Blueprints and Moonlight

Sammi Winston was thirty-three years old and had planned forty-one weddings, and she would tell anyone who stood still long enough that none of them had prepared her for the Holloway House job.

The mansion sat at the end of a gravel lane on the Maine coast, all widow's walks and rotting gingerbread trim, and the owner wanted it turned into an upscale wedding venue in three months. Three months! For a house that had been quietly falling down since the McKinley era! Sammi had said so, repeatedly, and the owner had said things like "ambitious timeline" and "disruption budget," which are the two phrases in the English language Sammi hated most.

She pulled her Corolla into the drive at dusk, because that was when she always came, because the day crew left at five and the night crew arrived at dusk and nobody at Holloway House ever seemed to overlap. She had started keeping a list of things that didn't add up about this site. The list was getting long.

For one thing, the night crew was already working. She could hear them before she saw them. Somebody was up on the porch roof replacing balusters in the last of the light, moving along the edge like the drop was a flat sidewalk. That was Hank. She'd know his silhouette anywhere now, which was a thought she tried not to examine too closely.

He came down the ladder without looking at it. Sammi had watched him do a lot of things without looking at them. He carried lumber up flights of stairs like it weighed nothing. He could set a plane blade by feel in the dark. And when the moon came out from behind clouds, and she had noticed this exactly once and then refused to notice it again, his skin seemed to catch the light wrong. Shimmer was the word that came to mind, and she hated the word, and she kept it on the list anyway.

She stood at the bottom of the ladder with her clipboard and did not say anything, because what would she even say? Excuse me, are you made of moonlight? He'd call her a city idiot, and he'd be right.

"Evening," Hank said, touching two fingers to his brow as he passed. He always did that, like something out of an old movie. He looked thirty-four, the crew said, and nobody knew anything else about him, which around here apparently passed for a normal biography.

"Evening," she said back, and wrote balusters on her list, underlined twice.

***

The meeting was at nine the next morning, in the empty ballroom with tarps on the windows, and it went exactly as badly as meetings at Holloway House go.

"Schedule's tightened," the owner said, a man named Prescott who wore one gold watch and checked it while other people were talking. "We're moving the venue date up a week."

Sammi put her coffee down very slowly. "The date's moved up? A week?"

"A week. The Kendricks booked the opening and they're paying a premium, so the house needs to be done. All of it."

"A week. Prescott, the east wing doesn't have a roof. It has an idea of a roof. It has roof-adjacent tarpaulins!"

"That's why we hired your firm. And the night crew is earning their money, I'll say that."

Sammi took a breath, the kind her sister called her "before-somebody-gets-fired breath." The night crew was indeed earning their money. The night crew, in fact, was the only reason this project was even theoretically possible, and Sammi had never once seen more than three of them, and she had begun to suspect the night crew was mostly one man named Hank who did the work of nine. She did not say this. She said she'd revise the schedule, in a voice like a slammed door, and she gathered her binders and walked out into the noon sun furious enough to fog glass.

She marched around the corner of the carriage house and walked directly into what felt like a warm brick wall, except the warm brick wall caught her by both shoulders and set her back on her feet like she weighed nothing at all.

"Whoa, there," Hank said. "You okay?"

"I'm fine! I'm fine, I just, schedules, and Prescott, and the east wing doesn't have a roof, in case anyone was wondering!"

"I heard about the week," he said. "Bad news."

"It's impossible news. It's news from a universe where carpentry happens by wishful thinking." She realized she was still gripping his forearms, or he was still gripping her shoulders, and they were standing closer than two people who had exchanged maybe four hundred words in five weeks ought to stand. She stepped back. He let go immediately, hands up, all apology.

"Tea?" he said, and held up a paper cup like evidence. "Chamomile. You looked like you were running on coffee and nerves, so I asked the delivery guy to grab one."

Nobody had ever brought Sammi tea on a job site. She took the cup anyway, because her hands wanted something to do and the universe had apparently decided to hand her a small warm surprise. "You did that on purpose?"

"Don't make it a thing." He shrugged. "Unless it's the wrong tea, in which case I'll drink it."

"It's not the wrong tea. There's barely another person on site after dark, which, can we talk about that? Where is your crew, anyway? I've met Kenji and the Rosenberg brothers. That's four. I have a feeling you're doing the work of about six more people, and before you say anything, the ledger doesn't lie, I do the ledger."

Hank looked at her the way he sometimes did, like he was deciding how much of a thing to say out loud. "The crew's around," he said. "They come and go. Night work, you know how it is."

"I don't, actually. I sleep at night like a normal person, which is apparently a full-time job I'm bad at." She blew on the tea. It was good tea. That annoyed her slightly, for reasons she couldn't name.

***

The porch was the one finished thing at Holloway House, rebuilt and sanded and polyurethaned to a soft glow, and Hank nodded at it and said "sit a minute" the way a person offers you the last cookie. Sammi sat. She was furious and the fury needed somewhere to go and apparently it was going to go into sitting on a porch with a carpenter.

The sun was going down over the water, doing its whole orange-and-purple production, the way it did here every single evening without a permit or a deadline.

"Feel that rail," Hank said, sitting on the top step below her, forearm resting on the wood. "Go on. Feel it."

She ran her palm along it. Smooth as silk, warm from the day. "Okay. It's very nice?"

