Chapter 1: The Old Workshop
The plane of wood was smooth under Drake’s palm, the sanding block moving in slow, deliberate arcs. Each pass sent a fine powder into the beams of sunlight cutting through the cracked workshop skylights. It smelled like his childhood in here—raw pine, linseed oil, the ghost of his father’s sweat and leather apron. He’d spent the morning clearing out the cobwebs and the melancholy, filling a dumpster with mouse-chewn lumber and outdated hardware catalogs from the nineties. Now, he was just trying to remember how the wood felt when it wasn’t trying to fight you.
His shoulders ached. A good ache. The city had left him with a different kind of tension, one that sat in his jaw and behind his eyes. Here, the pain was in his muscles, earned and honest. He straightened, rolling his neck, and surveyed the space. His space now. The tools hung on the pegboard just where the old man had left them, a dusty monument to order. He hadn’t moved a single one.
A laugh drifted through the open double doors, where the late afternoon light flooded the gravel drive.
It was a sound he knew in his bones. A bright, warm ribbon of noise that used to echo across the Hartley’s backyard, over the fence, right into his bedroom window. He went very still, the sanding block frozen in his hand.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel, hesitant. A shadow fell across the threshold.
He turned.
Mandy stood there, one hand braced against the doorframe as if testing its solidity. The sun lit her from behind, turning the loose strands of her golden-blonde hair into a frizzy halo. It was piled in that messy bun she’d always worn. She had a smudge of what looked like blue paint on her forearm. Her eyes, the color of summer lake water, were wide, taking him in.
“Hey, stranger,” she said. Her voice was softer than he remembered, but the smile was the same. A little hesitant at the edges.
“Mandy.” His own voice came out rough, sawdust-dry. He set the block down, wiping his hands on his jeans. He felt too big suddenly, all clumsy limbs in the quiet shop. “I was… I was gonna call. Once I got things in order.”
“I heard you were back. Small town.” She took a step inside, her gaze sweeping over the workbenches, the stacked lumber, the old radio silent on its shelf. “Looks just the same.”
“Feels it,” he said. He couldn’t stop looking at her. The years had settled on her gently. The freckles were still there across the bridge of her nose. She wore a simple cotton dress, faded blue, and sandals. She looked like home. “You look good, Mandy.”
“Thanks.” She wrapped her arms around herself, a self-conscious gesture that felt new. “You too. City life agreed with you.”
He let out a short, breathy laugh. “It didn’t, actually. That’s why I’m here.”
“Oh.” Her eyebrows lifted slightly. She didn’t press. She never had. That was her way. “Well. Welcome back.”
Silence pooled between them, filled only with the distant buzz of a lawnmower somewhere down the road. It was a thick, complicated silence. It held every summer night spent on her porch swing, every note passed in high school hallways, every stupid, fearless dream they’d whispered about leaving this place. It held the last time he’d seen her, at his father’s funeral three years ago, when he’d been too gutted to speak and she’d just squeezed his hand, her eyes full of a shared grief he hadn’t known how to accept.
He’d left a week later. He hadn’t called.
“So you’re really doing it?” she asked, finally walking over to run her fingers along the edge of the workbench he’d just been sanding. “Fixing the place up?”
“Trying. Remembering how he did things.” He leaned back against the bench, watching her. “It’s slow.”
“I like slow,” she said, almost to herself. Then she looked up. “Leo—my boyfriend—he’s all about fast. Fast internet, fast cars, fast-track career in Elgin.” She said it casually, but there was a flatness to the words, like she was reciting a fact from a textbook.
Leo. The name landed in the space between them, a stone in a still pond. He’d heard about him, of course. From his mother’s carefully neutral updates. Mandy’s seeing that Garrison boy. He manages the farm supply store. Seems nice.
“Yeah?” Drake said, because he had to say something.
“Yeah. He’s talking about buying a place. A new build, out on the ridge.” She was studying the wood grain under her fingertips, avoiding his eyes. “He hates old houses. Says they’re money pits.”
Drake glanced around the workshop, this beautiful, crumbling money pit full of his father’s soul. “Guess they are.”
Her eyes met his then, and he saw a flicker of the old Mandy, the one who understood him without words. “Some things are worth the pit, Drake.”
The air in the workshop changed. It became heavier, charged with all the things they weren’t saying. He could see the pulse in her throat, quick and light. He wanted to ask her a hundred questions. Are you happy? Does he make you laugh like you used to laugh? Does he know how you take your coffee, that you’re terrified of horseflies, that you read the last page of a book first?
