Friday afternoon, Knox takes me to the back lot.
The first two houses are framed. Wooden skeletons against the fall sky. Two-by-fours and plywood, the bones of homes that will have walls and windows and people inside them. Vaughn and Robin's house on the left, Ash and Jason's on the right, there if Ash ever decides to move to the pride, but for now they can split their time between the houses. Knox wanted them to have a place of their own here too. The shapes are clear now. You can see where the kitchens will be, where the bedrooms will face, where the porches will look out at the fire pit in the center.
"Framing's ahead of schedule," Knox says. "Dave's got a good crew."
"When do they start on three, four, and five?"
"Once one and two are under roof. Another month." He looks at me. "The bookshelves will add a week to house five."
"I know."
"Worth it?"
"Every day."
Knox nods. We stand there in the October afternoon, looking at the beginning of something. Two houses with bones. Three more in the ground. A fire pit that will have string lights because Robin declared them non-negotiable and nobody argues with Robin about aesthetics.
"He's good for you," Knox says.
I don't ask who. "Yeah."
"You're different. Since he came."
"Different how?"
"You talk more. You're in the room instead of next to it." Knox is quiet for a moment, the alpha quiet, the kind that has weight. "You were always the patient one. The one who watched and waited and didn't need anything from anyone. I used to think that was strength. Now I think it was just lonely."
"Both things."
"Yeah. Both things." He claps my shoulder. "The apartment soon?"
"Soon."
"The house will be ready in four months. Give or take."
"He'll come to it in his own time."
"I know." Knox looks at the framed houses, the cleared land, the sky. "But I've got a feeling about that kid. He reads books like he's building a home inside them. Eventually he's going to want one made of wood."
I look at the five acres. The bones. The beginning.
Knox is right. He usually is.
Chapter 22
Devin
The apartment on Birch Street is a studio. Four hundred square feet. One room that's everything: bedroom, living room, the life I'm about to start. The kitchen has a two-burner stove and a counter barely wide enough for a cutting board and a window above the sink that looks out at the building next door's brick wall, which isn't scenic but is mine.
The landlord, Mrs. Zillmann, a small woman with reading glasses on a chain who looked at my application and said "you work for Robin at the café? Good. Robin's good people," gave me the walk-through yesterday. Clean, freshly painted, the carpet new enough to still smell like glue. A door that locks from the inside. A closet that's mine. A bathroom that's mine.
Four hundred square feet and every inch of it mine.
We're standing outside now. Silas and me. The lease is in my hand, two pages, printed, the dotted line waiting. Mrs. Zillmann is inside at the kitchen counter with a pen and a folder and the patience of a woman who's rented apartments to young people before and knows they sometimes need a minute.
Silas has been quiet the whole walk over. Not the comfortable quiet. Not the library quiet or the reading quiet or the "we don't need to talk because we already know" quiet. A different kind. Loaded. The kind that means he's building a sentence and hasn't finished constructing it yet.
"It's a good space," I say, because someone needs to talk. "Small, but I don't need much. The kitchen has a window. I was thinking herbs on the sill."