"Five weeks ago that was a rotten plank full of carpenter ants. I could've rushed it. Slapped a new board in, called it done, you'd never know till it splintered under some bride's uncle with a drink in his hand." He ran a thumb along the grain, and Sammi noticed he always touched wood like it was a cat, with the grain and never against. "Grain tells you how fast to go. Fight it, you get tearout. Follow it, it does half your work for you."

"That's very poetic for a man who told me my punch list was 'cute.'"

"Your punch list was cute. Two hundred items, half of them 'flaking paint on mystery outbuilding.' What even is the mystery outbuilding, Sammi?"

"I don't know. Nobody knows. That's why it's mysterious." She was laughing, she realized, which was not the plan. The tea was chamomile and honey and she had not asked for it and she was drinking it anyway.

The light went orange, then pink, then that grey-violet that happens right before the stars. And Hank, sitting on the step below her, went quiet in a way she'd learned to recognize. She glanced over.

He was looking at the sky, at the first stars coming out, and his face had something on it she'd only seen once before, the day she'd watched him carry a window sash up three flights in the dark. A kind of attention. A kind of waiting.

"You do that a lot," she said. "Go quiet when the sun goes down."

"Old habit," he said.

"Everything about you is old habits. Two fingers to the brow. Working by feel. You plane a board like you learned before electricity, and I mean that as a genuine question, Hank, did you learn carpentry before electricity?"

He laughed, and the laugh was warm and low and it did something unreasonable to the back of her neck. "Family trade," he said. "Long family trade."

"How long?"

"Long," he said, and would not say more, and Sammi Winston, who had never in her adult life let an unanswered question stand, found herself letting this one stand. Because the stars were fully out now, and her list of things that didn't add up had just grown a page, and none of it, not one item on it, explained why she was in no hurry at all to get off this porch.

"More tea?" he asked.

"There's only one cup."

"There's a thermos in my truck," he said, and got up before she could answer, and she watched him go and thought, not for the first time, that whatever Hank was, he was the only thing on this job site that was ahead of schedule.

The plumbing disaster happened on a Tuesday, because disasters always know the schedule.

Sammi was in the east wing at five in the evening checking the measurements for the arbor trellis when a pipe somewhere above her head decided it had been a Victorian pipe long enough. There was a groan in the walls, a sound like the house clearing its throat, and then a burst joint opened up over what was supposed to be the bridal suite and turned it into a waterfall exhibit.

"NO. No no no." Sammi stood in the doorway and watched three months of drywall scheduling drip onto a tarp. "The Kendricks are paying a premium. Prescott is going to check his watch at me for a solid hour."

She called the day crew foreman, who had already left at five, because of course he had. She called a plumber, who said Thursday. She said Thursday doesn't work, and he laughed at her, which was fair. So she did the only thing left. She found the shutoff valve, which took forty minutes and cost her one scraped knuckle and a patch of elbow skin, and then she spent an hour hauling wet tarps and mopping while the light died around her.

By the time the floor was mostly dry she was soaked to the knees, filthy, and it was fully dark. The day crew's work lights were long gone. And that was when she noticed she wasn't doing it alone.

There was a bucket beside her that hadn't been there before. A stack of dry rags. And a shape in the doorway she knew by now from the way it moved, careful around the grain of everything.

"Hank. Oh my god, you startled me. How long have you been standing there?"

"Came when I heard the water." He stepped in and handed her the bucket without being asked. "Which valve did you close?"

"The one behind the rotten panel, which I now own a piece of."

"That's the wrong one. Well. It's not wrong, it's just half the house." He crouched by the wall and did something she couldn't see, and the groaning in the pipes faded to nothing. "There. Now it's done."

"Thank you. Really. I was about to write a strongly worded note to a pipe."

"You're soaked."

"I'm aware. I'm a wedding planner, not a plumber, and tonight I was bad at both." She wrung out her sleeve over the bucket and when she looked up, she saw it.

His hands were glowing.

Not brightly. Not like a flashlight. More like the last warmth of a coal, a soft silver along his knuckles and the backs of his fingers, enough that she could see the lines of his palms in a room where she could see nothing else. He reached for the rags and the glow moved with him, and Sammi stood very still and did not scream, mostly because her voice had left to file a permit.

"You're..." she started, and stopped, because there were about nine sentences competing to come out first.

Hank looked at his own hands the way a man checks his fly. Then he closed them into fists and the light went out, and the room was black again, and Sammi's heart was doing something architectural.

"Okay," she said, once her mouth worked. "Okay. So. Either I have a head injury from that pipe, or your hands just did a thing, and I would very much like to rule out the head injury. Please tell me it's the hands."

He didn't answer right away. She heard him set the bucket down.

"Can we go outside?" he said. "I see better out there. And I'd rather not have this talk in a wet room."

***

They sat on the porch steps again, in the same spots as before, like seats assigned by some invisible teacher. The stars were out in force. Hank held his hands loose in his lap and let them glow, and up close it was easier to see it wasn't just his hands. It was under his skin, faint, like moonlight through milk.

"So," Sammi said. "Moon-touched. That's a real thing, that's not just a name you gave yourself to be mysterious, which by the way, mission accomplished."

"It's real." He turned his palm over. The light pooled there. "It's a family thing. A long line. We live by night. We're made for night. The sun isn't deadly to us, exactly, it's just wrong. Like