count drywall anchors until the numbers made sense again.

"It's not a threat," she said. Her voice was dry, precise, understated—the same voice she used when she told him the milk was out, or when she reminded him that Owen had a parent-teacher conference he'd forgotten about, or when she said please don't take the truck and he took it anyway. "It's a request. For space."

Steve looked at the document. The pages were numbered. There were sections with headings he didn't want to read. He could see the shape of it from here—a life being divided into columns, assets allocated, responsibilities assigned, a marriage reduced to line items the way he reduced inventory to SKUs and reorder points. He'd done it a thousand times in spreadsheets. He'd never imagined it applied to this.

"Space," he repeated. The word felt insufficient. It was a word you used for parking spots and storage units, not for the thing that had been happening between them for months—the slow retreat, the careful avoidance, the way they'd learned to navigate each other like furniture in a room they both occupied but neither owned.

"I can't do this right now, Steve," she said. She finally looked at him. Her green eyes were steady, the way they got when she was about to say something she'd rehearsed. "Not with the store collapsing. Not with Owen filming you in the parking lot like you're some kind of public service announcement. Not with you checking your email fourteen times a day and pretending it matters."

He flinched. He hated that she knew about the fourteen. He'd told her once, defensively, in a tone that suggested she was interrogating him, and she'd absorbed the number like data and filed it somewhere he couldn't reach.

"I'm trying to fix things," he said.

"You're trying to fix the building," she corrected gently. "There's a difference."

Steve set the mug down on the counter. His hand shook slightly—he'd noticed it in the mirror that morning, the tremor in his right hand, the way his fingers couldn't hold a pen steady when he signed a vendor invoice—and he curled his fingers into a fist to hide it. The kitchen felt smaller than it used to. Maybe it was because Marla had taken up less space in it, physically and otherwise, and the room had adjusted to fill the void with something heavier than square footage.

"What happens if I sign it?" he asked. He didn't want to ask it. The words came out anyway, small and brittle, the way a man speaks when he's standing on ice he doesn't trust.

Marla considered the question. She folded her hands on the counter, palms down, fingers interlaced. Steve noticed a smudge of ink on her left thumb—she'd been writing again, the way she did when she was thinking, the fountain pen she'd bought at a shop in downtown that she never used in front of him because she knew he didn't understand why anyone would use anything but a ballpoint.

"You move into the guest room," she said. "Owen stays here. You figure out what you're going to do with the store and with yourself, and I figure out what I'm going to do with the next forty years. We talk once a week about Owen. We don't talk about anything else unless something is urgent. If it gets to the point where we can't stand each other in the same room—which, frankly, Steve, we're already at—then we see a lawyer and we make it permanent."

She said it all without raising her voice. Without anger. That was the worst part. If she'd been angry, Steve could have met anger with anger. He could have defended himself. He could have talked about the store, about the inventory, about the employees who depended on him, about the three generations of Roberts men who'd built something from nothing and handed it down like a heirloom tool. But Marla wasn't angry. She was resigned. And resignation was something he couldn't argue with, couldn't spreadsheet, couldn't fix with visible labor and calloused hands.

"How long have you been writing this?" he asked, nodding at the document.

"Since November."

November. Three months. He'd been in the store every day. He'd come home at eight, eaten dinner in silence, gone to bed at ten, woken at five, and repeated the cycle. He'd told himself this was what commitment looked like. He'd told himself that if he just held the line, if he just kept the machinery running, the rest would sort itself out. He'd been wrong.

"Can I read it?" he asked.

Marla hesitated. Then she slid the document toward him, just an inch, the way you might offer a live thing to someone who'd forgotten how to hold it.

Steve picked it up. The pages were warm from being handled. He flipped to the first page. The heading read Proposed Separation Agreement – Draft for Discussion. Below it, in Marla's neat handwriting—a script he'd admired once, when they'd been young and she'd written him notes on grocery lists that made him laugh out loud in the checkout line—were sections he recognised from a law magazine he'd skimmed years ago, back when magazines arrived in the mail and he read them on the toilet instead of checking email.

Division of Assets. Custody Arrangements. Temporary Living Arrangements.

He stopped reading. He put the document down carefully, aligning the edges with the counter, the way Marla had aligned her manuscript pages. His hands were still shaking. He tucked them into his pockets.

"I need to go to the store," he said.

"I know," Marla said. "Take the afternoon. Owen needs to eat something that isn't energy drink and chips. And Steve?"

He looked up.

"Don't check your email."

He pushed through the automatic doors, the hum of the cooling units fading into the quiet of the evening, leaving the weight of the building’s future suspended in the air between him and the parking lot.

Chapter 3

The auto parts store on West Central Avenue had fluorescent lights that flickered at a frequency Steve could feel behind his eyes, a low-grade migraine that pulsed in time with the overhead buzz. He stood in the shoe section—which was really just a rack of rubber soles and cardboard displays—and stared at a wall of steel-toed boots the way he used to stare at inventory spreadsheets, searching for patterns that would tell him what to do next.

They were arranged by size, by price, by brand. Carhartt, Timberland, Red Wing. Each pair sitting in its little cardboard coffin, staring back at him with laces tied in perfect bows. Steve reached out and touched the toe cap of a pair in his size. Cold steel. Solid. He pressed harder. His finger left a smudge on the matte finish.

He was forty-seven years old and he had never bought work boots before in his life. His dad had worn them—brown leather, scuffed at the shins, the steel toes dented from decades of dropped wrenches and kicked pallets—but Steve had always worn dress shoes. Brown oxfords. The kind that required a belt buckle the same shade of brown. The kind that said you managed people, not that you worked with them. That was the distinction his father had drawn, anyway, back when Steve was old enough to understand that shoes were a statement.

Now his oxfords were sitting in a closet at home, gathering dust alongside the blazers he hadn't worn since the conference room in Columbus, alongside the silk ties that smelled faintly of the cedar hangers they'd hung on. Steve had worn sneakers to the site visit yesterday. Canvas sneakers, white, bought for a reason he couldn't quite remember—comfort, maybe, or the desperate wish to look younger, less like a man whose life had already been organized and filed away.

He took the boots off the display. Size 11, medium width. The clerk—a kid with a nose ring and a t-shirt that said WORLD'S OKEST FATHER—watched him from behind the counter without saying anything. Steve carried the boots to the register, set them down gently, the way you set down something fragile.

"Sixty-eight dollars," the kid said.

Steve nodded. He pulled out his wallet. His hands were still shaking, a little, the tremor that had started three days ago and hadn't stopped—not fully, not completely. He thought about the fourteen times a day he'd checked his email, the way his thumb had moved across the screen like a metronome keeping time with his anxiety, and he wondered if buying boots was the same thing. If it was just another ritual, another way of pretending that action equaled progress.

He paid. The kid bagged the boots. Steve took the bag and walked back to his truck, the plastic handle cutting into his palm, the weight of the boots solid and unexpected against his thigh.

The store smelled the same as it had for three days now—wet drywall dust and ozone and something underneath that Steve couldn't identify, something organic and damp, like the inside of a cellar. He parked in the same spot he'd been parking in, the one closest to the loading dock, and sat in the Ford F-150 for a moment with the engine off, listening to the building settle. It groaned sometimes, late afternoon, when the temperature dropped and the exposed beams contracted. Steve had started timing it. The groans came every day at about four-thirty, right around the time he'd normally be checking his email for the fifteenth time. Now the groans were the only schedule he had.

He opened the truck door and stepped out, the boots still in the bag. He didn't take them out. He just carried the bag toward the entrance, where the chain-link fence had been erected by the demolition crew—orange mesh, fluttering in the wind, held up by metal poles that looked like they'd been driven into the ground with minimal ceremony.

Owen was already there.

His son was sitting on the tailgate of the truck, knees drawn up, phone in hand, the blue light reflecting in his glasses. He looked up when Steve approached, and his expression didn't change. It never did, not anymore. Three weeks of silence had calcified something in Owen's face, a mask of practiced indifference that Steve recognized from his own reflection in the bathroom mirror—except Steve's mask was cracking, and Owen's was seamless.

"You're early," Owen said. Not a question. An observation delivered in the flat tone of someone reporting weather.

"I'm always early," Steve said. Then he realized he wasn't sure if that was true. When had he started being early? When had early replaced on-time? When had on-time become late?

Owen shrugged. He put his phone in his pocket and slid off the tailgate. He was wearing the same clothes he'd worn yesterday—jeans, a hoodie, sneakers that had seen better days. Steve noticed the scuff marks on the left toe and thought about the steel-toed boots in his hand.

"What's in the bag?" Owen asked.

Steve hesitated. This was the moment. This was the thing he'd been carrying around all morning, the thing he'd rehearsed in the truck, the thing that felt both enormous and ridiculous, like standing on a stage with a speech you'd written but suddenly forgotten every word except the first sentence.

"Boots," Steve said.

Owen looked at the bag. Looked back at Steve. "What boots."

Work boots. Steel-toed. Steve shifted his grip on the plastic handle. For the store.

Owen was quiet for a long time. The wind pulled at the orange mesh fence. Somewhere inside the building, a piece of drywall shifted with a sound like a sigh. Steve waited.

"Why do you need work boots?" Owen finally said.

Let's go to work. In the store.

"That's what you said last week."

"I know what I said last week."

"And the week before that."

Steve felt the familiar defensiveness rising in his chest, the jargon wanting to spill out—the KPIs, the deliverables, the quarterly projections, the strategic realignment. He pushed it back down. Instead, he said: "I'm going to buy boots. And I'm going to wear them. And I'm going to work in the store."

Owen stared at him. The stare lasted longer than Steve was comfortable with. He felt like a kid caught doing something he shouldn't, like the time he'd tried to sneak into the R-rated movie without his mom's permission, standing in the lobby with crumpled tickets in his hand and the usher looking at him like he was a specimen under glass.

"You're serious," Owen said.

"Yes."

"Dad."

Owen pushed off the tailgate and took a step toward the fence, then stopped. He didn't look back. "Mom said you were having a breakdown. She didn't say you were turning into a Home Depot commercial."

Owen dropped from the tailgate and moved toward the fence, then halted. He kept his eyes forward. "Mom said you were losing it. She didn't say you were auditioning for a hardware store infomercial."

"I'm not a contractor."

"Then what are you?"

Steve opened his mouth. Closed it. He thought about the conference room, about Piper Bellamy's blazer fitting too perfectly, about the spreadsheet on the screen that showed the demolition costs broken down by category, about the number at the bottom that was larger than his life savings. He thought about his dad's hands, scarred and calloused, the way they'd moved over tools with a certainty Steve had spent his whole life trying to replicate through spreadsheets and meetings and performance reviews.

"I'm taking a sabbatical," Steve said.

Owen blinked. "A sabbatical. From what. You work at a hardware store."

"From the daily role. From the— from managing. From email. From checking email fourteen times a day." He stopped himself. "I'm going to rebuild the store. With you."

Owen looked at him for another long moment. Then he said, very quietly: "You're doing this yourself."

"Yes."

"We're doing this ourselves."

"Yes."

Owen turned away. He walked toward the chain-link fence and ran his fingers along the orange mesh, feeling the rough texture between his thumb and forefinger. Steve watched him. He wanted to say more—he wanted to explain the plan, the timeline, the budget, the confirmation he’d received from Doug regarding the demolition crew, the inventory list Mei-Lin had already begun sorting, and the business card Piper had left on the kitchen counter with a note that said Call me if you want someone to talk to in handwriting that was too neat, too controlled.

But none of that was what Owen needed to hear. What Owen needed to hear was simpler, and harder, and something Steve had never been good at delivering because it required him to admit that he didn't have a plan.

"We're doing this ourselves," Steve said again, and this time he meant it differently. Not as a declaration of capability, but as a confession of necessity. He had no one else. Marla was gone—or rather, she was in the other room, in the kitchen, sorting through manuscript drafts and pretending she wasn't listening to him. Doug was sixty-two years old and had been walking the floors of this store for forty-three years, and Steve couldn't ask him to do more. Piper was twenty-nine and algorithmic and she dealt in assets and liabilities, not in fathers and sons trying to figure out how to be related to each other.

Owen turned back. He looked at Steve's face, really looked at it, the way you look at something you haven't examined closely in a while. His expression shifted—just slightly, just enough that Steve noticed. It wasn't warmth. It wasn't forgiveness. It was something closer to assessment. Like a contractor evaluating a foundation.

"Okay," Owen said.

Just one word. But it was enough. It was the first word Owen had spoken to Steve in three weeks that didn't feel like a defense mechanism.

Steve reached into the plastic bag and pulled out the boots. He set them on the ground between them, laces still in their perfect bows. He looked down at them—brown leather, thick soles, the steel toe peeking through the rubber cap like a promise.

"Try them on," Steve said.

Owen shook his head. "I'm not sixteen."

"You're fifteen."

"Exactly."

Steve smiled. It felt strange on his face, unfamiliar, like a muscle he'd atrophied and was trying to flex again. "You'll be sixteen in August."

"Four months."

"Still. They'll fit."

Owen looked at the boots. Looked at Steve. He didn't say anything for a long time. Then, slowly, he sat down on the tailgate and pulled off his left sneaker.

Steve watched him slip his foot into the boot. The leather was stiff, unyielding, and Owen winced as his heel met the back of the shaft. He wiggled his toes. He pressed down on the sole, testing the tread. Then he pulled on the other boot, both hands working the laces with a concentration Steve recognized from when Owen was eight and trying to tie his own shoelaces for the first time, tongue poking out the corner of his mouth, brow furrowed with effort.

"How's the fit?" Steve asked.

Owen stood up. He took two steps forward, then stopped. "They're heavy."

"They're steel-toed."

"I can feel the steel."

"That's the point."

Owen nodded. He took another step, then another, walking across the gravel parking lot with an awkward gait, adjusting to the weight, finding his balance. Steve followed him, hands in his pockets, feeling the boots on his own feet for the first time since he'd bought them—no, wait, he hadn't put them on yet. He was still wearing his sneakers. The boots were sitting on the ground where Owen had kicked them off.

Steve bent down and unlaced his sneakers. He kicked them aside. He stepped into the boots, pulling them on one foot at a time, the leather cold against his ankles, the insole firm and supportive in a way his sneakers had never been. He laced them up, not in the perfect bows of the display model, but in the messy, practical knots of someone who intended to wear them to work.

He stood up. The world felt different. Lower. More grounded. His center of gravity had shifted, just slightly, but enough that he felt steadier, more present, more anchored to the earth beneath him.

Owen was watching him. Still standing in the gravel parking lot, still wearing the boots that were too big for him, his hands in his hoodie pockets, his shoulders squared against the wind.

"You look ridiculous," Owen said.

Steve looked down at his feet. The brown leather was bright and new, contrasting sharply with the grime on his jeans, the scuffs on his shins, the dirt on his knees from kneeling in the rubble yesterday. He looked like someone playing dress-up. Like a child wearing his father's shoes.

"Yeah," Steve said. "I do."

Owen's mouth twitched. Not a smile. Not quite. But close. Close enough.

"Come on," Owen said. "Let's go inside. I want to see if the north wall is still standing."

Steve followed him toward the chain-link fence, his new boots crunching on the gravel, each step heavier than the last, each step more deliberate. The orange mesh flapped in the wind. Through the gaps, he could see the skeleton of the store—the exposed beams, the collapsed ceiling in the electronics section, the golden haze of sunlight filtering through the gap in the roof where it used to be, the particular amber glow that had always seemed to pool in aisle four like liquid honey.

He stepped through the fence. He walked into the store. And behind him, the building groaned—four-thirty on the dot—and Steve felt the vibration travel up through the soles of his boots, through his calves, through his knees, into his hips, into his core, into the place inside him that had been hollow since the roof fell in.

The hollow felt a little less empty.

Inside, the air was cooler than it had been outside, the shade of the collapsed roof creating a pocket of stillness that smelled like dust and old wood and the faint metallic tang of exposed wiring. Steve's boots made a solid sound against the concrete floor, a thud that echoed differently than his sneakers ever had—deeper, more resonant, like a drumbeat marking time.

Owen was already ahead of him, moving toward the north wall with the careful gait of someone navigating unfamiliar terrain. Steve trailed behind, matching his stride, eyes fixed on the damp patch spreading across the back of Owen’s hoodie as his son crouched to inspect a fracture in the concrete, fingers dragging along the jagged edge with the precision of a technician reading a fault line, hunting for the structural rot that lurked beneath the visible scar.