He didn’t ask any of them.
“How’s the kindergarten terror squad?” he asked instead, forcing a lighter tone.
Her face lit up, the tension breaking. “They’re monsters. I love them. Today, Billy Crenshaw tried to eat a glue stick because he said it smelled like bananas.” She launched into a story, her hands moving, her smile becoming more real. He listened, soaking in the sound of her, the way her nose crinkled when she laughed.
He found himself smiling too, a real one, for the first time in months. This was easier. This was the shore of their past, a place they could both stand on without drowning.
She stayed for half an hour, talking about her kids, the town gossip, her grandmother’s rosebushes that were taking over her cottage. He told her about the city, about the noise and the feeling of being constantly anonymous, about the breakup that had been less a explosion and more a slow, cold leak until nothing was left. He didn’t mention how, in the middle of it all, his mind would drift to the silence of these hills, or the specific quiet of this workshop. Or of her.
Finally, she glanced at the watch on her wrist—a delicate silver thing that looked out of place. “I should go. Leo’s picking me up for dinner at six.”
“Right.” He pushed off from the bench. “It was really good to see you, Mandy.”
“You too, Drake.” She walked to the door, then paused, silhouetted again in the golden light. She looked back over her shoulder. “Don’t be a stranger this time, okay? We’re still just across the field.”
He nodded, his throat tight. “I won’t.”
She gave him one last, long look, her expression unreadable—a mix of warmth and a sadness so deep it seemed to have no bottom. Then she was gone, her footsteps fading on the gravel.
Drake stood in the sudden, hollow quiet of the workshop. The motes of dust swirled madly in the sunbeams, disturbed by her passage. He picked up the sanding block again, the wood now warm where her hand had rested. He ran his thumb over the spot.
The memory of her laugh replayed in his head. Then, clear as a bell, the flat tone of her voice. He hates old houses.
He looked out the open doors, down the path that cut through the overgrown field to the line of trees, beyond which was the small, white cottage with the wild rosebushes. He’d walked that path a thousand times.
He had come back to rebuild this place, to fix something that was broken. Now, standing alone in the scent of pine and memory, a cold, clear realization settled in his chest.
He might have waited too long.
He might have waited too long.
The thought was a cold stone in his gut. He stared at the empty doorway until the shape of it burned into his vision. Then, with a force that came from somewhere deep, he turned back to the workbench and picked up the sanding block.
He worked. The rasp of the grit against the wood was the only sound, a sharp, rhythmic scratch that filled his skull and pushed everything else out. He focused on the muscle in his forearm tightening and releasing, on the line of the bench’s edge coming slowly, perfectly straight. He sanded until his fingertips were numb and the golden wood gleamed like honey.
Action was the only antidote to the feeling swimming inside him—a hectic, restless churn of regret and a foolish, tenacious hope.
He moved to the old metal toolbox, its red paint flaking. He dumped its contents onto the floor with a loud, cathartic crash. Rusty screws, bent nails, a tape measure with a cracked case. He began sorting, tossing the useless bits into a five-gallon bucket. Clink. Clank. Each throw was too forceful.
He remembered her smile. Not the hesitant one from today, but the one from before. The one that used to take over her whole face, that made her eyes disappear into little crescent moons. She’d smiled at Leo like that. He was sure of it. The guy probably told good jokes, remembered anniversaries, hated old houses but loved new, efficient appliances.
“Damn it,” he muttered to the empty room.
He attacked a shelf unit next, half-built and abandoned by his father. It was clumsy. The joints were uneven. He took it apart with a pry bar, the nails shrieking as they pulled free from the pine. The violence of the action felt good. He stacked the salvaged boards neatly against the wall.
Sweat traced a path down his spine. The afternoon light slanted, stretching the diamond patterns from the skylights across the floor. He paused, wiping his brow with his forearm, and his eyes landed on the far wall, behind the lumber rack. There was a dark space there, a gap in the insulation board.
Frowning, he walked over and peered in. Something was wedged in the cavity between the studs. He reached in, his fingers brushing against cobwebs, and closed around something flat and solid. He pulled it out.
It was a piece of cedar shingle, about a foot long. On its smooth, inner face, someone had written in bold, black marker. He recognized the cramped, all-caps handwriting immediately. His father’s.
