WRONG SIDE OF THE FAMILY
Chapter Two: Thin Walls
The restaurant client approved the terracotta palette on Tuesday morning with the single word perfect, which meant Erin had been right about what they wanted since week two and had spent three additional weeks convincing them of it. This was, she had learned, the nature of client work: you arrived at the right place twice, once on your own, once when the client arrived there too.
She was in the garden with her coffee when the approval email came through, and she made a small sound of satisfaction that was mostly for herself, and then became aware that Connor was standing at the kitchen window, watching.
He raised his mug.
She raised her coffee.
It was not communication, exactly. But it was something, and it travelled through the glass and the morning air and landed somewhere under her ribs with more weight than a mug lift should have carried.
* * *
The second week established its own patterns.
Sarah and David had lives, work and friends and the particular social calendar of two people constructing a shared existence. They were not always in the house. This was something Erin hadn't fully considered when she'd agreed to the summer: there were days when it was only her and Connor in the craftsman on Maple Street, moving around each other in the careful way of two people who had agreed on a schedule but not on anything larger.
Connor worked at his desk until noon, then often moved to the living room or garden, infrastructure drawings, phone calls, the occasional video conference where she could hear the measured pace of his voice through the wall without making out the words. He ran in the mornings before she came down; she knew this because she'd once looked out the window at six fifteen and seen him coming up the garden path in running kit, the fabric of his shirt clinging damp to his chest, and she had looked away quickly for reasons she declined to examine.
He read in the evenings, the same chair in the corner of the living room, the same lamp, different books each time. She noticed the books because she was a person who noticed books, the way the spines faced out, the worn quality of some of them, the fact that he turned actual pages rather than reading on a device.
"What are you reading?" she asked, Wednesday evening, nine o'clock, her parents out at a dinner, the silence in the house the kind that had actual weight to it.
Connor looked up. Held the spine toward her. "Engineering history. The Great Bridge. Brooklyn. The Roebling story."
"Pleasure or work?"
"Both. The politics of large infrastructure projects are instructive." He glanced at her book. "What are you reading?"
She held hers up. "Normal People."
Something crossed his face, interest sharpening. "Good?"
"Devastating. I've read it before. It doesn't get less devastating."
"Why read it again, then?"
"Because the devastating parts are the good parts," she said, and watched him consider this seriously, the way he seemed to consider everything.
"Fair," he said, and went back to his book.
They read on opposite ends of the living room for two hours, the most companionable thing they had done all summer. When she went to bed at eleven, she realised she had stopped counting days somewhere in the last hour, and found this mildly alarming, the way you might find it alarming to notice you'd stopped locking a door out of habit rather than decision.
* * *
On Friday it rained.
Not the light Seattle mist everyone expected: proper rain, the kind that drummed the garden and ran in sheets down the windows. Erin was at the island with her laptop and a second coffee when Connor came down at nine to find he could not, as planned, take his work outside.
He stood at the window a moment, watching the rain.
"I had a site visit. This morning." He turned from the glass. "He'll postpone."
"You could still go. It's just rain."
"I could," he said. "Or I could acknowledge that standing in active rain to study drainage specifications is less useful than studying them from a desk."
"Very sound reasoning."
"I'm a sound reasoner."
He made toast and brought his drawings to the dining table, the largest flat surface in the house, which he had apparently been waiting for an excuse to use. She watched him unroll them with the care of a man handling something that had cost real time, weighting the corners with two mugs, a phone, the small pot of ceremonial honey Sarah had left there for reasons more aesthetic than practical.
"Does the honey bother you? On the drawings."
He looked at it. "It's not touching them."
"It's close."
"It's fine. The honey isn't moving."
She went back to her laptop. The rain kept moving against the glass. After a while she got up for more coffee and asked, because it seemed rude not to, whether he wanted some, and he said yes, and she made two cups and brought his over and set it beside him without being asked twice.
He was bent over the drawing, the line of his back curved in concentration, forearms braced on the table, and she set the mug down and he said thanks without looking up, and she went back to her stool and thought about palettes and negative space and the fact that she was absolutely, completely not thinking about the line of his back, or the way his sleeves were pushed up, or the faint vein along his forearm where he'd braced his weight.
"The drainage issue," he said, later.
"Yes."
"The contractor thinks we can redirect the overflow channel by eight metres without affecting the foundation gradient." He looked up. "He's wrong. Account for the soil saturation rate over forty years, and the original placement is more efficient."
She looked at him. "How do you know I can follow that?"
He blinked, something in the quality of his attention shifting, from the drawing into the room, into her. "Sorry. Thinking out loud."
"No, I mean it was interesting. Explain the saturation thing?"
He studied her, as if checking whether this was genuine.
"It's not exciting," he said.
"I'm a designer. I spend my days thinking about how materials behave in space over time. It's not that different."