"It's intact," Owen said. He ran his palm along the brick, feeling the rough texture, the mortar between the courses, the slight bow in the middle that told Steve the wall had absorbed the shock of the collapse and held.

"Good," Steve said.

Owen turned. He was looking at Steve's boots again. "You actually put them on."

"I did."

"For real."

"For real."

Owen considered this. He tilted his head, studying Steve the way he used to study video game character sheets, looking for stats and attributes and hidden bonuses. "Does it feel different?"

Steve thought about it. The boots felt different. The world felt different. But the feeling itself—what was the feeling? Grounded? Serious? Committed? Those were words, and words were easy, and Steve had spent his whole life mistaking words for action.

"It feels like I'm wearing something my dad would have worn," Steve said.

Owen nodded slowly. He didn't say anything more. He just turned and walked deeper into the store, toward the collapsed ceiling, toward the golden haze in aisle four, toward whatever came next. Steve lingered for a heartbeat, watching his son’s silhouette dissolve into the dust, before stepping into the wake of his footsteps, letting the silence between them fill the space where words should have been.

The boots were heavy. The work would be harder. He couldn’t say whether they could pull this off, or whether either of them could. But he knew one thing, certain and simple and undeniable: he was here, in the store, wearing steel-toed boots, and he wasn't going to check his email today. Not once. Not fourteen times. Not even once.

And that was a start.

Chapter 4

The store woke up to the sound of Doug's chainsaw.

Steve hadn't planned for the chainsaw. He'd planned carefully—the way he'd always planned, with spreadsheets and timelines and color-coded task lists laminated and hanging on the one remaining wall that wasn't covered in orange mesh. He'd anticipated lumber, pry bars, a wheelbarrow, maybe a rented dumpster. He had not anticipated Doug arriving at six-forty-five in a flannel shirt and a hard hat that looked like it had survived the Reagan administration, carrying a Stihl MS 250 chainsaw slung over his shoulder like a rifle.

"You don't need that," Steve said, though he wasn't sure what he meant. Needed for what? Safety? Efficiency? Some version of the morning he could control?

Doug killed the engine with a tug that sent a spray of sawdust across his boots. "Needed a warm-up. Besides, the beam in aisle four isn't coming out with a crowbar. That's structural oak. Your daddy put it there in '78 and he used marine-grade screws."

Steve's jaw tightened. "I didn't ask you to bring equipment."

"No," Doug agreed cheerfully, wiping his hands on a rag that had probably been clean in 2003. "But you didn't ask me to do anything, either. So I figured I'd start where things were weakest."

Owen emerged from the loading dock area, earbuds in, phone in hand, looking at the chainsaw with the same wary expression he reserved for spiders and his mother's serious conversations. He pulled one earbud out. "Is that legal? In a structure that might fall down?"

"It's a controlled demolition of a non-load-bearing partition," Doug said. "Your dad knows this. Right, Steve?"

Steve knew a dozen things about load-bearing walls. He'd spent thirty years knowing a dozen things about load-bearing walls. But standing there in his new boots—heavy, unbroken, still stiff at the ankles—he felt the gap between what he knew on paper and what was happening in front of him. The store was a carcass. The ceiling in the electronics section had pancaked two weeks ago. The north wall still stood, proud and stupid, like something from a postcard of a building that hadn't existed since Friday. Everything else was a question mark wrapped in orange mesh and held together by hope and the stubbornness of a sixty-two-year-old clerk who'd been walking these aisles since 1981.

"Let's just—" Steve started, and then stopped, because he wasn't sure what the word was. Clear? Assess? Begin?

Mei-Lin arrived at seven-twelve, which was precisely twelve minutes after she'd told Steve she would, because Mei-Lin operated on a schedule that was both flexible and immovable, like a well-tuned engine. She carried a clipboard and a pair of nitrile gloves and the kind of calm that made other people's urgency look performative.

"I've organized the salvage inventory into three zones," she said, as though they were discussing quarterly projections rather than the rubble of a collapsed ceiling. "Zone A: items still usable. Zone B: damaged but repairable. Zone C: total loss. I've also labeled everything with a color-coded system. Red, yellow, green. You'll find it intuitive."

Steve nodded because nodding was what you did when someone presented you with a system and you didn't want to seem ungrateful. He was grateful. He was also overwhelmed, and the two feelings were currently fighting for territory behind his ribs.

"Where's Piper?" Owen asked, which was fair, because Piper had been part of the plan—or at least part of the conversation, the one at the Torrid Home office where Steve had refused to sign the liquidation papers and walked out into the rain.

Piper was running late," Mei-Lin said. "She texted. Something about traffic on I-280."

"She's not required," Steve said, sharper than he intended.

Mei-Lin met his eyes without flinching. "No. But she offered. There's a difference."

Steve opened his mouth to say something defensive—something about budgets and timelines and the fact that he didn't need a consultant telling him how to tear down his own building—and then closed it again. He was learning, slowly, that some battles weren't worth fighting. Or maybe he was just tired. The tremor in his hands, which had started three days ago and had been getting worse, was present now, a faint vibration in his fingers that he hid by keeping them clenched in his pockets.

"Alright," he said. "Let's start with the east wall. We clear the debris, we assess what's salvageable, we document everything for the insurance adjuster. Doug, you handle the chainsaw. Mei-Lin, you catalog. Owen—"

"I'm not doing anything," Owen said.

Steve looked at him. "Like everyone does."

"I'm supervising." Owen held up his phone. "Someone needs to make sure nobody gets hurt. Or sues. Or, you know, dies."

Steve considered telling him that death by falling drywall was statistically unlikely in a building this size, but the words caught in his throat. He swallowed them instead. "Fine. Supervise. But stand where I can see you."

The morning began with the kind of false optimism that comes from fresh boots and an empty clipboard. Doug worked the chainsaw along the base of the east wall, cutting through rotted plywood and corroded nails with the practiced ease of a man who'd spent forty-three years understanding the structural personality of buildings. The noise was enormous—deafening, almost musical in its violence—and Steve found himself speaking louder to compensate, which meant everyone was shouting by seven-thirty, which meant communication consisted mostly of grunts and gestures, which meant Steve spent the first hour of his self-proclaimed sabbatical communicating entirely through the universal language of pointing and nodding.

Mei-Lin catalogued with methodical precision, moving from shelf to shelf in the remaining intact sections, tagging items with colored stickers, creating categories within categories, building a taxonomy out of wreckage. Steve watched her work and felt a strange mixture of admiration and inadequacy. She could take chaos and make it orderly. He could take a thriving business and somehow still lose control of it.

By nine o'clock, the east wall was partially demolished. Doug had cut through three sections of partition, and the debris was accumulating in a neat pile that Mei-Lin had already begun sorting. Steve stood back, hands on hips, boots planted, and tried to look like a man who knew what he was doing.

Then he saw the beam.

It was structural oak, just like Doug had said, spanning the width of what had been the electronics section, now open to the sky on one side and still connected to the remaining ceiling on the other. It sagged slightly in the middle, bearing weight that shouldn't have been there anymore, groaning softly with every gust of wind that found its way through the gaps in the north wall.

"That needs to come out," Steve said.

Doug looked up from his chainsaw and followed Steve's gaze. "Yeah. It does."

"How do we—"

"We wait for the crane."

Steve shook his head. "We don't have a crane."

"We can rent one."

"How long?"

"Two days, maybe three, for delivery and setup."

Steve looked at the beam. It was thick as his wrist, maybe thicker, and at least twelve feet long. He'd moved furniture before. He'd moved boxes. He'd helped his dad lift a refrigerator once, back when his dad still lived in the house down the street and still laughed out loud at things that weren't funny, just because laughing was easier than not laughing. He'd lifted things. He was strong. He was forty-seven. He wasn't—

"We'll move it ourselves," Steve said.

Doug's expression didn't change. It was the same expression he'd worn when Steve told him about the sabbatical, when he'd announced he was quitting his daily role, when he'd declared that he and Owen were going to rebuild the store together. The expression that said: I have been waiting for you to say something reckless, and now you have.

"Steve."

"It's not that heavy. It's oak, sure, but it's not—" He gestured at the beam, which was sagging in a way that suggested gravity had already made up its mind about it. "We can manage it. Together. With leverage."

Owen, who had been standing near the loading dock scrolling through his phone, looked up. "Dad, that thing looks like it weighs a ton."

"It's wood, Owen. Wood isn't—"

"Dad." Owen's voice was flat. Deadpan. The tone he used when he was about to say something that would make Steve regret not listening earlier. "That beam is structural. It's been holding up part of this building for forty-six years. If it falls wrong, it'll take out the north wall. Then the whole thing comes down. Like a pancake. Like the ceiling did."

Steve felt the heat rise in his neck. "I'm not going to let it come down."

"Then don't try to lift it alone."

He wasn't going to lift it alone. He was going to lift it with Doug. Or with Doug and Owen. Or with Doug and Owen and Mei-Lin, if she wanted to help, which she probably wouldn't, because Mei-Lin understood the difference between participation and overcommitment. But the beam was there, and it needed to come out, and the crane was two or three days away, and every day the store sat open to the elements was another day of damage, another day of questions from the insurance adjuster, another day of Marla not calling because they'd agreed to once a week and it wasn't Wednesday yet.

"I'll figure it out," Steve said.

And he meant it. He always meant it. That was the problem.

Doug didn't argue. He never argued. He just nodded, killed the chainsaw, and wiped his hands on his rag, which was the Doug equivalent of raising his hands in surrender. "Alright. But I'm standing back while you test the weight."

Steve approached the beam the way he approached everything: cautiously, methodically, with a plan that existed primarily in his head. He placed his hands on the underside, feeling the rough grain of the oak, the dampness of moisture that had seeped in through the collapsed ceiling, the slight give of rot at the edges. He braced his feet in the dust-covered concrete, bent his knees, and pulled.

The beam didn't move.

He pulled again, harder, putting his shoulders into it, feeling the familiar burn in his back muscles, the same muscles he used when he raked leaves in October and loaded lumber into the bed of his F-150 and carried boxes from the storage unit to the garage and did all the small, invisible labor that held a life together. He pulled until his vision swam, until his breath came in short gasps, until the tremor in his hands became a full-body shake.

Nothing. The beam held fast, anchored by decades of gravity and screw threads and the stubborn refusal of old buildings to let go.

"Steve," Doug said, and his voice was gentle, which was worse than if it had been firm. "Let me—"

"No." Steve straightened, wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve, and tried to smile. "Just needs a second wind."

He bent again. He grabbed lower this time, closer to the center, where the beam was thickest and strongest. He planted his feet wider. He inhaled, filling his lungs with the taste of drywall dust and ozone and something else—something metallic, like blood or fear—and he pulled.

Something tore.

It wasn't the beam. It was inside him, deep in his lower back, a sensation like a rubber band snapping under tension, sharp and immediate and absolutely definitive. Steve went down hard, his hands sliding off the oak, his knees hitting the concrete, his breath knocked out of him in a rush that sounded like a sob if you listened closely enough.

The world tilted. Dust rose in a cloud around him. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't think. All he could feel was the pain, bright and hot and spreading, radiating from his spine outward like cracks in glass.

"Steve!" Doug was there, kneeling beside him, hands on his shoulders, voice loud but not panicked. "Steve, look at me. Can you move your legs?"

Steve couldn't look at Doug. He was staring at the beam, which was still there, still sagging, still holding whatever weight it had been holding before he'd tried to be stronger than it.

"Steve." Doug's hand was on his arm now, firm, grounding. "Breathe. Just breathe."

Owen was there too, crouching at Steve's side, phone forgotten, face pale. "Dad. Dad, what happened?"

Steve couldn't answer. He was busy remembering what it felt like to breathe.

Mei-Lin appeared at the edge of the pile, clipboard abandoned, gloves still on, her expression unreadable. She didn't say anything. She just stood there, watching, assessing, already building a category in her mind for whatever this was.

After a minute—maybe two, maybe longer—Steve could breathe again. The pain was still there, a deep, throbbing ache that settled into his lower back like a stone dropped into a well, but it was manageable. He could move his legs. He could feel his toes. He could stand, eventually, with help.

"I'm fine," he said, which was not true but was the sentence he reached for because it was the only sentence he had.

Doug helped him up. Steve put weight on his legs and immediately regretted it, his knees buckling slightly before he locked them and stood straight, pretending that the pain was something he'd chosen, something under his control, something he could manage with enough will and the right angle of approach.

"Sit down," Doug said.

"Not yet." Steve rubbed his back with one hand, feeling the stiffness already setting in, the way muscles remembered trauma even when the mind refused to acknowledge it. "We need to—"

"Steve." Doug's voice was soft, but it had the weight of forty-three years of walking these aisles, of knowing which walls held and which ones didn't, of understanding that some things couldn't be fixed by pulling harder. "Sit down. Please."

Steve sat. He sat on a stack of salvaged tile that Mei-Lin had already sorted and tagged, red sticker facing up, and he stared at the beam, which was still sagging, still waiting, still refusing to be moved by a man who thought he could control everything by sheer force of will.

Owen crouched beside him again. "Do you want me to call Mom?"

Steve looked at his son. Really looked at him. Owen was fifteen, but in that moment, with his dark hair falling into his eyes and his face lined with a concern Steve couldn't quite decipher, he looked older. Older than Steve. Older than he'd ever been allowed to be.

"No," Steve said. "Not yet. It's not—" He stopped. He was going to say it's not bad. He was going to lie. But the words wouldn't come. Instead he said, "I twisted my back. It hurts. I'll be alright."

Doug was already pulling his phone from his pocket. "I'm calling a doctor. Just in case."

"It's not necessary."

"Steve."

"It's not—"

Steve. Doug’s voice had shifted, hardening into the register he reserved for stubborn vendors and chronic tardiness, the tone meant to cut through denial. “You’re forty-seven. You just attempted to heave a steel girder that has anchored this structure for nearly half a century. I’m calling a doctor.”

Steve opened his mouth to argue and closed it again. He looked at Mei-Lin, who was watching with the same calm detachment she brought to everything, and then at Owen, who was watching with something that looked like fear, and then at the beam, which groaned under its own weight, a low, metallic complaint vibrating through the soles of his feet.

"Okay," he said. "Call the doctor."

Doug dialed. Steve leaned forward, pressing his palms against his knees, trying to make the pain recede through the power of positive thinking, which was a strategy that had never worked and was unlikely to start now.

The store exhaled behind him, steady and patient, and somewhere in the distance, a bird called, and the wind moved through the gaps in the north wall like a finger tracing the edge of a wound, and Steve sat on a stack of red-stickered tile and waited for the doctor to arrive, wondering how he'd gotten here, wondering if he'd ever get anywhere else.

Mei-Lin picked up her clipboard. Doug finished his call. Owen stood and walked to the loading dock and leaned against the wall and looked at his phone without reading it. The demolition continued without Steve, because Doug knew what he was doing, because Mei-Lin understood how to organize chaos, because the building itself seemed to want to be taken apart, piece by piece, whether Steve was strong enough to help or not.

And Steve sat. He sat and he breathed and he let the pain be what it was, which was a lot, and he wondered, not for the first time, what it would feel like to let someone else carry the weight.

The question didn't have an answer yet. It wouldn't for a while. But it was there, sitting beside him in the dust, waiting for him to be ready.

Mei-Lin moved to the next section, her steps measured, her gloves flashing red and yellow and green in the afternoon light. Doug reset the chainsaw and began cutting through another section of wall, the noise filling the space where Steve's certainty used to be. Owen stayed by the loading dock, phone in hand, watching his father sit on a stack of tiles and breathe through the pain, and saying nothing, because sometimes the only thing you could say was nothing, and that was enough.

The beam remained. It would remain for two or three more days, until a crane arrived and did what Steve had tried to do and failed at, and Steve would watch it come down, and he would understand, eventually, that some things couldn't be fixed by pulling harder.

For now, he just sat. He just breathed. He just was.

The store held him, its familiar weight pressing against his chest, steady and enduring long after his own hands had begun to shake.

The afternoon light shifted across the debris field, painting everything in gold and shadow, and Steve closed his eyes and let the dust settle around him like something sacred.