FOR DRAKE’S TROPHY SHELF. MANDY HARTLEY, 1ST PLACE SCIENCE FAIR, ‘09. DO NOT USE FOR FIREWOOD. - DAD
He stood perfectly still. The noise in his head vanished. The writing was faded but legible. He could see his father, grinning secretly, salvaging this scrap when no one was looking, making a plan for a future shelf for a son who might need a place to put things that mattered.
He ran his thumb over the words. Mandy Hartley. His father had known. Of course he had known. The old man saw everything from his quiet perch in this shop.
Drake’s chest tightened. He looked from the shingle in his hand to the beautiful, sanded workbench, to the open doors leading to the field path. The workshop hummed around him, no longer just a tomb of memory, but a silent, persistent question.
He carried the shingle to the clean workbench and laid it down carefully, aligning it with the edge. It was a blueprint. It was an accusation. It was a permission slip, fifteen years too late.
Outside, a car door slammed, way off in the distance. Probably Leo, picking up Mandy for their dinner in Elgin. Drake didn’t look up. He picked up a fresh board, measured it, and reached for the saw. The whine of the motor was loud and decisive in the quiet. He had work to do.
The saw’s whine faded into a ringing silence. Drake stared at the cedar shingle, the bold black letters feeling like a live wire in the stillness. His father’s ghost was a practical one, leaving notes in walls instead of appearing in dreams.
He set the shingle aside, carefully, on the freshly sanded bench. It was a artifact now. A compass point.
The restless energy in him had changed. It was no longer frantic. It was purposeful. He finished dismantling the clumsy shelf, sorted the usable wood, and swept the sawdust into a neat pile. The physical work became a kind of meditation, each motion measured.
He found an old coffee can full of bent, forgotten nails. He sat on a stool by the open door, the evening air cooling his skin, and began straightening them one by one on the concrete floor, tapping them straight with a hammer. Clink. Tap. Clink. Tap. It was mindless, repetitive. It let his thoughts unwind.
He thought of Mandy’s smile, the new hesitation in it. He thought of her voice saying “Leo” with that flat, factual tone. He thought of the blue paint on her arm—from her kindergarten class, where she spent her days patiently explaining the world to small, chaotic humans. He thought of Leo, who probably never got paint on his clothes, who liked new builds and fast tracks.
A memory surfaced, sharp and clear. They were sixteen, sitting on the tailgate of his dad’s rusted truck out by the reservoir. She was eating a peach, the juice running down her wrist. She’d offered him a bite, and he’d taken it, his lips brushing her fingers. She’d gone quiet, staring at the water, her cheeks flushed something deeper than the sunset. “I think I’d go crazy anywhere else,” she’d said, not looking at him. “This place is in my veins.” He’d just nodded, because he felt it too, but he’d also felt the restless itch to see what else was out there. He’d left. She’d stayed.
Tap. Clink.
He’d assumed her life without him had just… flowed on. A natural current. He’d pictured her happy, because wanting anything else for her was too painful. But that flatness in her voice today… that wasn’t happiness. It was acceptance. There was a canyon between the two.
The lawnmower sound in the distance had stopped. The world was settling into the deep, humming quiet of a country evening. Crickets were starting up.
He dumped the straightened nails into a clean jar. He wiped down the tools and hung them back on their outlines on the pegboard. He rolled up the extension cords. The workshop, still far from finished, began to look like a place of potential instead of a relic. He’d made a dent.
His eyes kept drifting back to the shingle.
Finally, he walked over and picked it up again. He didn’t read the words this time. He just felt the weight of it. Then he crossed to the far wall, to the empty space where his father’s old desk had been. A single, rusted hook was screwed into a beam. He hung the shingle there. It looked absurd. A piece of roofing material on a hook. But it was a start. It was the first thing on the wall.
He turned off the main light, leaving the space in the deep blue gloom of twilight. The skylights showed the first faint stars. He locked the big double doors, the click of the padlock final and solid.
The walk to his truck was across gravel and then damp grass. The air smelled of cut grass and coming night. He could see the lights on in his mother’s house up the hill, a yellow square of warmth. In the other direction, through the line of trees, a single light burned in Mandy’s cottage. A porch light, or maybe a lamp in the kitchen.
He got into his truck but didn’t start it. He sat in the dark cab, watching that distant, solitary light. He wondered if she was home from dinner. He wondered what they’d talked about. He wondered if she’d thought about this place, about the workshop, about him, at all.
With a sharp exhale, he turned the key. The engine roared to life, shattering the quiet. He flipped on the headlights, illuminating the gravel drive, the overgrown path, the long way home.