Another beat. Then he turned the drawing to face her, the measurements and gradients and precise notation, and explained the saturation rate, the channel, the forty year model, the way she imagined he'd explain it to a colleague: directly, no softening, assuming she would follow or ask when she didn't.
She followed. Mostly. She asked twice. Each time he answered without impatience, and something in her chest turned over, slow and warm.
He doesn't simplify for me, she thought. I should stop noticing things about him.
"He'll realise when he models it out," Connor said, rolling the drawing back. "He's competent. He'll see it."
"But you'll be there to say you told him."
The corner of his mouth. "I won't say it. I'll just not be surprised."
"Subtle difference."
"Very subtle," he agreed, and she felt the agreement land somewhere low in her stomach, entirely out of proportion to the subject of drainage channels.
The rain had not let up. It was noon and they had been at the table together for three hours, and she could not decide whether this was the worst possible development of the summer or the only good thing in it.
* * *
That evening Sarah and David came home with takeaway, and they ate in front of a documentary David had been recommending for two weeks, which turned out to be about the construction of the Erie Canal. At a critical juncture involving an engineering miscalculation, Connor said "they had to re-excavate the entire eastern section" a half second before the narrator did, and David looked delighted.
"Erin and Connor were discussing drainage today," Sarah said, because she noticed everything.
"You have more in common than you think," she added, with the particular satisfaction of a woman whose plan was working.
Later, quietly, so only Connor could hear: "The drainage approach was right, by the way."
He didn't look at her. But the corner of his mouth did the thing.
"I know," he said, and the words settled against her skin like a hand she hadn't asked for and didn't want to stop feeling.
* * *
Three weeks in, David took Sarah to Bainbridge for the weekend, a ferry trip planned since spring.
"We'll be back Sunday evening," Sarah said Friday morning, as though this required announcement. "You'll be fine."
"We're twenty eight and twenty three," Connor said. "We've managed before."
They left at ten. The house went very quiet.
"Do you want to do something?" Erin asked, once the toast was made and the kitchen had settled into its new, smaller shape. "Today."
He looked at her, something considering in his gaze. "What did you have in mind?"
"I don't know. Walk. There's the waterfront." A beat. "If you're not working."
"I'm not working today." A pause. "The waterfront would be good."
They walked forty minutes and talked, not about family, not about schedules, but about work the way two people talk when both are genuinely interested in what the other does. She asked about the tunnel, the compressed air technique, the way they kept the pressure stable boring through Seattle's geological layers. He explained it the way he'd explained the drainage, directly, expecting her to follow.
She told him about the restaurant rebrand, a tech identity project for a company that wanted to look disruptive but trustworthy, a brief she described with appropriate scepticism.
"Disruptive but trustworthy is a contradiction in terms," he said.
"Welcome to tech branding."
The waterfront was beautiful the way Seattle managed, practical and striking, the view toward the islands, a ferry making its slow crossing in the middle distance.
"Did you know," Connor said, looking at the water, "the original ferry infrastructure here was rebuilt three times in the twentieth century. The first two miscalculated the tidal variation."
"Did they."
"The third used a flexible mooring system. Still in use. Seventy years and counting."
"That's a long time to get something right."
He looked at her then, not the weather reading look, something more direct, something that made her skin prickle under her sleeves despite the cool air.
"Yes," he said. "It is."
They stood at the railing a long while, the ferry shrinking, and she thought about flexible moorings and what it took to build something that lasted.
That evening they cooked together, pasta, simple, because neither wanted a project. He chopped while she made the sauce, and they moved around each other in the kitchen with an ease she noticed and then forced herself to stop noticing, because noticing it felt dangerous, the way standing too close to a ledge felt dangerous even when you had no intention of jumping.
They ate at the island, not the table built for four.
"Tell me something else about the tunnel," she said. "The thing you'd tell someone who wasn't being polite about it."
He considered the question seriously. "The geological survey mapped seventeen distinct strata. The boring machine adjusts its pressure and speed based on each one. It reads the ground as it goes." A pause. "That's what I find most interesting. It's not a fixed plan. It's a plan that adjusts to what it finds."
She looked at him, and something in her chest felt like it was being read the same way, slowly, carefully, adjusting to what it found.
"That's a good way to work," she said.
"It's the only way that works."
They finished. She washed, he dried, the sound of it domestic and easy, and she was doing a very disciplined job of not thinking about anything except clean plates and the warmth radiating off his arm where it brushed hers at the sink.
"Good night, Erin," he said, at the foot of the stairs.
"Good night."
She lay in the dark of the blue room and listened to the house settle, thinking about boring machines reading the ground as they went, adjusting to what they found, and about the particular heat that had pooled low in her belly every time his voice had dropped a register that evening, and about how badly, how specifically, she wanted his hands on her instead of a dish towel.
This is fine, she told herself.
The lavender on the windowsill sat there, entirely unconvincing, and for the first time she thought it might be laughing at her.