He had always believed in systems. Even now, with his back broken and his plans in ruins, he found himself organizing the pain — the sharp moments, the duller ones, the ones that came with movement and the ones that stayed constant regardless of what he did. Twelve hours of it before sleep, four before coffee, two between the kettle and the door.

Except there was no kettle. There was no door. There was just the beam, the dust, and the slow, inevitable realization that he was not the load-bearing wall he'd thought he was.

And that was a start.

Chapter 5

The store smelled like wet plaster and regret. Steve stood in the center of what used to be the sporting goods section with a set of blueprints spread across a milk crate, trying to make the lines on the paper correspond to the reality of the space. They didn't. Nothing did anymore. The collapse had rearranged everything—the load paths, the drainage, the structural logic he'd spent twenty years understanding intuitively, the way a man understands the floor beneath his feet. Now the floor beneath his feet was covered in orange mesh and pulverized drywall, and the blueprint he'd found in the old filing cabinet showed walls that no longer existed and beams that had been buried under three tons of collapsed ceiling.

He held the blueprints with both hands, pressing down on the corners to keep them from fluttering in the draft that moved through the skeletal remains of the building. His hands were still shaking. Not badly—not the way they had been in the parking lot—but enough that the edges of the paper rippled like water. He closed his fingers around them tighter.

"Dad."

Owen stood in the doorway of what used to be the office. He was wearing the same clothes he'd worn yesterday, the same clothes he'd worn the day before that. A dark hoodie with a hole near the cuff where his thumb had worn through the fabric. Black jeans. Scuffed sneakers that looked familiar from a catalogue Steve had ordered three months ago, a silent purchase that felt too much like admitting he didn't know what his son needed in person.

"The north wall," Steve said, not looking up. "We need to shore it before we touch anything above it. The inspector said—"

"Dad, the inspector isn't coming until Thursday. We've got three days."

"We've got less than three days if the wind picks up. That wall is carrying—"

"Dad."

Owen's voice had that particular flatness that Steve had learned to recognize over fifteen years. It wasn't anger. It wasn't sarcasm. It was the tone Owen used when he'd already had the conversation in his head three times and decided Steve wouldn't understand any of it. Steve looked up anyway.

Owen was holding a piece of paper. Not the blueprints. Something else. A printout, judging by the glossy finish catching the light from the high windows. He held it out like he was offering something to a wild animal.

"What's that?" Steve asked.

"It's the structural report. From the county archives. I pulled it last night."

Steve felt something tighten in his chest. "You went on my laptop?"

"I used my tablet. I didn't touch your laptop." Owen's jaw worked. He was trying to modulate his voice, Steve realized. Trying to sound casual. It was a skill he'd developed recently, the way teenagers develop skills they don't want—masking, deflection, the careful calibration of disappointment so it doesn't spill over into something ugly. "The report says the north wall was reinforced in 1998. Original specs show it was load-bearing, but the reinforcement adds another forty percent capacity. We don't need to shore it."

Steve took the paper. His hands were still shaking. He laid it on top of the blueprints and tried to align the two documents the way he used to align inventory reports—cross-referencing, checking figures, finding the discrepancies. But the county report was typed in a font he didn't recognize, clean and impersonal, and the blueprints were hand-drawn in someone else's handwriting from another century, and there was no way to make them agree because they weren't speaking the same language. One was a record. The other was a wish.

"Forty percent," Steve said. "That's not—"

"Dad, it says here the reinforcement was galvanized steel straps, bolted to the existing framing. It's solid."

Steve looked at Owen. Really looked at him. The boy was standing there in his worn-out hoodie, holding a printout he'd printed from the county website at some hour that Steve knew he should have been asleep, and he was looking at Steve the way he used to look at him when they were building model airplanes in the garage—patiently, with that careful attention that made Steve feel both seen and judged simultaneously.

"How long were you up?" Steve asked.

"Does it matter?"

"It matters if you're tired and you trip over something and hurt yourself."

Owen's mouth twitched. Not a smile. Something close to it and then away. "I'm not five, Dad."

"No. You're not." Steve folded the papers, his hands trembling as he tried to decide what to do with them. He set them on the milk crate and picked up his tape measure instead, the brass one his dad had given him, the one with the numbers worn smooth from decades of use. "Okay. So we don't shore the north wall. But the east side—Doug said the base was compromised. We can't leave that exposed overnight."

"He said that?"

"He said that this morning."

Owen nodded slowly. He was processing. Steve could see it happening: Owen’s eyes shifted slightly, his thumb rubbing at the hole in his hoodie cuff. Processing meant Owen was considering something, weighing it, preparing to say it. Steve waited. He had learned patience in the last week. It was the only thing he'd gotten better at.

"I think we should tear out the drywall on the east side," Owen said. "All the way down to the studs. If the base is compromised, the moisture damage probably extends higher than Doug thinks. We should pull it now while we have Doug's help."

Steve blinked. "Pull drywall? Owen, we haven't even—"

"Dad, look." Owen pointed toward the east wall. Through the gap where Doug had cut with the chainsaw, Steve could see the orange mesh covering the demolished section, and beyond that, the remaining drywall, stained and sagging. "It's already wet. You can see the discoloration. If we wait, it'll warp more. Then we'll have to replace it anyway. Better to pull it now when it's loose."

Steve stared at the wall. He'd been thinking about it wrong. He'd been thinking about the building as a whole, as a system of interlocking parts that needed to be preserved in their current configuration until he could figure out the master plan. But Owen was thinking about it differently—piece by piece, component by component, the way a mechanic thinks about an engine. Strip it down. Find what's broken. Replace what needs replacing. Move to the next part.

"That's... that's actually smart," Steve said. The words surprised him. They came out quieter than he intended.

Owen didn't react to the compliment. He just nodded, once, and turned toward the tool area where Doug had left the hammer and pry bar from yesterday. He picked up the hammer without looking at it, testing the weight the way Steve tested tools before using them—briefly, instinctively, with a familiarity that made Steve's throat tight.

"I'll start on the lower panels," Owen said. "You can help me mark the cut lines."

Steve followed him. They walked across the concrete floor, their footsteps echoing in the hollow space, past the orange mesh and the piles of debris and the skeletal remains of shelving units that had held thousands of products and now held nothing but dust and spiderwebs. The east wall was taller than Steve remembered. The drywall panels stretched up to the ceiling joists, eighteen feet or more, and the lower sections were dark with moisture damage—brown stains spreading outward from the base like ink on blotting paper.

Owen crouched down and ran his finger along the bottom edge of the drywall. His finger came away gray with dust. He held it up to the light and inspected it, then pressed his palm flat against the panel and pushed. The drywall gave slightly, softening under his hand like old bread.

"See?" he said. "It's spongy. Water's gotten in behind it."

Steve crouched beside him. He pressed his own hand against the panel. It felt the same—soft, compromised, ready to fail. He looked at Owen’s hand on the wall: fingers splayed wide, wrist bent at a sharp, practiced angle that betrayed experience. Owen’s hands were smaller than Steve’s, cleaner, but they shared the same basic shape—the same broad palm, the same slightly crooked pinky finger that had been bent wrong since a baseball accident when he was eight and Steve had been too busy with a vendor meeting to notice until the swelling went down and the bone had set wrong.

Steve looked away.

"Okay," he said. "Mark the lines. I'll hold the panel."

Owen pulled a utility knife from his pocket and began scoring the drywall along the seams, the blade slicing through the paper face with a clean, satisfying sound. Steve held the panel steady, feeling the vibration travel up his arms, feeling the way the drywall responded to the cutting—brittle at first, then giving way in a controlled fracture that Owen directed with practiced precision.

They worked in silence for a while. The only sound was the utility knife and the occasional crack of the drywall separating from the studs. Steve watched Owen’s hands, steady as a surgeon’s, and felt the sharp contrast to his own tremor. Owen’s grip never faltered. Steve had noticed that once, years ago, when Owen had helped him change a tire and his small hands had gripped the lug wrench without hesitation while Steve’s had fumbled with the locking nut. Steve had been proud then. He was proud now, and the pride felt like a stone in his stomach.

After twenty minutes, Owen stepped back and looked at his work. The lower section of drywall was scored all the way around, a rectangular outline that separated cleanly from the rest of the panel. He pressed his palms against the cut section and pushed. The drywall came free with a crack that echoed through the empty space, landing on the concrete with a cloud of dust.

Steve coughed. Owen didn't.

"Again?" Owen asked.

"Again."

They worked for another hour. Panel after panel came down. Owen's rhythm was methodical—score, push, stack. He arranged the removed panels in a neat pile against the far wall, each one flat and aligned, the way Mei-Lin would organize inventory. Steve held the panels, then helped Owen carry them to the stack. His arms ached. His hands bled where the broken edges of the drywall had caught his skin. He didn't notice.

By mid-afternoon, they'd removed six panels. The exposed studs showed the extent of the water damage—dark streaks running vertically from the base plate, mold blooming in patches like lichen on bark. Owen ran his hand along one of the studs and came away with a smear of green-black residue.

"It's bad," he said.

"Yeah."

"We'll need to treat the studs before we put anything new up."

"I know."

Owen looked at the pile of removed drywall, then at the remaining panels, then at Steve. "We should do the upper ones tomorrow. These are easier when they're lower. Once we get the bottom row, the rest will be heavier."

"Right," Steve said.

Owen didn't respond to the praise. He just picked up the utility knife and checked the blade, snapping off the dull tip with his thumb and extending a fresh segment. He was already thinking about the next panel.

Then Doug arrived.

He came through the front entrance with his usual morning energy, flannel shirt tucked into jeans, hard hat tilted back on his white hair, a thermos in one hand and a paper bag in the other. He stopped when he saw the east wall. He stopped completely. The thermos lowered slowly to his side.

"Well," he said. "I'll be damned."

"Morning, Doug," Steve said.

Doug walked closer. He ran a hand along one of the exposed studs, then along the remaining drywall, then at the neat stack of removed panels against the far wall. His expression was unreadable. Steve couldn't tell if he was impressed or annoyed or both.

"You boys did all this?" Doug asked.

"Most of it," Owen said. "Just the lower panels so far."

Doug looked at Owen. He looked at the stack of panels. He looked back at Owen. "You pulled drywall?"

"Yes, sir."

"At your age?"

"I've done it before."

Doug's eyebrows rose. "When?"

"In middle school. My friend's dad was a contractor. I helped him once or twice."

Doug nodded slowly. He took a sip from his thermos and looked at the wall again, his expression shifting from surprise to something else—something that looked like respect, or maybe grief, or maybe both. Steve couldn't tell.

"Six panels," Doug said. "In a few hours. With the bottom row cut clean and stacked straight." He looked at Steve. "You taught him that?"

Steve opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "No," he said. "He figured it out."

Doug didn't respond. He just walked over to the stack of panels and ran his hand along the edge of the top one, checking the cut line with a craftsman's eye. His hand was steady. His face was calm. But Steve noticed Doug’s thumb tracing the drywall edge, over and over, a repetitive motion that felt like a silent apology.

Then Owen dropped the hammer.

It happened fast. Owen was reaching for the next panel, his right hand extended, his left hand supporting the bottom edge. The panel shifted. He adjusted his grip. His left hand slipped on the smooth face of the drywall, and he lurched forward, his right hand dropping the hammer as he tried to catch his balance.

The hammer fell. It hit the concrete and bounced, spinning end over end, and caught Owen on the side of the foot.

The sound was wrong. Not a thud. Not a crack. Something between them, a dull impact that Steve felt in his teeth more than he heard with his ears.

Owen went down.

Steve was moving before he thought about it. He crossed the distance in three strides, dropping to his knees beside his son, his hands already reaching, already assessing. Owen was clutching his left foot, his face contorted, his breath coming in short gasps that he was trying to suppress.

"Owen. Owen, look at me."

"I'm fine."

"Let me see."

"I'm fine, Dad."

Steve grabbed Owen's ankle and lifted his foot. The sneaker was scuffed, the toe cap dented inward. Owen's toes were curled tight inside the shoe. Steve could see the swelling already—rapid, localized, the kind of swelling that meant something was wrong beneath the surface.

"Okay," Steve said. "Okay, Doug. Don't move."

"It's just bruised."

"Owen."

Steve looked up. Doug was standing over them. His face was pale. His hands were clenched at his sides.

"Do you have ice?" Steve asked.

"In the truck," Doug said. "I'll get it."

"Thanks."

Doug turned and walked out. Steve knelt beside Owen, keeping his son's foot elevated on his own knee, applying gentle pressure above the ankle to slow the swelling. Owen was breathing harder now. The suppression was failing.

"Did it hit the bone?" Steve asked.

"I don't know."

"Can you wiggle your toes?"

Owen tried. His toes moved, but the movement was limited, stiff. He winced with each attempt.

"Okay," Steve said. "Ice first. Then we'll figure out the rest."

Owen closed his eyes. He pressed his lips together so tightly they went white. Steve recognized the expression—the same one Owen had worn when he'd broken his arm falling off the swing set at age seven, the same one he'd worn when he'd failed his driver's ed test and sat in the car in the driveway for twenty minutes without speaking. The expression of a boy who was trying very hard not to cry in front of his father.

Steve felt something break inside his chest. Not dramatically. Not with a sound. Just a quiet, internal fracture, the kind that happens when a man realizes he's been absent from something important and the realization comes too late to fix it.

Owen had been working. Owen had been helpful. Owen had been good at something Steve couldn't do, and Steve had been kneeling beside him, useless, watching his son try not to cry over a bruised foot while Steve's own hands shook and his mind raced with calculations that didn't matter.

The ice arrived. Doug knelt beside them, pressing the plastic bag against Owen's foot, wrapping it in a towel to prevent frostbite. Owen hissed through his teeth but didn't pull away.

"Better?" Steve asked.

"Less hot," Owen said.

Doug looked at Steve. "I'll take him home. Get it looked at properly."

Steve nodded. He stood up. His knees cracked. His back ached. He looked down at Owen, who was still on the floor, still holding his foot, still trying to be brave.

"I'm sorry," Steve said.

Owen looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed but dry. "It's okay, Dad. It's just a foot."

But it wasn't just a foot. Steve knew that now. It was everything—the work, the effort, the attempt, the failure, the injury, the apology that came too late. It was the architecture of everything he'd been trying to fix and couldn't.

He helped Owen stand. They walked slowly toward the front entrance, Doug carrying the ice bag and walking on Owen's other side, supporting his weight without making it obvious. Steve walked behind them, watching his son's face, watching Owen's jaw clench with each step, watching the silence that followed.

At the door, Owen stopped. He turned back to look at the store—at the east wall, at the exposed studs, at the stack of removed drywall panels stacked neatly against the far wall, at the orange mesh and the dust and the debris and the evidence of what they'd done and what they'd failed to do.

"We'll finish tomorrow," Owen said.

Steve didn't answer. He just nodded, the silence between them settling like dust after a collapse, heavy and final and enough.

Chapter 6

The pepperoni arrived in a grease-stained cardboard box that smelled like yeast and salt and something chemically sweet, the kind of scent that used to mean Friday night video games and silence, but now meant the first honest thing Steve had heard in three weeks. He set the box on the floor of the gutted store, right in the center of the triangle formed by the exposed oak beam, the pile of orange mesh, and the milk crate that served as their makeshift table. The floor was covered in pulverized drywall dust, a fine white powder that coated everything in a ghostly layer, turning the jagged shards of debris into something soft and abstract. Steve sat down on his heels, his knees popping, and looked at the box. Then he looked at Owen.

Owen was standing by the north wall, his back to Steve, staring at the vertical face of the building where the roof hadn’t fallen. He was wearing the dark hoodie with the hole near the cuff, the black jeans, the scuffed sneakers. He didn’t turn around when the box landed. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched forward as if bracing against a wind only he could feel. Steve waited. The silence stretched, thin and brittle, like the drywall paper peeling off the lath behind Owen’s head.

“Pepperoni,” Steve said. It sounded stupid the moment it left his mouth. Too casual. Too much like he was hosting a sleepover instead of sitting in the wreckage of his life.

Owen turned. He walked over slowly, his steps crunching on the drywall dust, and stopped in front of the box. He looked down at it, then up at Steve, his expression unreadable in the dim light filtering through the gaps in the orange mesh. “Pizza?”

“Yeah. Pizza.”

“From Tony’s?”

