Chapter 4: Sawdust and Secrets
The morning bled into afternoon, marked only by the arc of sunlight crawling across the workshop floor and the growing pile of sawdust beneath the table saw. They worked in a rhythm that felt both new and deeply familiar. Mandy held boards for marking. Drake cut them. She sanded the rough edges with a block until the wood was smooth as skin, her movements becoming less tentative with each pass.
They spoke sparingly, about the work.
“Is this square?”
“Tilt it a hair left.”
“Like this?”
“Yeah. Perfect.”
It was safe. It was a reprieve from the seismic shift of the previous day. The ordinary noise of the sander and the saw filled the space where big conversations would have gone. Drake found himself stealing glances at her when she was focused on a task. The line of concentration between her eyebrows, the way she’d chew her bottom lip just slightly. He saw the teacher in her then, the patience she must have with small, fumbling hands.
He was fetching a box of long deck screws from a high shelf when it happened. The shelf was cluttered with old coffee cans full of nails, rolls of twine, a few outdated how-to books. Mandy, wiping her hands on her jeans, walked over to the workbench to grab the water bottle she’d left there. Her hip brushed against a dusty cardboard box perched precariously on the bench’s edge.
It teetered. Drake saw it in slow motion. “Whoa—”
The box hit the concrete floor with a dry, slapping sound. It didn’t explode, but it vomited its contents. A cascade of faded blue construction paper, curling at the edges, fluttered out. Old plans for a backyard deck his father never built. Schematics for a picnic table.
And among them, a smaller, ragged sheaf of notebook paper, bound with a brittle rubber band. The impact broke the band. The papers skidded across the floor, fanning out like a hand of cards.
“Oh, crap, I’m sorry,” Mandy said immediately, dropping to her knees. “I’m such a klutz.” She began gathering the blueprints, stacking them hastily.
“It’s fine, they’re junk,” Drake said, climbing down. But his voice stuck in his throat. He was looking at the notebook pages. They had landed face-up.
They were drawings.
Not architectural drawings. Pencil sketches. The paper was yellowed, the graphite smudged in places. From his knees, Drake recognized the bold, uncertain lines of his seventeen-year-old self. He felt a cold sweat break out on the back of his neck.
Mandy gathered the last of the blueprints and stuffed them back in the box. She reached for the nearest notebook sheet. “Are these yours too? Some kind of… Oh.”
She went completely still. The air in the workshop changed, the dust motes seeming to freeze in the sunbeams.
The drawing was of a girl sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck, knees drawn up, looking out over a field. The perspective was from behind, slightly to the side. The details were rough, but the essence was unmistakable: the slope of the shoulders, the messy knot of hair at the nape of the neck, the specific curve of an ear.
Mandy’s own hand came up, unconsciously, to touch the back of her neck.
She didn’t look at him. Silently, she reached for another sheet. This one was a closer study. Just a face. It was softer, more detailed. The wide-set eyes, the slight bump on the bridge of the nose from when she’d fallen off her bike in seventh grade, the full lower lip. The artist had spent time on the freckles, a delicate scatter of dots across the cheeks and nose.
She placed the first drawing down carefully, as if it were made of glass, and picked up a third. This one was her laughing, head thrown back, teeth showing. The lines were energetic, joyful.
There were maybe a dozen in total. Her reading under the oak tree. Her leaning against her locker. Her walking away, the sun through a thin t-shirt.
Mandy sorted through them slowly, methodically, her breathing the only sound. Drake remained frozen on his knees, his mind a white noise of panic. He had forgotten they were there. He had hidden them in that box of his father’s things the summer he left for the city, a clumsy burial of a feeling too big to take with him.
She assembled them into a neat pile on the floor between them. Finally, she looked up at him. Her eyes were huge, unreadable. Not angry. Not pleased. Shock had flattened her expression into something strangely blank.
“You drew these,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
He nodded, unable to speak.
“When?”
“High school.” The words were a croak. “Mostly senior year.”
“You never showed me.”
“No.”
“Why?”
He looked at the drawings, then back at her face. Any lie would be an insult. “Because they were… evidence.”
“Of what?”
He swallowed. “Of how I felt. Which was… a lot. Too much, probably. It would have scared you. It scared me.” He gestured weakly at the papers. “It felt safer to put it on paper than to say it out loud.”
Mandy looked back down at the sketch of her laughing. Her thumb brushed over the graphite lines of her own smile. “You saw me like this?”