“Tony’s.”

Owen nodded once, a sharp, jerky motion, and lifted the lid. Steam rose from the slices in a thin, greasy plume. He picked up a slice with both hands, holding it away from his body like it might burn him, and took a bite. He chewed slowly, his eyes fixed on the ceiling where the metal joists hung exposed, twisted and bent from the heat of the collapse. Steve watched him eat. He watched the tension in Owen’s jaw, the deliberate push of his throat as he forced the food down. It was a mundane thing, eating pizza on a dirty floor, but it felt monumental, like a ritual they had forgotten how to perform but remembered how to want.

Steve picked up his own slice. It was hot, the cheese stretching in thick strands between the crust and the tip, dripping grease onto his thumb. He wiped it on his jeans, leaving a dark smear, and took a bite. The flavor was overwhelming—salty, acidic, rich—and for a second, he forgot about the beam, the inspector, the separation agreement sitting on his kitchen counter. He forgot about the shaking in his hands. He just ate.

They ate in silence for a while. The only sound was the crunch of crust and the distant hum of traffic on West Central Avenue, muffled by the thick walls of the store. Steve finished his slice and set the crust on the cardboard lid, arranging the bones neatly, a habit from his father’s garage. He watched Owen do the same. Owen’s hands were steady. Steve’s were not. He hid his right hand in his lap, curling his fingers into a fist to stop the tremor, feeling the muscle twitch beneath the skin like a trapped bird.

“You’re shaking,” Owen said. He didn’t look up. He was picking at a piece of pepperoni stuck to the box.

“Dust,” Steve said. “Lungs. Irritation.”

“Dust doesn’t make your hands shake, Dad.”

Steve looked down at his lap. He uncurled his fist. The tremor was there, a subtle vibration running up his forearm, visible in the way his thumb tapped against his thigh. He clenched it again. “Adrenaline,” he said. “We did a lot today. Heavy lifting. Stress.”

“You lifted a two-by-four,” Owen said. “I lifted it.”

Steve didn’t have an answer for that. He looked at the milk crate between them. On it sat his tape measure, the brass casing worn smooth by decades of use, the numbers faded to ghosts. Next to it lay the pry bar Doug had left behind, the metal rusted and pitted. Steve reached for the tape measure, needing something to hold, something to anchor him to the present moment. He pulled the blade out a few inches, the metal singing softly, then let it snap back. Click. Click. Click.

“I checked my email,” Steve said. The words came out before he could stop them, a confession he hadn’t planned.

Owen stopped picking at the pepperoni. He looked up. “How many times?”

“Twelve.”

Owen made a noise in his throat, something between a laugh and a groan. “You promised Doug. You promised me. No email.”

“I just… I needed to see if Torrid Home had responded to the refusal letter.”

“And?”

“They haven’t. Piper hasn’t either.” Steve hesitated. “Maybe they’re waiting for me to sign. Maybe they think if I wait long enough, I’ll crack.”

Owen shrugged, a small, dismissive gesture. “Let them wait.”

“It’s not that simple, Owen. They have the insurance. They have the lawyers. They have…” Steve trailed off. He didn’t want to say time. He didn’t want to admit that the waiting was the worst part, the suspension of judgment, the feeling of standing on a ledge and not knowing if you’d jump or be pushed.

“What?” Owen prompted. He was looking at Steve now, really looking at him, his brown eyes dark and serious in the gloom.

“Nothing,” Steve said. He pulled the tape measure blade out again, measuring the distance between two nails driven into the floor joist. Four inches. Five. Six. “It’s just… pressure. Corporate pressure. You wouldn’t understand.”

“I’m fifteen, Dad. Not an alien.” Owen took another bite of pizza. “I understand pressure. I have a chemistry test on Monday. I have to figure out how to not get expelled for sleeping in class. I have to watch you cry in the parking lot every time someone looks at me wrong.”

Steve flinched. The words hit him like a physical blow, sharp and sudden. He looked away, focusing on the tape measure, on the bright yellow blade with its black markings. He wanted to argue. He wanted to tell Owen that he wasn’t crying, that he was just… adjusting. That the parking lot was windy, and the tears were just a reaction to the wind. But Owen wasn’t wrong. The video was still out there. Steve had seen the comments on his personal Facebook page, the ones from people he hadn’t spoken to in years, asking if he was okay, asking if he was alright, asking why a grown man was sobbing in a Ford F-150 while his son filmed it. He couldn’t unsee them. He couldn’t unsay them.

“I’m sorry,” Steve said. The words felt inadequate, small and fragile against the weight of what Owen had said.

“For what? Being sad? Everyone gets sad, Dad. Even you. Especially you.”

Steve looked at his son. Really looked at him. Owen was growing so fast it scared him. His face was losing the roundness of childhood, the angles sharpening, the jawline becoming more defined. He was tall, taller than Steve expected him to be, his limbs long and awkward, like a deer learning to stand. He was wearing the hoodie Steve had bought him for Christmas, the one with the hole where his thumb had worn through the fabric. Steve remembered buying it. He remembered Owen trying it on in the mirror, striking a pose, asking if it looked cool. Steve had said yes. He had meant it.

“You’re wearing the hoodie,” Steve said.

Owen looked down at his chest. He touched the hole near the cuff, his crooked pinky finger bending slightly as he did. “Yeah. It’s comfortable.”

“It’s falling apart.”

“So?”

“So… I can buy you a new one.”

Owen laughed. It was a short, sharp sound, devoid of humor. “No. I’m good. It fits.”

Steve wanted to insist. He wanted to take Owen to the mall, to the store that still had a roof, to buy him something nice, something clean and new and free of holes and dust and regret. But he couldn’t. Not here. Not now. The store was a skeleton. He was a skeleton. They were both too tired for malls. They were too tired for anything except this: pizza on the floor, breathing the same air, surviving the same silence.

“Did you talk to Marla?” Owen asked.

Steve froze. The name hung in the air between them, heavy and dangerous. Marla. His wife. The woman who had packed a bag three days ago and left it by the door, who had written him a letter about “space” and “breathing room” and “needing to remember who I am outside of this place.” She hadn’t said divorce. She hadn’t said forever. She had said once a week. Once a week for a phone call. Once a week to pretend they were a family that could survive the collapse.

“No,” Steve said. “I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I’m… afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Afraid she’ll say she doesn’t want to talk. Afraid she’ll say she’s moving out. Afraid she’ll say…” Steve stopped. He couldn’t say it. He couldn’t say i didn’t mean to lose you. The phrase was stuck in his throat, a bone lodged deep in the esophagus, painful and impossible to swallow or spit out.

Owen studied him for a long moment. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. He held it out to Steve. The screen was dark. “You should call her.”

“I don’t want to bother her.”

“She’s not bothered, Dad. She’s waiting. She told me so.”

Steve looked at the phone. It was a black rectangle, sleek and modern, a window into a world Steve didn’t understand. He took it from Owen’s hand. His fingers brushed Owen’s, cold and dusty. He looked at the screen. No notifications. No missed calls. Just the time: 8:14 PM. The store was quiet. The beam was silent. The dust settled slowly, grain by grain, covering everything in a fine, white shroud.

Steve pressed the power button. The screen lit up. He scrolled to Marla’s name. He stared at it. His thumb hovered over the call button. He could feel his heart beating, a slow, heavy thud in his chest, like a hammer striking a nail. He took a breath. He pressed call.

The phone rang once. Twice. Three times. Steve held his breath. He looked at Owen. Owen was watching him, his expression neutral, his eyes wide and dark. The phone clicked. A voice answered.

“Hello?”

It was Marla. Her voice was soft, precise, understated. The same voice that had read him bedtime stories when Owen was small, the same voice that had argued with him about budgets and bills and the meaning of silence. Steve opened his mouth. He wanted to say I love you. He wanted to say I’m sorry. He wanted to say I’m shaking.

“Marla,” he said. “It’s Steve.”

There was a pause. A long, suspended moment where the universe held its breath. Then she said, “Hi, Steve. How are you?”

Steve looked at Owen. Owen nodded, a small, encouraging gesture. Steve closed his eyes. He listened to the sound of his wife’s voice, the sound of her breathing, the sound of the life he was trying to fix.

“I’m okay,” he said. And for the first time in months, he almost believed it.

Chapter 7

Doug pulled a roll of blueprints from inside his flannel shirt, unfolding it with a ritualistic care that made Steve feel suddenly careless, even reckless, in his own movements. The paper crackled as it spread across a stack of cinder blocks—makeshift table in the west corner of the store. Beside it sat a thermos and a paper bag, lunch arranged with the kind of precision that suggested calories rather than comfort. Doug didn’t mention the food. He didn’t mention the orange mesh tangled around his ankles or the pulverized drywall dust coating his work boots. He just smoothed the blueprints flat and waited.

He'd gone back to the office after lunch yesterday, rummaging through the rusted filing cabinet in the corner that hadn't been opened since the corporate office took over the lease, and pulled the bundle from the bottom drawer where it had been wrapped in twine and forgotten for decades.

Steve wiped his hands on his jeans. The denim was stiff with dried mud and the gray grit of the collapsed ceiling. He looked at the cinder blocks, then at the thermos, then at Doug.

"Soup?" Steve asked.

“Chili,” Doug said. “With beans. I know you haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

Steve hadn’t. He’d been too busy staring at the east wall, trying to calculate the volume of debris that had fallen, trying to determine if the structural integrity of the remaining north wall could support a temporary shoring system if they decided to rebuild the roof in sections. He’d been calculating. He hadn’t been eating.

He sat down on an overturned bucket. Owen sat on a pallet of rotting insulation to his left, scrolling through his phone with the intense, narrow-eyed focus he reserved for video games and arguments with his mother. He didn’t look up when Doug sat down. He didn’t look up when Steve poured the chili into the plastic lid Doug provided. He just kept scrolling, his thumb moving in a steady, rhythmic swipe.

Doug ate slowly. He chewed with his mouth closed, a habit Steve remembered from the early days, back when Doug was still trying to impress the regional manager with his professionalism. Now, he just ate. He ate with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had brought his own food to a job site and didn’t have to rely on the vending machines in the lobby for sustenance.

Steve ate too. The chili was hot and salty and tasted like cumin and ground beef and something else—maybe the dust, maybe the fatigue, maybe just the relief of having something warm in his stomach. He ate because he was hungry. He ate because Doug was watching him, waiting for him to finish so they could talk about the walls.

When the lid was empty, Steve set it aside and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked at the blueprints. They were yellowed, brittle at the edges, rolled tight for decades and then unrolled with a crackling sound that seemed too loud in the hollow space of the store.

“What are those?” Steve asked.

Doug tapped the paper with a calloused finger. “Original specs. ’72. Before the expansion. Before the mezzanine. Before the HVAC system that costs more to fix than the building is worth.”

Steve leaned forward, his steel-toed boots planted firmly against the pulverized drywall dust that still coated the floor. The paper smelled like old paper—like a library book that had been returned late and then shelved without being checked. He traced the lines with his eyes. They were hand-drawn. Pencil, mostly, with some ink annotations in red. The lines were precise but not mechanical; there was a slight waver in the straight edges, a human hesitation that made the drawing feel alive, unlike the sterile CAD files Steve kept on his computer, perfect and soulless and impossible to argue with.

“I didn’t know we had these,” Steve said.

“I drew them,” Doug said.

Steve stared at him. Doug was sixty-two years old. He had been working at the store since 1981. He had been walking the aisles, restocking shelves, helping customers find the right size washer for their leaking faucet for forty-three years. He was the man who knew where the spare keys were kept. He was the man who remembered every customer’s name. He was not the man who drew the building.

“You drew this?” Steve asked.

“Junior architect,” Doug said. “Before I realized I liked selling things better than designing them. I stayed on because the pay was decent and the hours were predictable. My wife loved the predictable hours.”

Steve looked back at the blueprint. He saw the dimensions now. The width of the aisles. The placement of the load-bearing columns. The location of the electrical conduits running through the ceiling. It was all there. Every detail. Every connection.

“This says the east wall is load-bearing,” Steve said. His voice was flat. He was trying to keep the panic out of it, but it was there, humming under his skin like a live wire.

Doug nodded. “It is. Or it was. Until you knocked it down.”

“I didn’t knock it down,” Steve said. “The roof did. The roof collapsed, and the force transferred to the east wall, and the wall failed. That’s physics. That’s gravity.”

“Sure,” Doug said. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded tired. “But look at the annotation. Red ink. ‘Reinforced steel bracket at intersection of Bay 4 and Bay 5. Verify before demolition.’”

Steve looked. There it was. A small, red circle around a junction of lines. A note in Doug’s handwriting, precise and urgent. Verify before demolition.

“We didn’t verify,” Steve said.

“No,” Doug said. “You didn’t. You called the contractor. The contractor called the inspector. The inspector signed off on the roof. Nobody looked at the walls. Because nobody thought the walls needed looking at. They’ve been standing for forty-six years. Why would they stop now?”

Steve felt a coldness in his chest. It wasn’t fear. It was shame. He had trusted the contractor. He had trusted the inspector. He had trusted the system. And the system had failed him, not because it was broken, but because it was blind. It was designed to look at the roof, not the walls. Designed to look at the big picture, not the details. Designed to miss the red ink.

Owen looked up from his phone. “So what does it mean?”

Steve didn’t answer. He was looking at the blueprint, tracing the lines with his finger, trying to understand the logic of the building, trying to find the flaw in the design that had allowed the roof to collapse in the first place. He found it. A small note in the corner, barely legible. Tolerance for lateral load: 15%. Actual load during storm event: 22%.

“The wind,” Steve said. “The storm. It exceeded the tolerance.”

“Yeah,” Doug said. “It did.”

“And the wall couldn’t handle the transfer of force because it wasn’t reinforced to the new standard.”

“Correct,” Doug said.

Steve looked at Owen. Owen was watching him, his expression unreadable. The phone was still in his hand, but he wasn’t scrolling anymore. He was waiting.

“So we rebuild the wall,” Steve said. “We reinforce it. We install the brackets.”

Doug shook his head. “Not just the wall. Look at the mezzanine.”

Steve looked. The mezzanine was a secondary level, a walkway that ran along the north wall, providing access to the upper storage racks. It was still standing, barely, supported by the north wall and a series of steel beams that Doug had pointed out the day before.

“The mezzanine was an addition,” Doug said. “Added in ’85. It’s not on the original specs. It’s not connected to the main structure. It’s just… bolted on.”

Steve stood up. He walked over to the mezzanine, his boots crunching on the debris. He looked up at it. It was rusted. The bolts were corroded. The wood planks were warped. It looked like something that had been held together by hope and duct tape for thirty years.

“If we rebuild the east wall,” Steve said, “we have to take down the mezzanine.”

“Yeah,” Doug said. “It’s not safe. It’s not load-bearing. It’s just hanging there.”

Steve looked at the mezzanine. He thought about the inventory stored up there. The old display units. The seasonal stock. The boxes of Christmas decorations from 1998. All of it would have to be moved. All of it would have to be sorted. Thrown away if it was too damaged.

“It’s a lot of work,” Steve said.

Doug shrugged. “That’s what we do. We work.”

Steve looked at Owen. Owen was still sitting on the pallet, his phone dark in his hand. He was watching Steve with a intensity that was unfamiliar, a look of assessment, of calculation. Owen was fifteen. He was supposed to be playing video games or texting his friends or doing whatever it was teenagers did when they weren’t being forced to participate in their father’s midlife crisis. But he was here. He was watching. He was waiting for Steve to decide.

“Okay,” Steve said, his hands still trembling as he wiped the pulverized drywall dust from his palms. “We take down the mezzanine. We reinforce the east wall. We rebuild.”

Doug nodded. He rolled up the blueprint carefully, tucking it back into his flannel shirt. “I’ll bring the brackets tomorrow. And the drill. And the ladder.”

“Thanks, Doug,” Steve said.

Doug paused at the door. He looked back at Steve, at the dust, at the orange mesh, at the skeleton of the store. “You know,” he said, “your dad used to say that a building is only as strong as the people who maintain it. Not the architects. Not the inspectors. The people who show up every day and fix the leaks and tighten the bolts and replace the broken tiles. That’s what makes it stand.”

Steve didn’t answer. He just watched Doug leave, his figure disappearing into the gray light of the parking lot, and then he turned to Owen.

Owen was standing up now. He brushed the dust off his jeans. He looked at the mezzanine, then at the east wall, then at Steve.

“I can help with the mezzanine,” Owen said.

Steve looked at his son. He saw the crooked pinky finger, the hole in the cuff of his hoodie, the determination in his brown eyes. He saw the boy who had filmed him crying in the parking lot, who had uploaded the video to the internet, who had stripped him of his dignity and then stayed anyway.

“You sure?” Steve asked.

Owen shrugged. “Yeah. I’m good with tools. I watched you.”

Steve nodded. He felt a sudden, sharp ache in his chest, a pain that had nothing to do with the dust and everything to do with the realization that he had missed fifteen years of his son’s life, and that his son was still willing to stand in the wreckage with him.

“Okay,” Steve said. “We’ll start tomorrow.”

They walked out of the store together, stepping over the orange mesh, stepping over the debris, stepping over the evidence of what had broken. The sun was setting, casting long shadows across the parking lot, turning the dust in the air into gold. Steve didn’t check his email. He didn’t check his phone. He just walked to his truck, got in, and drove home, thinking about brackets and bolts and the people who maintained things.

Chapter 8

The salvage yard was a disaster. That was the first thing Steve noticed when he arrived at nine o’clock on Wednesday morning, though it took him a moment to realize why. It wasn’t just the debris—the twisted rebar, the shattered glass, the splintered plywood that Doug had spent the previous day hacking away from the east wall. It was the sheer volume of unsorted matter. It was a mountain of “maybe” and “probably” and “we’ll deal with that later,” piled high in the center of the gutted store like a monument to indecision.

Steve stood in the doorway, his steel-toed boots crunching on a layer of pulverized drywall dust that coated the floor like fresh snow. He held a clipboard in his left hand and a coffee cup in his right, both of them steady now, though the coffee had gone cold ten minutes ago. He looked at the mess. He looked at the blueprints Doug had produced the day before—hand-drawn, yellowed, smelling of old paper and basement damp—and he felt that familiar tightening in his chest, the one that usually preceded a panic attack or a phone call to corporate.

Then he heard the sound.

It was a rhythmic thumping, followed by the scrape of metal on concrete. It came from the west corner, near the old office partition that still stood, though the drywall on one side had been stripped to the studs. Steve walked toward the sound, his steps careful, avoiding the puddles of rainwater that had seeped through the collapsed roof.

Mei-Lin was there.

She was standing in front of a stack of crates, her back to him, wearing a pair of orange safety gloves that were too big for her hands. She was moving with a speed that seemed impossible, her arms a blur of motion as she lifted items from the chaos and placed them into labeled bins. Steve stopped and watched her. He didn’t understand what she was doing, but he recognized the pattern. She wasn’t just cleaning. She was categorizing.

She pulled a rusted hinge from a pile of wood scraps, wiped it with a rag, and dropped it into a bin marked HARDWARE. She picked up a shard of stained glass, examined it, and placed it gently into a separate box marked GLASS – RECLAIM. She moved to a pile of insulation, shook the dust from it, and tossed it into a bin marked TRASH.

Steve stepped closer. “Mei-Lin?”

She didn’t turn around. She just kept moving. “The hinges are coming out of the drywall studs,” she said, her voice soft but clear over the noise of the store. “They’re galvanized steel. Still good. We can reuse them for the shelving.”

Steve blinked. “Shelving?”

“For the new layout,” she said. She finally turned to face him. Her hair was pulled back in a tight bun, a few strands escaping to frame her face. Her eyes were dark and focused, scanning the pile in front of her as if she were reading a book. “Doug says the east wall needs to come down completely. Which means we lose the fixtures. But the hardware stays. The pipes stay. The lighting tracks stay. We just… sort them.”

Steve looked at the bins. There were five of them, arranged in a row on the floor. HARDWARE, METAL, WOOD – SALVAGE, GLASS, TRASH. Each one was labeled with a marker, the letters neat and precise. He looked at the mountain of debris behind her. It was still a mess. But it was a mess with a system.

“How long have you been doing this?” he asked.

“Since six,” she said. “I figured if we’re going to rebuild, we need to know what we have. We can’t order new stock if we’re sitting on three hundred pounds of usable copper wire.”

Steve felt a strange sensation in his chest. It wasn’t panic. It wasn’t the usual urge to take over, to direct, to correct. It was relief. Someone else was handling the chaos. Someone else was imposing order on the disorder. He looked at his clipboard, then at the bins, and for the first time in weeks, he didn’t feel the need to write anything down.

“I’ll help,” he said.

Mei-Lin nodded. She didn’t smile, but her shoulders relaxed slightly. “Okay. Start with the wood. Look for anything that’s not rotted. Doug says the oak beams are solid, but the plywood is probably soaked. Throw the wet stuff in the trash bin. Keep the dry stuff in the salvage pile.”

Steve knelt down. He picked up a piece of plywood. It was heavy, waterlogged, sagging in the middle. He tossed it into the TRASH bin. He picked up another. Same thing. He worked in silence, the rhythm of the tossing matching the rhythm of Mei-Lin’s sorting. Thump. Scrape. Thump. Scrape.

After a while, Owen appeared in the doorway. He was wearing his dark hoodie, the hole near the cuff visible, and his black jeans. He carried a tablet in one hand and a energy drink in the other. He stopped and looked at the scene.

“What are you guys doing?” he asked.

“Sorting,” Steve said. He didn’t look up. He tossed another piece of wet plywood into the trash.

Owen walked over and looked at the bins. He frowned. “Why are you throwing that away? That’s good wood.”

“It’s wet,” Steve said. “It’ll rot.”

“It’s just damp,” Owen said. He picked up a piece of plywood and examined it. “We can dry it out. We can use it for the subfloor.”

Steve paused. He looked at the piece of wood in his son’s hands. It was indeed only damp, not soaked. He looked at Mei-Lin, who was still sorting, her movements unhurried.

“Is that right?” Steve asked.

Owen nodded. “Yeah. We just need to stack it with spacers. Let it air dry. It’s fine.”

Steve looked at the trash bin. Then he looked at the WOOD – SALVAGE pile. He reached into the trash and pulled out the piece of plywood he’d just thrown away. He handed it to Owen.

“Okay,” Steve said. “Show me how to stack it.”

Owen smiled. It was a small smile, barely there, but it was real. He took the wood and began to arrange it on the floor, placing small blocks of scrap wood between the sheets to allow airflow. Steve watched him, noting the precision of his movements as he aligned the edges and checked the level with his crooked pinky. He was good at this. Better than Steve had been at his age. Better than Steve was now.

Mei-Lin moved to the next pile. She was sorting through a box of electrical fixtures. She pulled out a string of LED strips, tested them with a portable battery pack, and placed the working ones in a bin marked ELECTRICAL. The dead ones went into TRASH.

Steve watched her for a moment. She was quiet, efficient, observant. She didn’t talk much, but she saw everything. Her eyes tracked the hesitation in Steve’s hand before he tossed a piece of wood, noted how Owen corrected him without being asked, and lingered on the light filtering through the collapsed roof to cast long shadows across the pulverized drywall.

“Steve,” she said, without looking up. “You should check the blueprints again. Doug mentioned something about the load-bearing capacity of the north wall. I think we need to reinforce it before we put any weight on the mezzanine.”

Steve froze. The mezzanine. He had forgotten about the mezzanine. It was a bolted-on addition from ’85, not part of the original structure. If they were going to use it for storage, they needed to make sure it could hold the weight.

“I’ll check,” he said.

He stood up and walked over to the milk crate where the blueprints were spread out. He unfolded the yellowed paper, smoothing it out with his hands. The lines were faint, but legible. He traced the outline of the north wall, looking for the annotations Doug had made. There, in the margin, in Doug’s cramped handwriting, was a note: North wall joists spaced 24” OC. Check for rot. Reinforce if necessary.

Steve traced the note with his finger. He looked up at the north wall. It was still standing, covered in orange mesh, but he could see the studs through the gaps. They looked solid. But he couldn’t be sure. He needed to check.

“Owen,” he said. “Can you grab the ladder? I want to inspect the north wall joists.”

Owen put down his energy drink and grabbed the aluminum ladder from the corner. He set it up against the north wall, the rungs clicking into place. Steve climbed up, his heart beating a little faster than usual. He reached the top rung and leaned forward, peering into the darkness above the ceiling tiles.

The joists were exposed, dark and shadowy. He shone his flashlight beam along them, checking for cracks, for rot, for signs of stress. The beam landed on a section of wood that looked darker than the rest. He reached out and touched it. It was soft. Spongy.

“Steve?” Owen’s voice came from below. “You okay?”

Steve pulled his hand back. There was a spot of moisture on his finger. He looked at it, then at the wood. Rot.

“I’m okay,” he said. “But we’ve got a problem.”

He climbed down and handed the flashlight to Owen. “This section is rotted. We can’t put any weight on it. We need to shore it up before we use the mezzanine.”

Owen looked at the spot Steve had indicated. He nodded. “Okay. What do we need?”

Steve looked at the blueprints again. He traced the lines, calculating the load, the span, the required support. He needed a jack post. A temporary support column to hold the weight until they could install a permanent beam.

“We need a jack post,” he said. “And some 4x4s. And maybe a level.”

Mei-Lin walked over, wiping her hands on her rag. “I have a level in the office,” she said. “And Doug has a jack post in his truck. I’ll go get it.”

“Thanks,” Steve said.

He watched her walk away, her steps steady, her purpose clear. He looked at Owen, who was already sketching something on his tablet, likely calculating the dimensions for the shoring. He looked at the blueprints, then at the wall, then at the mountain of debris that was slowly, methodically, being sorted into order.

For the first time, he didn’t feel overwhelmed. He felt… organized. There was a plan. There was a process. There was a team.

He took a deep breath. The air smelled like dust and damp wood and possibility. He picked up a piece of drywall from the floor and tossed it into the trash bin. It made a dull thud.

“Let’s get to work,” he said.

The afternoon wore on, the light shifting from harsh white to a softer, golden hue that filtered through the gaps in the collapsed roof. The store, which had been a place of chaos and confusion, began to take on a new shape. It wasn’t fixed—not yet—but it was ordered. The bins were full. The piles were sorted. The debris was contained.

Steve stood in the center of the store, his arms crossed, watching Mei-Lin and Owen work. Mei-Lin was labeling a stack of reclaimed wood, using a permanent marker to write the dimensions and the condition on each piece. Owen was measuring the distance between the joists, calling out numbers to Steve, who was recording them on his clipboard.

It was quiet. Not the silence of emptiness, but the silence of focus. The kind of silence that comes when people are working together, each doing their part, each contributing to the whole.

Steve looked at his hands. They were steady. They were dirty. They were useful.

He thought about the email he hadn’t checked all day. He thought about the phone call he hadn’t made. He thought about the letter from Torrid Home that was sitting on his kitchen counter, unsigned. None of it mattered right now. Right now, there was only the work. The sorting. The building.

Mei-Lin finished labeling the wood and stood up. She stretched, her back cracking audibly. “That’s the salvage done,” she said. “Everything’s categorized. We know what we have. We know what we need.”

Steve nodded. “Good job.”

Mei-Lin smiled. It was a small smile, but it was warm. “Thanks. Now we just need to figure out how to rebuild.”

Owen looked up from his tablet. “I think I know where to start,” he said. “If we shore up the north wall, we can use the mezzanine for storage. That frees up floor space for the new layout.”

Steve looked at the blueprints. He traced the lines again, visualizing the new configuration. The mezzanine, reinforced. The north wall, supported. The floor space, cleared. It was possible. It was actually possible.

“Okay,” Steve said. “Let’s do it.”

He looked at Mei-Lin. She was already moving toward the office to fetch the level. He looked at Owen, who was already planning the next step. He looked at the store, which was no longer a ruin, but a project.

Steve glanced down at his clipboard. The graphite dragged across the page, mapping out walls that were gone, holding onto the shape of them before they vanished completely.

Steve didn't look up. The graphite dragged across the page, mapping out walls that were gone, holding onto the shape of them before they vanished completely. mpletely.

Chapter 9

The dust hung in the air like a held breath. It was a fine, chalky powder that coated everything—the orange mesh, the exposed studs, the stack of drywall sheets leaning against the north wall—in a uniform, ghostly gray. Steve wiped his forehead with the back of a wrist, leaving a smear of white across his skin, and looked at the sheet Owen was holding.

It was a standard four-by-eight sheet of ½-inch Type X drywall, heavy and unwieldy, smelling faintly of gypsum and the cardboard backing that had peeled slightly at the corner. Owen held it with both hands, his arms extended, his face set in a grimace of concentration that Steve recognized from when he tried to parallel park the F-150.

“Hold it steady,” Steve said. “I’m going to tack it.”

Owen didn’t answer. He just shifted his weight, his sneakers squeaking softly against the concrete floor, and kept the board vertical. His pinky finger—the crooked one, the one bent wrong since the baseball accident at age eight—twitched against the edge of the panel. Steve watched it twitch. He wanted to say something about it. He wanted to say, Keep that finger flat, or you’ll catch it on the stud. But he didn’t. He just picked up the hammer.

He had never hung drywall before. He had bought the tools on Monday: a utility knife with a retractable blade, a T-square that felt too light in his hand, a drill with a drywall bit that looked like a screw but wasn’t, and a bucket of coarse-thread screws that rattled like marbles when he shook them. He had watched three videos on YouTube while Owen slept, pausing and rewinding until the sequence of actions was burned into his memory: measure, cut, lift, tack, screw, repeat. It sounded simple. It sounded like assembly instructions for a bookshelf.

But the videos didn’t show the weight. Drywall was heavier than it looked. It was dense and unforgiving, a slab of compressed earth that wanted to fall. It wanted to crush your toes or snap back and hit you in the face. Steve knew this instinctively, the way a man knows that a hot stove burns, even if he’s never touched one.

He stepped up to the wall. The studs were spaced twenty-four inches on center, a rhythm he knew from the blueprints Doug had pulled from the filing cabinet. He aligned the edge of the sheet with the pencil mark he’d made the night before, his thumb pressing against the gypsum to keep it from sliding.

“Steady,” he said again.

Owen adjusted his grip. His shoulders hunched. He was fifteen, all elbows and knees and awkward angles, but he was strong. Steve had seen him carry the bags of mulch from the garden center last week, two at a time, without breaking stride. Now, he just stood there, holding the wall up for his father, saying nothing.

Steve raised the hammer. He didn’t use nails—he’d read that screws were stronger, that nails popped out when the house settled, that screws held the line. He placed a single screw at the top corner, against the stud, and tapped it gently with the hammer to set the head. Just a tap. Not enough to drive it in, just enough to hold the weight.

“There,” he said. “That’s the tack.”

Owen exhaled, a long, shaky breath. “My arm is killing me.”

“Switch sides,” Steve said. “I’ll lift the bottom.”

They moved around the sheet like dancers who hadn’t rehearsed, bumping hips, apologizing with grunts. Steve took the bottom edge, feeling the rough texture of the cardboard backing against his palms, the cool smoothness of the gypsum face. He lifted. The sheet rose, tilting upward, pivoting on the single screw at the top. It was a precarious balance, a teeter-totter suspended in dust.

“Okay,” Steve said. “Push it in.”

Owen pushed. The sheet slid against the studs, settling into the cavity between the framing. Steve held it there, his forearms burning, his shoulders screaming, waiting for the sound of the screw biting into wood. It didn’t come. The sheet just sat there, leaning, wobbling slightly in the draft that came through the holes where the windows would eventually go.

Steve reached for the drill. He loaded a screw into the bit, positioned it against the stud at waist height, and pulled the trigger. The motor whined—a high, eager sound—and the screw drove into the wood. Thwick. Thwick. Thwick. Three screws in a row, sinking flush with the surface, leaving small dimples that Steve ran his thumb over to check.

“Good,” he said. “That’s good.”

Owen lowered his arms. He rubbed his biceps, wincing. “Is that it? Is that the whole thing?”

“That’s the first sheet,” Steve said. He looked at the wall. It looked… finished. Or nearly finished. The gray surface covered the dark void of the studs, the insulation, the wiring that Mei-Lin had helped them snake through the channels last week. It looked solid. It looked like a wall.

He felt a surge of pride, sharp and sudden, like swallowing ice water. He had built a wall. He had taken a pile of raw materials and turned it into a structure. It was a small structure. It was a single sheet on a single wall in a gutted store in the Flagship Store. But it was something.

“Let’s do the next one,” he said.

Owen didn’t move. He was staring at the stack of sheets against the north wall, his expression unreadable. The dust settled around them, coating his eyelashes, his lips, the collar of his hoodie.

“Dad,” Owen said. “How do you know where to put the screws?”

Steve paused. The drill hung in his hand, heavy and silent. “You put them in the studs. Every twelve inches. Along the edges. In the middle.”

“But how do you know where the studs are?” Owen asked. “The sheet covers them up. Once you screw it in, you can’t see them. How do you make sure you’re hitting wood and not just empty space?”

Steve opened his mouth to answer. The study of walls unfolded in his mind: the stud finder’s spinning dial, the magnetic nail tossed against the surface, Doug pressing his ear to the plaster and tapping it with his knuckle, listening for the difference in tone between solid wood and hollow cavity.

“I…” Steve said.

He didn’t know.

He had assumed—hoped, really—that he would know. That the knowledge would transfer from the blueprints to his hands, from the spreadsheet to the screwdriver. That because he had managed this store for twenty years, because he had signed the purchase orders and approved the invoices and sat in the conference rooms with Piper Bellamy, he would understand how to put the walls back up.

But he didn’t. He didn’t know where the studs were. He didn’t know how to cut the sheets to fit around the electrical outlets they hadn’t installed yet. He didn’t know how to tape the seams so they wouldn’t crack when the house settled. He was guessing. He was faking it. And Owen, who had watched three YouTube videos and read the instructions on the box, knew it.

Owen looked at him, waiting. His brown eyes were clear, unblinking, devoid of the judgment Steve expected. There was no sarcasm in his face. No eye-roll. Just a quiet, terrifying curiosity.

“You don’t know,” Owen said. It wasn’t a question.

Steve lowered the drill. The dust motes danced in the shaft of sunlight that cut through the hole in the roof, illuminating the space between them like a stage.

“I don’t know,” Steve said.

The admission hung in the air, heavier than the drywall. Steve waited for the shame to hit him, for the familiar tightening in his chest, the urge to deflect, to blame the tools, the weather, the corporate mandate that had forced them into this DIY purgatory. But it didn’t come. Instead, he felt a strange lightness, like a knot loosening.

“I’ve never hung drywall before,” he said. “None of us have.”

Owen nodded slowly. He looked down at his hands, at the gray dust coating his knuckles. “I thought you did. I thought… I thought you had it figured out.”

“I don’t,” Steve said. “I’m making it up as I go.”

Owen was quiet for a long moment. Then he walked over to the stack of sheets and pulled out another one. He dragged it across the floor, the rough surface catching on grit until it came free with a dry, scratching rasp.

“Okay,” he said. “So what do we do?”

“We find the studs,” Steve said. “We figure it out.”

“How?”

Steve looked around the store. He looked at the tools scattered on the floor—the hammer, the T-square, the utility knife, the bucket of screws. He looked at the blueprints Doug had left on the milk crate, the lines and numbers that described a building that no longer existed. He looked at Owen, who was already lifting the next sheet, his face set in that same grimace of concentration.

“We measure,” Steve said. “Twenty-four inches on center. We start from the corner and count.”

Owen lifted the sheet. It was heavier this time, or maybe Steve’s arms were just tired. He held it up, waiting.

Steve picked up the tape measure. The brass casing was worn smooth from years of use, the numbers faded to a ghostly white. He extended the blade, the metal ribbon snapping out with a crisp shink. He walked to the corner where the north wall met the east wall—the corner where Doug had started the demolition, where the chainsaw had chewed through the framing two weeks ago.

He pressed the end of the tape against the stud. He measured twelve inches. He marked it with a pencil. He measured another twelve. Another mark.

“Here,” he said. “This is a stud.”

Owen shifted the sheet, aligning the edge with the mark. “And the next one?”

“Twelve inches from there.”

They worked in silence. The only sound was the rasp of the pencil, the click of the tape measure retracting, the soft thud of the drywall settling against the wood. Steve measured. Owen lifted. Steve marked. Owen held. It was a rhythm, slow and imperfect, but it was a rhythm.

At thirty-six inches, Steve paused. He pressed the tape against the wall. He measured twelve more inches. Forty-eight. He marked it.

“Another one,” he said.

Owen nodded. He didn’t ask how Steve knew. He just trusted the tape, the numbers, the method. And Steve, holding the tape measure, felt the weight of that trust. It wasn’t the trust of a customer who believed Steve knew how to fix a carburetor. It wasn’t the trust of an employee who believed Steve knew how to balance a ledger. It was the trust of a son who was learning, alongside his father, that it was okay not to know.

“Ready?” Steve asked.

“Ready,” Owen said.

They lifted the sheet together. This time, Steve didn’t hold the bottom alone. He stepped in closer, his shoulder brushing Owen’s, and took the lower edge with both hands. They lifted in unison, the sheet rising, tilting, sliding into the cavity between the studs. It fit. Perfectly. The edges aligned with the marks. The surface was flush.

Steve grabbed the drill. He drove the screws—thwick, thwick, thwick—along the edges, in the middle, securing the sheet to the wood. He checked each dimple with his thumb, ensuring it was sunk just deep enough, not tearing the paper face, not leaving the head proud.

When he was done, he stepped back. The wall looked the same as the first sheet. Gray. Solid. Silent.

Owen lowered his arms. He rubbed his shoulders, winced, then looked at the wall. A small smile touched his lips—barely there, gone as quickly as it came.

“Not bad,” he said.

“For a first try,” Steve said.

They stood there for a moment, looking at the wall they had built together. The dust continued to settle, coating their hair, their clothes, the tools on the floor. Outside, a truck rumbled past on West Central Avenue, the sound muffled by the thickness of the new drywall. Inside, the air was still. Quiet.

Steve wiped his hands on his jeans, leaving streaks of gray on the dark denim. He felt exhausted. His back ached. His shoulders burned. But for the first time in months, the exhaustion felt clean. It wasn’t the drain of anxiety, the depletion of worry. It was the fatigue of effort. Of work done. Of hands that had held weight and found it bearable.

“Lunch?” Owen asked.

Steve looked at the clock on his wrist—no signal, just the analog face, the hands moving steadily. It was past noon.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Lunch.”

They walked over to the milk crate where Doug had left their sandwiches two days ago, wrapped in wax paper and forgotten in the chaos. Steve unwrapped them. They were stale. The bread was hard, the cheese congealed, the pepperoni slick with oil. He took a bite anyway. It tasted like salt and cardboard and survival.

Owen ate his in silence, chewing slowly, watching the dust motes dance in the light. Steve watched him. He counted the rhythmic pull of Owen’s throat as he swallowed, noted the jagged angle of his crooked pinky as his fingers curled around the crust, and followed the drift of a fly circling the mezzanine rafters. He looked like a boy. He looked like a young man. He looked like his mother when she was thinking.

“Dad?” Owen said.

“Yeah?”

“Can we watch a video after? The one about taping the seams?”

Steve swallowed. He looked at the wall, at the single screw he had driven into the corner, at the line of marks on the stud that guided their work. He thought about the videos, the tutorials, the endless stream of information that promised to teach him everything he needed to know if he just paid attention.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “We can watch a video.”

“Okay.”

They finished their sandwiches. They threw the wrappers into the orange trash bin. They stood up, brushing the crumbs from their laps, and walked back to the wall, ready to measure again.

The sun was beginning to dip below the horizon, casting long shadows across the store floor, turning the dust in the air into gold. Steve picked up his tape measure. He picked up his pencil. And he got to work.

Chapter 10

The drive to Columbus was a study in friction. The highway was a gray ribbon of asphalt stretching toward a sky that refused to commit to either rain or sun, hovering in that suspended state of atmospheric indecision that made Steve’s joints ache. He kept the radio off. He usually kept the radio off when he was thinking, because the static provided a white noise that drowned out the internal monologue, but today the silence inside the cab was louder than any broadcast. It was filled with the memory of Owen’s face—not the sarcastic mask he wore for school, not the stoic grimace he wore for Doug—but the quiet, focused look he’d worn while taping the seam on the north wall. It was a look Steve hadn’t earned.

He checked the passenger seat. The manuscript was there. It wasn’t much—just a stapled packet of twenty pages, bound with a red clip that was bent slightly at the corner—but it felt heavier than the clipboard he usually carried. He hadn’t asked Marla for it. She hadn’t offered it. It had simply appeared on the kitchen counter on Tuesday morning, sitting atop a stack of utility bills, typed on cheap paper that curled at the edges from the humidity. He had read it in the truck, waiting for the light to turn, his hands shaking so badly he’d had to pull over to the shoulder of I-280 and hold the pages flat against his knees until the tremor passed.

It was good. That was the insult of it. It was good, and it was about a woman who organized her grief by alphabetizing the contents of her husband’s desk drawers. It was precise, dry, and devastatingly honest. It was the writing Marla had always possessed, a work demanding a life steady enough to support the weight of observation. Steve had spent twenty years mistaking her quietness for emptiness, assuming that because she didn’t shout, she didn’t feel. He had built a career on the illusion that noise equaled importance, that visibility equaled value. And now she was gone, taking the noise with her, leaving behind this quiet, perfect proof that she had been full all along.

Steve turned off the interstate onto the exit ramp for the corporate district. The landscape shifted from the jagged, industrial scars of the city to the manicured lawns and glass facades of the regional headquarters. Torrid Home occupied a corner of a complex that smelled of filtered air and money. Steve parked in the visitor lot, his truck looking absurdly large and dirty among the sedans and hybrids. He sat for a moment, staring at the building. He wasn't going in to beg. He wasn't going in to plead. He was going in to deliver the manuscript, and perhaps, if the universe had a sense of justice he didn't believe in, to ask if there was a place for him in the company that wasn't defined by the collapse of a roof.

Steve parked in the visitor lot, his F-150 looking absurdly large and dirty among the sedans and hybrids.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I’m here to see Piper Bellamy,” Steve said. His voice sounded rough, unused. He cleared his throat. “Steve Roberts. I work—or worked—at the Toledo store.”

She typed something into her keyboard. “Ms. Bellamy is in a meeting. Would you like to leave a message?”

“No,” Steve said. He looked down at the manuscript in his hands. “I’ll wait.”

He sat in the chair opposite the desk. It was a sleek, modern chair with no lumbar support, designed for people who didn’t have back problems. Steve adjusted his posture, trying to mimic the casual confidence of the other visitors, but his shoulders remained hunched, protective. He watched the lobby traffic. A man in a suit walked past, talking into a headset, his stride long and purposeful. A woman in a bright yellow coat laughed into her phone, her head thrown back, unbothered by the world. They moved through the space as if they owned it, as if the floor wouldn’t crack beneath their heels. Steve felt like an intruder in his own life, a ghost haunting the machine he had helped build.

Twenty minutes later, the glass doors at the far end of the lobby opened, and Piper Bellamy walked through. She was wearing a blazer today, navy blue, tailored to hide the slight curve of her hips, but her hair was loose, falling in waves around her shoulders. She looked tired. The algorithmic precision of her posture was slightly off; she was rubbing her temples with one hand, her phone tucked under the other arm. She spotted Steve, paused, and then walked over.

“Steve,” she said. Her voice was softer than usual, lacking the projected cheerfulness she used in meetings. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I didn’t call,” Steve said. “I didn’t know if you were busy.”

“I’m always busy,” she said, but she gestured toward the elevators. “But I have twenty minutes before my next review. Come on.”

They took the elevator to the fourth floor. The ride was silent, the hum of the cables the only sound. Steve watched the floor numbers climb. 1… 2… 3… Each digit felt like a step away from the store, from the dust and the oak beam and the smell of wet plaster. He wondered if he was making a mistake. He wondered if Marla would come back if he signed the liquidation papers. He wondered if he deserved for her to come back.

Piper’s office was a glass box overlooking the city. It was sparse, decorated with abstract art and potted plants that looked artificial. She closed the door behind them, shutting out the view of the lobby, and walked to her desk.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“Thanks,” Steve said. “I’ve been sleeping poorly.”

“You’ve been sleeping poorly since the collapse,” Piper said. She leaned against her desk, crossing her arms. “Steve, we need to talk about the timeline. The insurance adjusters are asking questions about the delay. If we don’t have a clear demolition schedule by Friday, they’re going to freeze the payout.”

Steve looked at the manuscript in his hands. He hadn’t decided what to do with it yet. He was still holding it like a weapon, or a shield.

“I don’t care about the payout,” he said.

Piper raised an eyebrow. “Steve, you care about the payout. You care about the job. You care about the reputation of the Toledo store. If we liquidate, Doug loses his pension vesting. Mei-Lin loses her position. Owen loses the project he’s been working on. You lose the chance to prove that you can manage a crisis.”

“I’m not trying to manage a crisis,” Steve said. “I’m trying to fix the store.”

Piper sighed, a short, sharp exhale through her nose. “Steve, the store is a loss. The roof is gone. The east wall is compromised. The insurance only covers demolition and debris removal. There is no money for reconstruction. You know this. I sent you the report. I sent it three times.”

Steve didn’t answer. He looked out the window. The city sprawled below, a grid of streets and buildings, each one a testament to human effort and human error. He thought about the oak beam in the store, twelve feet of solid wood that had held up the ceiling for forty-six years. It was still there, buried under the debris, waiting. It hadn’t given up. Why should he?

“I quit,” Steve said.

Piper went very still. “What?”

“I quit,” Steve said again, louder this time. “I’m not signing the liquidation papers. I’m not handing over the keys. I’m going to rebuild the store. With Owen. With Doug. We’ll do it ourselves. We’ll save the salvageable inventory. We’ll reopen smaller. A fraction of the space. But we’ll reopen.”

Piper stared at him. For a moment, Steve thought she was going to laugh. Instead, she uncrossed her arms and walked to the window, standing beside him.

“You’re forty-seven years old, Steve,” she said quietly. “You have a tremor in your hands. You haven’t done manual labor in twenty years. You have a son who hates you. You have a wife who left you. And you want to tear down a building with a chainsaw?”

“It’s not about the chainsaw,” Steve said.

“No,” Piper agreed. “It’s not about the chainsaw. It’s about control. You think if you can fix the building, you can fix yourself. But you can’t. The building is just wood and drywall. It doesn’t care about your guilt. It doesn’t care about your marriage. It’s just a structure. And structures fail. That’s what they do.”

Steve looked at her. Her eyes were gray, he realized. Not blue, not brown. Gray, like the sky outside.

“And you?” Steve asked. “What are you doing here, Piper? Really? You’re twenty-nine. You could be anywhere. Why are you stuck in a glass box in Columbus, watching a man tear his life apart?”

Piper didn’t answer immediately. She looked down at her hands, which were resting on the windowsill. Her nails were painted a neutral beige, perfect and unchipped.

“My father was an architect,” she said finally. “He died five years ago. Cancer. Fast. He left me a house full of blueprints and a lifetime of regrets. He spent his whole life designing buildings that would outlast him, but he never built anything for himself. I came to Torrid Home because I thought if I could optimize enough assets, if I could make enough numbers work, I could prove that efficiency is a form of love. That if you take care of the details, the big picture will take care of itself.”

She turned to look at him. “It doesn’t work, Steve. I’ve optimized a hundred stores. I’ve fired a thousand employees. And I have never once felt like I fixed anything. I just… rearranged the debris.”

Steve felt a lump in his throat. He wanted to say something, but the words wouldn’t come. He looked down at the manuscript in his hands. The red clip glinted in the light.

“This is for you,” he said.

Piper frowned. “What?”

“My wife’s novel,” Steve said. “She left it on the counter. I read it. It’s… it’s good. I thought maybe you’d want to see it. Or maybe I just needed to give it to someone. Someone who isn’t part of the wreckage.”

Piper looked at the manuscript, then at Steve. She reached out and took it, her fingers brushing his. Her skin was cool, dry. She held the packet as if it were fragile, as if it might break if she squeezed too hard.

“Thank you,” she said. Her voice was thick. “I’ll… I’ll read it.”

“Don’t optimize it,” Steve said. “Just read it.”

Piper nodded. She tucked the manuscript under her arm, next to her phone. “Steve, you can’t rebuild the store. It’s structurally unsound. It’s financially impossible. It’s a fantasy.”

“I know,” Steve said. “But it’s mine.”

He turned and walked to the door. He didn’t look back. He didn’t know if he was being brave or foolish. He didn’t know if Marla would ever come home. He didn’t know if he could actually lift a pry bar without his hands shaking. But for the first time in months, he felt the weight of the decision in his chest, solid and real, like a stone. It wasn’t peace. It wasn’t hope. It was just certainty. And that had to be enough.

He took the elevator down. The lobby was empty now. The receptionist was gone. Steve walked out the glass doors, into the gray afternoon. The wind was picking up, carrying the smell of rain and exhaust. He got into his truck, started the engine, and sat there for a moment, listening to the idle. Then he put it in reverse and backed out of the parking lot, heading west, toward Toledo, toward the dust, toward the work.

Steve kept his eyes on the lane markers, letting the rhythmic thump of the wipers fill the silence where the numbers used to be. es on the lane markers, letting the rhythmic thump of the wipers fill the silence where the numbers used to be.

Chapter 11

The inspector arrived at seven-thirty on a Thursday morning, which was three hours before Steve had told him he would arrive, and twenty minutes before Steve was ready for him to arrive. Steve was not ready because he was standing in the middle of the electrical sub-panel box, which was open, empty, and terrifyingly exposed, holding a handful of copper wires that looked less like conductors and more like the tangled intestines of a machine that had died before it could be born.

He was forty-seven years old. He had spent twenty years managing inventory spreadsheets, tracking SKU numbers, and ensuring that the price tags on the shelving units matched the receipts in the register. He knew how to balance a ledger. He knew how to organize a warehouse by turnover velocity. But looking at the live wire, the neutral bus bar, and the ground strap dangling like a loose tongue from a dog that had forgotten how to bark, he had no idea what to do.

The front door chimed.

Steve jumped. The copper wire snapped.

It didn’t spark. It didn’t shock him. It just fell to the dusty concrete floor with a soft, metallic plink, rolling under the milk crate that served as their workbench. Steve stared at it. He stared at the empty panel box. He stared at his hands, which were shaking with a violence that felt personal, as if his own nervous system was staging a mutiny against his conscious intent.

"Mr. Roberts?"

The voice came from the entrance. It was male, flat, and carried the specific, bored authority of a man who had seen three hundred failures in the last month and expected to see three hundred more by lunch.

Steve turned slowly. He tried to smooth his face into an expression of welcome, but his cheeks felt stiff, like dried clay. Standing in the doorway was a man in a navy windbreaker, holding a clipboard and a flashlight. He looked young—thirties, maybe—but his eyes were old. They scanned the store with the dispassionate efficiency of a coroner examining a body.

"I’m here for the electrical rough-in inspection," the man said. He didn’t introduce himself. He didn’t ask how Steve was. He simply stated the fact of his presence, as if the universe itself had sent him to deliver the verdict.

"Right," Steve said. His voice sounded thin, reedy. "Yes. The… the inspection. I was expecting you at ten."

"You called me at eight-thirty yesterday evening," the inspector said. He stepped inside, his boots crunching on the pulverized drywall dust. "You said it was urgent. You said the store needed to be operational by Friday."

"I… yes." Steve gripped the edge of the open panel box. His knuckles were white. "Things moved quickly. We’re ahead of schedule."

The inspector stopped ten feet away. He looked at the panel box. He looked at the floor, where the copper wire lay coiled like a sleeping snake. He looked at the exposed stud wall, where the wiring ran in messy, unsecured loops, held in place by staples that looked like they had been driven in by hand with a hammer.

"This is not up to code," the inspector said.

Steve felt a cold flush rise up his neck. "It’s temporary. We’re installing the conduit today. The permanent run is… it’s in progress."

"It’s in violation of Section 300.4," the inspector said. He clicked his flashlight on and shone the beam into the panel box. The light caught the dust motes dancing in the air, turning them into a swirling galaxy of gray. "Unsecured conductors. No grounding electrode conductor installed. And…" He paused. He leaned closer. "Is that Romex? Inside the wall cavity, without a junction box?"

Steve looked at the wire. He looked at the inspector. He thought about telling the truth—that he had bought the wire at the salvage yard, that he had stripped it himself with a knife that had slipped twice and drawn blood from his thumb, that he had stapled it to the studs because he didn’t have a tool to drive the clips, and that he was praying, silently and desperately, that the building inspector wouldn’t notice the difference between a professional installation and a desperate improvisation.

But he couldn’t say that. He couldn’t say that he had never touched a wire in his life. He couldn’t say that he was a forty-seven-year-old man who was hiding in the walls of his own store, pretending to be something he wasn’t, because the alternative was admitting that he had failed his son, his wife, and himself.

"Yes," Steve said. "It’s Romex."

The inspector clicked his flashlight off. He wrote something on his clipboard. The sound of the pen scratching against the paper was loud in the quiet store. It sounded like a bone breaking.

"I can’t approve this," he said. "I can’t sign off on a rough-in that looks like it was done by someone who’s never held a screwdriver. If I sign this, I lose my license. If you proceed without a sign-off, you lose your permit. If you lose your permit, Torrid Home pulls the insurance. If Torrid Home pulls the insurance, you’re sitting on a liability bomb that’s going to blow up in your face the second someone flips a switch."

Steve felt the room tilt. He gripped the panel box tighter. The metal was cold against his palms.

The inspector looked at him. His expression didn't change. He made a mark on his clipboard, then capped his pen with a dull click. "Section 300.4 requires all conductors to be secured at intervals not exceeding eighteen inches. Yours aren't. I can't issue a pass on that. You'll need to bring it into compliance before I can sign anything."

"I want you to tear it out," the inspector said. "All of it. Strip the walls. Run the wire properly. Install the junction boxes. Get a licensed electrician to pull the permit. Then call me back when it’s done."

Steve looked at the walls. He looked at the mess of copper and plastic that he and Owen had spent the last three nights pulling, stripping, and stapling. He looked at Owen, who was standing in the corner, holding a hammer, watching them with wide, terrified eyes. Owen didn’t understand the codes. Owen didn’t understand the licenses. Owen just understood that his father was failing, and that if his father failed, the store would disappear, and they would go back to being strangers who lived in the same house.

"We don’t have time," Steve said. His voice was rising. "We don’t have money for an electrician. We don’t have time to strip the walls. We have a deadline. We have a… a momentum."

The inspector looked at him. His expression didn't change. He exhaled through his nose, a long, tired sound, and made another notation on his clipboard. "I can't override a code violation, Mr. Roberts. I don't have the authority. You'll need to bring it into compliance before I can sign anything."

He turned to leave.

Steve moved.

He didn’t think. He didn’t plan. He just moved, stepping out from behind the panel box, blocking the inspector’s path to the door. The inspector stopped, surprised, and looked up at Steve with a mixture of annoyance and fear.

"Wait," Steve said. "Just… wait a minute."

The inspector crossed his arms. "I don’t have a minute. I have three more inspections today. I have a life. I have a family. I don’t have time to babysit a DIY disaster."

Steve stared at the inspector, then at the clipboard, then at the pen. The spreadsheet loomed behind his eyes. He remembered the old inventory system—categorizing items, labeling them, filing them into neat, logical rows. He remembered the belief that organizing enough data could control the outcome.

But there was no data for this. There was no spreadsheet for this. There was just the wire, the wall, and the terrible, crushing weight of the present moment.

Steve reached into his pocket. He pulled out his wallet. He pulled out his credit card. He held it out to the inspector.

"Who are you affiliated with?" Steve asked.

The inspector blinked. "What?"

"Your company. Your employer. Who do you work for?"

"I work for the city," the inspector said. "I’m a municipal employee."

"Right," Steve said. He nodded. He lowered the card. "But… do you subcontract? Do you have a… a preferred vendor? Someone you recommend? Someone who can come out today? Right now? I’ll pay double. Triple. Whatever it takes."

The inspector stared at him. "There are no electricians available, Mr. Roberts. Everyone is booked. It’s a busy season. After the storm, everyone is trying to get their power back on."

"Then find someone," Steve said. "Find anyone. I don’t care if it’s a kid with a toolkit. I don’t care if it’s a guy who does it in his garage. Just… make it legal. Make it signable."

"Best of luck," the inspector said.

Steve felt the desperation rising in his throat, hot and acidic. He wanted to scream. He wanted to throw the clipboard against the wall. He wanted to grab the inspector by the windbreaker and shake him until the truth fell out of his mouth. But he didn’t. He just stood there, holding his breath, waiting for the man to say no.

The truck disappeared into the traffic on the avenue. Dust settled. Silence returned.

"I’m sorry, Mr. Roberts," the inspector said. "But I can’t help you. You need to tear it out. Or you need to wait. But you can’t proceed."

He stepped around Steve. He walked to the door. He opened it. The sunlight poured in, bright and harsh, illuminating the dust in the air.

"Good luck," the inspector said.

And then he was gone.

Steve stood in the doorway for a long time. The man walked to his truck, got in, and drove away. The truck disappeared into the traffic on West Central Avenue. Dust settled. Silence returned.

Then he turned around.

Owen was still standing in the corner. He was holding the hammer. His face was pale.

"Did he leave?" Owen asked.

"Yes," Steve said.

"Did he sign it?"

"No."

Owen gave a single, sharp dip of his chin. He didn’t cry. He didn’t yell. He just lowered the hammer and set it on the floor. He looked at the walls. He looked at the messy, unsecured, unlicensed mess of copper and plastic that they had built.

"So what do we do now?" Owen asked.

Steve looked at the panel box. He looked at the wire on the floor. He thought about tearing it out. He thought about calling an electrician. He thought about admitting defeat.

And then he thought about the salvaged parts in the back room. The old industrial junction boxes Doug had pulled from the demolition debris. The heavy-gauge conduit that had been used in the original 1972 build. The switches and breakers that were still good, still functional, just waiting to be reused.

He remembered how Doug described the old building—how it had been built to last, designed with a solidity modern construction had forgotten. He thought about the blueprints Doug had found, the hand-drawn plans that showed a different kind of logic, a logic based on materials and craftsmanship rather than efficiency and speed.

"We don’t tear it out," Steve said.

Owen looked up. "What?"

"We don’t tear it out," Steve said again. His voice was steadier now. "We fix it. We use the old stuff. The conduit. The boxes. We run it properly. We hide the mistakes. We make it look… we make it look like it was always supposed to be this way."

Owen stared at him. "That’s illegal, Dad."

"I know," Steve said. "But it’s also… it’s also the only way we’re going to get through the day."

He walked over to the panel box. He picked up the copper wire from the floor. He held it in his hand, feeling the smooth, warm plastic of the insulation. He thought about the lie he was about to tell. He thought about the risk he was taking. He thought about his license, his permit, his reputation.

And then he thought about Owen. About the way his son was looking at him, waiting for him to lead, waiting for him to be the father he had promised to be.

Steve took a deep breath. He stepped back into the panel box. He picked up his knife. He began to strip the wire.

"Grab the conduit," he said. "Let’s get to work."

Owen hesitated. Then he nodded. He picked up a length of steel conduit from the stack in the corner. He walked over to Steve. He handed it to him.

Steve took it. He fit it into the box. He tightened the bolt. He felt the metal click into place. It was solid. It was secure. It was a lie.

But it was a lie that held weight.

And for now, that was enough.

Chapter 12

The door opened at nine o’clock on a Thursday, and Piper walked in wearing a suit that cost more than Steve’s truck and carrying a portfolio that looked like it weighed fifteen pounds. She didn’t bring a spreadsheet. She didn’t bring a laptop. She brought a document bound in navy leather, stamped with the Torrid Home logo in gold foil that caught the morning light filtering through the broken skylight and threw it back as a harsh, accusing glare.

Steve stood by the electrical panel, his hands still shaking—not with the violent tremor from yesterday, but with a low-frequency vibration, like a phone left on silent in a pocket. She approached. Her eyes scanned the exposed conduit, the loose wires, the makeshift support brace Doug had rigged from a 2x4 and a ratchet strap. Her lips pressed together in that familiar, algorithmic line of assessment.

“Good morning, Steve,” she said. Her voice was bright, the same upbeat tone she’d used in the conference room, the same tone she’d used when she told him his inventory turnover was suboptimal. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

“You’re interrupting the only thing that’s working in this building,” Steve said. He gestured at the panel with his chin. “Inspector’s coming back in an hour. We’re still finishing the termination.”

Piper nodded. She didn’t look at the panel. She looked at him. “I know. That’s why I’m not here to talk about the electrical code. I’m here to talk about the future.”

She set the portfolio on a stack of cinder blocks that Mei-Lin had organized into a neat pyramid in the center of the store floor. The pyramid was a small miracle of logistics; Mei-Lin had sorted the blocks by size and weight, creating a stable platform in a space that had been chaos forty-eight hours ago. Steve respected the pyramid. He didn’t trust Piper.

“I went to Columbus,” she said. She opened the portfolio. Inside wasn’t a spreadsheet. It was a single sheet of paper, thick and cream-colored, with a letterhead that screamed authority. “I met with the regional claims adjuster. And the legal team.”

Steve felt the vibration in his hands travel up his forearms. “And?”

“And they’ve agreed to a restructuring.” Piper pulled the document out. It wasn’t a denial. It wasn’t an acceptance of his original plan. It was something else. Something that looked like a compromise, but felt like a surrender. “Torrid Home isn’t going to fund the full rebuild. Not the way you proposed. Not the two-hundred-thousand-dollar overhaul with the mezzanine, the new HVAC, the whole flagship experience.”

Steve stared at the paper. The gold foil logo seemed to pulse. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying they’re offering a smaller package,” Piper said. She tapped the document with a manicured nail. “A pilot program. They want to convert this location into a ‘micro-fulfillment hub.’ Six hundred square feet. Ground floor only. No mezzanine. No retail front. Just storage and local delivery pickup.”

Steve felt the air leave the space. It wasn’t a collapse—not like the roof. It was slower. More insidious. It was the feeling of a load-bearing wall being removed one brick at a time, until you realized you were standing in an empty room.

“Six hundred square feet?” he said. His voice was flat. Dead. “That’s… that’s not a store, Piper. That’s a closet. That’s a locker.”

“It’s a viable asset,” she said. Her voice didn’t waver. “It keeps the brand alive. It generates revenue. It pays off the debt. If you reject it, they walk. And then you’re left with a ruin and a mortgage you can’t service.”

Steve looked at the paper. He looked at the exposed beams above, the skeleton of the building he had promised to fix. He looked at Owen, who was standing by the north wall, holding a sheet of drywall he hadn’t been able to lift for an hour. Owen wasn’t looking at Piper. He was looking at Steve. His face was blank, but his eyes were wide, waiting for the decision that would define the next ten years of their lives.

Steve thought about the blueprints Doug had found. He thought about the hand-drawn lines, the careful annotations, the vision of a space that was meant to hold people, not just boxes. He thought about the way the store had smelled when it was full—of fresh paint and new plastic and the sharp, clean scent of possibility.

“If I take this,” Steve said, “we lose the front. We lose the aisles. We lose the… the humanity of it.”

“The humanity isn’t paying the bills, Steve,” Piper said. She wasn’t cruel. She was just accurate. It was the accuracy that hurt. “The market has changed. The data doesn’t lie. This location is no longer a destination. It’s a node. And nodes don’t need mezzanines.”

Steve looked at the contract. It was clean. Professional. Final. It offered safety. It offered a way out of the dust and the debt and the shame. It offered a life where he didn’t have to stand in a gutted building with shaking hands and wonder if he was failing his son.

But it was a lie.

It was a lie wrapped in cream-colored paper and gold foil. It was a lie that said he could fix everything if he just shrank his expectations. It was a lie that said he could rebuild the store if he forgot what the store was for.

Steve looked at Owen again. Owen was still holding the drywall. His arms were trembling. But he wasn’t putting it down. He was waiting.

Steve took the contract from Piper’s hand. He felt the weight of it. Fifteen pounds of paper. Fifteen pounds of surrender.

“No,” he said.

Piper’s eyebrows rose. Just a fraction. A glitch in the algorithm. “Steve, be reasonable. This is the best offer—”

“It’s not an offer,” Steve said. He handed the paper back. “It’s a severance package. And I’m not taking it.”

Piper stared at him. For the first time, her voice lacked its usual confidence. “Then what? You’ll go bankrupt? You’ll lose everything?”

“I’ll lose the mezzanine,” Steve said. He looked around the space, really looked at it, for the first time since the collapse. “I’ll lose the front. Maybe I’ll lose the roof. But I won’t lose the core. I won’t turn this into a locker. I won’t turn my life into a node.”

He picked up his tape measure. The brass casing was worn smooth, the numbers faded, but it still measured. It still told the truth.

“We’re doing it our way,” he said. “Smaller. Slower. But ours.”

Piper closed the portfolio. She didn’t argue. She didn’t try to convince him. She just nodded, a slow, reluctant gesture, and turned to leave. At the door, she stopped. She didn’t look back.

“You’re making a mistake,” she said. But her voice was softer now. Less algorithmic. More human. “But… I respect the courage.”

Then she was gone. The door clicked shut. The silence rushed back in, filling the space where her certainty had been.

Steve looked at Owen. Owen was still holding the drywall. His arms were shaking. But he was smiling.

“Okay,” Owen said. “So… what’s next?”

Steve looked at the north wall. He looked at the stack of drywall sheets. He looked at the tape measure in his hand.

“Next,” he said, “we measure.”

He walked over to the wall. He extended the tape. The metal blade slid out with a smooth, satisfying click. He pressed the end against the stud. He looked at the numbers. They were clear. They were true. They were enough.

Owen walked over. He stood beside him. Shoulders touching. Not quite close, but close enough.

“Eighteen feet,” Steve said.

“Yeah,” Owen said. “Eighteen feet.”

The dust settled around them, thick and gray, settling into the creases of their jackets and the hollows of the floorboards. Steve looked at the empty space where the registers used to be, then at Owen, who was already picking up a piece of debris. There was no plan for this exact corner, no blueprint for the quiet that had finally taken hold, but as he watched his son work, the tightness in Steve’s chest began to loosen, just enough to let the afternoon light in.

Chapter 13

The bell above the door chimed at ten-fifteen on a Saturday morning, a bright, brassy sound that cut through the low hum of the HVAC unit and the distant traffic outside the flagship store in Toledo. It was a cheerful sound. It was the kind of sound designed to make a customer feel welcome, to suggest that the space beyond the threshold was warm and stocked and ready to serve. Steve stood behind the counter, his hands flat on the laminate surface, and watched the door swing open.

He was wearing a shirt that wasn’t gray. It was a button-down, light blue, with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. It felt strange against his skin, tight across the shoulders, but he hadn’t taken it off. He hadn’t taken off the vest either—a navy pin-vest with the Roberts & Co. logo embroidered in white thread on the left breast. The embroidery was crooked. Owen had done it. Steve had held the fabric taut while his son fed the thread through the machine, his large, clumsy fingers fumbling with the tension dial, but the result was legible. It was proud. It was honest.

The store smelled different now. It didn’t smell like wet drywall anymore. It didn’t smell like ozone or pulverized limestone or the metallic tang of fear. It smelled of fresh paint—eggshell white, matte finish—and lemon oil. It smelled of new shelving units, galvanized steel and particleboard, stacked in neat rows along the north and south walls. The space was smaller. That was the first thing people noticed. The ceiling was lower, capped by the underside of the mezzanine that Doug had reinforced with steel plates and welds that scarred the metal like jagged seams. The east wall was gone, replaced by a large, floor-to-ceiling window that let in the morning light, turning the dust motes into suspended gold. The west wall was solid brick, painted white, lined with displays of hand tools, garden supplies, and the small, curated selection of hardware that Mei-Lin had arranged with such obsessive precision that every screw, every nut, every washer was grouped by size and material, labeled in a font that was clean and modern and entirely unlike the chaotic bin-system Steve had used for twenty years.

The memory came unbidden—the way memories of near-death tend to arrive: without invitation, fully formed, impossible to shake. Two weeks ago, same aisle. Doug had been on a ladder counting paint cans while Steve tallied fasteners below. The ceiling groaned—not a sound exactly, but a pressure, a deep muscular contraction in the bones of the building. Then the east wall buckled. A cascade of drywall and insulation sheeted between them like a drawn curtain, pinning Doug on one side, Steve on the other, trapped in the narrow aisle between shelves of garden hose and extension cords. Steve pressed his palms against the concrete, feeling the vibration travel through his ribs, listening to Doug's voice muffled behind a wall of debris, calling his name. Not angry. Not scared. Just certain. Certain that Steve wasn't going to make it through.

His palms rested flat against the workbench, steady as stone. The tremor had vanished without ceremony, dissolving like mist under a morning sun, leaving nothing but the familiar, calloused texture of his own skin. He curled his fingers inward. Sinew pulled taut beneath the surface. The tape measure weighed heavily in his pocket, its brass casing polished smooth by years of friction. He didn’t need it. He knew the dimensions of this counter by heart. He knew the distance to the door. He knew the exact spot where the floorboard groaned if you stepped on it with your left foot.

The customer was a woman in her sixties, wearing a beige coat and carrying a canvas tote bag. She stopped just inside the door, her eyes scanning the room. She looked at the shelves. She looked at the window. Then she looked at Steve. Her expression shifted—a flicker of recognition, quickly masked by a practiced neutrality. Steve recognized the mask. He'd worn it himself, in the mirror, every morning for the past week. The face you put on when you've been made public property and you're trying to pretend you're still a person.

But she didn’t look at his face. She looked at the display of hammers on the wall to his left. She walked toward it, her heels clicking softly on the polished concrete floor. Steve exhaled. He stepped out from behind the counter. He didn’t rush. He walked at a normal pace, deliberate and open-handed, not the guarded stride of a salesman, nor the shrinking gait of a victim.

The woman turned. She smiled, a small, polite smile that felt like a blanket draped over something fragile. "Good morning. I'm looking for a claw hammer. The 16-ounce. Do you carry Estwing?" She said it carefully, the way you might talk to a spooked animal. Not unkindly. But with a caution that told him she knew exactly what he was capable of unraveling.

Steve felt a surge of something—humiliation, pride, both so tightly wound he couldn't separate them. But he swallowed it down. He didn't let it show. He nodded toward the display. "Aisle three. Top shelf. We've got the direct drop forged. Red handle."

"Thank you," she said. She turned and walked away, but not before glancing back at him once, a quick, sympathetic flick of the eyes that confirmed what he already knew: the video had followed him home.

She thanked him, pivoted on her heel, and headed out.

Steve stood there for a moment, listening to the sound of her footsteps fading. He looked at Owen.

Owen was standing near the checkout register, which was a refurbished POS system that Mei-Lin had set up, complete with a barcode scanner and a receipt printer that chirped happily every time it printed. Owen was wearing a t-shirt and jeans, his hair messy, his pinky finger crooked as always. He was holding a tablet, scrolling through inventory numbers, but he had stopped scrolling. He was watching Steve. His expression was neutral, but his eyes were bright.

"That was easy," Owen said.

"It was," Steve said.

"She didn’t even know you," Owen said. "She didn’t care about the video. She just wanted a hammer."

"I know," Steve said.

That was the thing. The world hadn’t ended. The internet had moved on. The video of Steve breaking down in the parking lot had burned itself out, consumed by newer, louder disasters, and the people of Toledo had gone back to their lives, buying their hammers and their nails and their paint, and Steve Roberts had gone back to his store, smaller and quieter and real.

The door chimed again. This time it was Doug. He walked in wearing his old flannel shirt and a hard hat that he didn’t take off, even indoors. He carried a paper bag from the diner down the street, the kind of bag that leaked grease onto his fingers. He set it on the counter and looked around the store, his eyes lingering on the new window, the new shelves, the new sign above the door that read Roberts & Co. in letters that were bold and black and unapologetic.

"You did good," Doug said. He didn’t look at Steve. He looked at the ceiling. "Ceiling’s solid. I checked it myself. Those plates hold. I welded them myself. You didn’t have to worry about that."

"I didn't," Steve said.

Doug opened the bag and pulled out a coffee cup. He took a sip. He grimaced. "They put sugar in this. Like it’s a dessert. I hate it."

"It’s probably fine," Steve said.

"It’s sweet," Doug said. "Like a child. But not in a good way. In a annoying way." He paused. He looked at Steve. "You’re tired."

His gaze dropped to his palms, resting inert against his knees, while his eyelids weighed like lead curtains. The rest of him felt hewn from granite and dragged through grit. Four hours of sleep lay behind him, spent calibrating display lights, spacing bulbs with obsessive precision, angling beams to cast shadows just so. He did it because he could. Because he needed to command something, even if it was merely the trajectory of a single filament.

"I am," Steve said.

"Go home," Doug said. "Owen can handle the morning. I’ll stay. I like it here. It’s quiet. Quiet is good."

Steve’s gaze drifted toward the corner, catching Owen in the dim light. His son offered a loose shrug, a gesture of practiced ease. "I can handle it," he said. "I know where everything is."

Steve nodded. He didn’t argue. He didn’t give a speech. He just turned and walked toward the back office, the one that was now just a closet with a desk and a chair and a filing cabinet that was empty except for the original blueprints, the hand-drawn ones Doug had found, rolled up and tied with a string. He didn’t look at them. He didn’t need to. He knew what was in them. He knew the shape of the building. He knew the limits of its bones.

He stepped out into the November chill, under a slate-gray sky that seemed determined to withhold its snow. The wind bit at his face as he crossed the lot toward his Ford F-150, that rusted relic held together by duct tape and stubbornness. He slid behind the wheel, the seat vibrating against his spine as the engine caught, a familiar rhythm that grounded him before he pulled away from the curb.

He kept his phone in his pocket, a dead weight against his thigh, and watched the exhaust pipe shudder. Steam curled upward, dissolving into the gray Toledo morning, while the world around him continued its slow, indifferent rotation. His thoughts were anchored to the store, to the woman who needed a hammer and the man who needed to be useful. Doug stood behind the counter, nursing bad coffee and pretending to inspect the shelves, while Owen sat in the corner, scrolling through numbers with his pinky finger crooked, his eyes bright with a calculation Steve couldn’t quite read.

He thought about Marla. She was still in Columbus. She had sent a text two days ago—“I’m coming home this weekend. Don’t cook.”—and he had stared at it for a long time, his thumb hovering over the screen, unsure of what to type. He hadn’t typed anything. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know if he had earned the right to speak to her yet. But he knew she was coming. And that was enough.

He let the silence wrap around him, heavy and warm and familiar, and for the first time in months, he didn’t try to fill it with numbers. The engine hummed a low, steady note against the chassis, a vibration he could feel in his teeth rather than hear, grounding him in the physical reality of the truck and the dust-choked air. He didn’t need to calculate the load or measure the distance to know he was exactly where he needed to be.

Chapter 14

The conference room at the Torrid Home regional office smelled of expensive leather and cold air conditioning, a scent that Steve had come to associate with the precise moment his life stopped making sense. He sat at the far end of a table that cost more than his first car, his hands folded on the polished surface to keep them from trembling. Across from him sat Piper Bellamy, twenty-nine years old, wearing a blazer that fit too perfectly and a smile that looked like it had been calibrated by the same algorithms she presumably used to optimize inventory turnover.

She tapped a tablet screen. The sound was sharp, like a bone breaking.

"Steve," she said. "Let's talk about liquidation."

He didn't look at her. He looked at the window behind her, which overlooked the Columbus skyline. It was gray out there. Everything was gray lately. The sky, the pavement, the email notifications that pinged in his pocket with increasing desperation. He kept checking them. Fourteen times a day. He couldn't stop. It was a tic, like blinking, like breathing.

"Liquidation," he repeated. The word tasted like copper.

"Torrid Home doesn't have the capital to fund a full rebuild of a Class-B big-box structure in the Midwest," Piper said. Her voice was upbeat, algorithmic, the voice of someone who had never had to explain why a roof had fallen on her father. "The insurance payout covers the demolition and the debris removal. That's it. There's no contingency fund for reconstruction. Not for this size of asset."

Steve felt a coldness spread through his chest, starting at his sternum and moving outward to his fingertips. He willed his hands to stay still. He thought about the store. The way the light used to hit the dust motes in aisle four in the late afternoon, creating this golden haze that made the screws and nails and washers look like treasure. He thought about Doug, sixty-two years old, who had been stocking shelves since 1981, who knew the weight of every box and the price of every bolt. He thought about Owen, who had filmed him crying in the parking lot, who was probably watching the video right now, laughing or crying or doing something worse—something indifferent.

"You're telling me," Steve said, his voice sounding thin and distant, "that you're going to let the building sit there. Broken. Until it falls down completely?"

"We're telling you," Piper corrected gently, "that the building is a total loss. And that you have a choice. You can take the insurance money, sign over the land to the developer—there's a bid on the table already, residential mixed-use—and walk away with enough to retire comfortably. Or you can try to rebuild it yourself, with your own money, which you don't have, and hope that Torrid Home changes its mind about funding a project that has a negative ROI before it even breaks ground."

She paused. She let the silence hang in the air, heavy and suffocating. Steve could hear the hum of the refrigerator in the corner, the low thrum of the HVAC system, the sound of his own heart beating against his ribs. He counted the beats. One. Two. Three. He stopped when he reached twelve.

"And the third option?" he asked.

"There is no third option, Steve."

"Yes, there is." He looked up at her then. Really looked at her. He saw the slight tremor in her left hand, the way her eyes darted to the door every few seconds, as if she were expecting someone to burst in and tell her she wasn't allowed to be there. He saw the vulnerability she was trying to hide behind the blazer and the tablet and the confident posture. She was scared. She was terrified. And she was trying to prove that her methodology worked, that the numbers could save her, even when the numbers said everyone should die.

"What's the third option?" he asked again.

Piper sighed. It was a small sound, almost imperceptible. "You can fight it. You can hire a lawyer. You can appeal the assessment. But the assessment is based on structural engineering reports, Steve. The roof is gone. The walls are compromised. The electrical system is fried. The numbers are correct. They're not wrong. They're just… cruel."

Steve stood up. His legs felt shaky, but he forced them to hold him. He walked to the window and looked out at the gray city. He thought about the store. He thought about the load-bearing walls, the ones his dad had built with his own hands, the ones that had held up the roof for forty years. He thought about the way the building had exhaled when the roof collapsed, like a beast curling into sleep. He thought about the silence that followed.

"I'm not signing anything," he said.

"Steve," Piper said, her voice softening. "Please. Don't make this harder than it has to be. You're grieving. I get it. But grief doesn't pay contractors."

Steve turned to face her. He felt a sudden surge of anger, hot and bright and terrifying. He wanted to scream. He wanted to throw the tablet through the window. He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she admitted that the numbers were wrong, that there was a way to fix things, that if you just tried hard enough, you could put the pieces back together.

But he didn't. He just stood there, breathing hard, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.

"You're right," he said finally. "The numbers are correct."

Piper exhaled. Relief washed over her face, visible and immediate.

"But," Steve continued, "they don't matter."

"What?"

"The numbers. They don't matter. Because I'm not doing this for the numbers. I'm doing this because it's mine. Because my dad built it. Because my son needs to see me try. Because…" He trailed off. He couldn't say it. He couldn't say I didn't mean to lose everything. He couldn't say I'm afraid I'm already gone.

"Because what?" Piper asked.

Steve looked down at his hands. They were still shaking. He put them in his pockets.

"Nothing," he said. "Just… leave me alone."

He walked out of the conference room. He didn't look back. He walked down the hallway, past the glass walls and the minimalist decor and the smell of expensive leather, and he stepped into the elevator. The doors closed behind him. The elevator descended. Steve leaned his head against the cool metal wall and closed his eyes.

He thought about the store. He thought about the roof. He thought about the way the light used to hit the dust motes in aisle four. He thought about Doug. He thought about Owen.

And then he thought about the third option. The one Piper hadn't mentioned. The one that didn't have a name. The one that required him to do something he hadn't done since he was a kid helping his dad in the garage: to build something with his own hands. To fix something broken. To see if it could hold weight again.

The elevator dinged. The doors opened. Steve stepped out into the lobby. He walked out the front door and into the gray afternoon. He walked to his truck. He got in. He started the engine. He sat there for a long time, listening to the idle, watching the rain begin to fall.

Then he drove home.