“I saw you like you were.”
A long silence filled the workshop, dense and humming. She wasn’t crying. She was just… absorbing. Taking in this new, old information that reframed a past she thought she understood.
“All those times,” she said, her voice distant. “You’d be quiet, and I’d just talk about whatever. About Leo, even. God.” She flinched, a quick, inward crumple. “I talked to you about Leo. When we were eighteen.”
“You were my friend. You were supposed to.”
“But you were drawing this.” She tapped the portrait. “And I was telling you about the movie he took me to.” She hugged her arms around herself, sitting back on her heels. “It’s so sad, Drake. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”
He felt those words like a physical blow. He’d expected anger, or discomfort. Not this devastating pity. “It wasn’t all sad,” he protested, but it sounded feeble.
“Wasn’t it?” She met his gaze, her eyes now glistening. “You were alone with it. All of it. This is… this is a lot of love to be carrying by yourself. It’s a weight.”
He had no answer to that. It was the truth.
She wiped at her eyes with the back of her wrist, leaving a faint smudge of sawdust on her cheek. “What do I do with this?” she asked, not just about the drawings, but about everything they represented. The past was no longer a quiet, closed door. It was a box spilled open on a concrete floor, demanding to be dealt with.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. He wanted to reach for her, to take the drawings and set them on fire. He wanted to explain every line. He did nothing.
Mandy took a deep, shuddering breath, composing herself. She gathered the drawings again, squaring the edges with a sharp tap against the floor. She didn’t hand them back. She held them to her chest.
“I’m keeping these.”
“Okay.”
“I need to go. I need to… be alone. I need to think.”
“Mandy—”
“No, Drake. Please.” She stood up, the drawings pressed flat against her sweater. “This is a lot. Yesterday was a lot. This is… this is a different kind of a lot. It changes the story. I need to breathe.”
He stood slowly, his joints stiff. He felt gutted. He’d shown her his naked heart from a decade ago, and she was walking away with it. He couldn’t blame her. “Where will you go?”
“My cottage. I have to face it sometime.” She headed for the door, then paused, looking back at him. Her expression was a turbulent mix of affection and fear. “Thank you. For the work today. And for… this. Even if it hurts.”
Then she was gone, the workshop door sighing shut behind her. He listened to the sound of her boots crossing the grassy field, growing fainter. The sunlight felt accusing now, too bright, illuminating the empty space where she’d been kneeling.
He looked at the box of blueprints. The empty space where the notebook papers had been. He picked up a piece of the shelf they’d cut together. It was smooth, solid, useful.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, expecting a text from her. It was his mother.
Dinner at 6. Meatloaf. Is Mandy staying?
He stared at the screen. The domestic normality of it was a surreal counterpoint to the emotional wreckage in his chest. He typed back, his fingers clumsy.
No. Just me.
He put the phone down. The workshop was silent. It was just wood and tools again. But nothing was simple anymore. The past had risen, vivid and demanding, and it was waiting for an answer. He picked up the sanding block she had used, the wood grain still holding the faint, warm impression of her hand. He just stood there, holding it, until the sunlight moved on and left him in the cool, gathering shadow.
He just stood there, holding it, until the sunlight moved on and left him in the cool, gathering shadow.
The sanding block was just a piece of wood and foam. It meant nothing. He tossed it onto the bench where it landed with a dull thud. The action felt futile, a weak punctuation to a sentence he didn’t know how to finish. He spent the next hour cleaning with a brutal, focused efficiency, trying to scour the feeling of her from the air.
He swept the sawdust into a perfect, miniature dune. He coiled the extension cord so tightly it hurt his palms. The organized silence of the space felt like a reproach. Every tool in its place, and everything he felt was a tangled, spilled mess on the floor.
His phone buzzed again in his pocket. He ignored it, assuming it was his mother with a side-dish question. He finished oiling the table saw’s cast-iron top, the rag moving in slow, concentric circles. The buzzing stopped, then started again almost immediately. A stubborn, insistent rhythm.
He pulled the phone out, the screen blinding in the dim workshop. The caller ID wasn’t his mother.
It was Mandy.
He stared at her name, his heart doing a slow, hard roll against his ribs. He let it ring three more times, the vibration humming in his hand, before he swiped to answer. He didn’t speak. He just put the phone to his ear and listened to the empty line.
He could hear her breathing. A shaky inhalation, then a slow release. There was a hollow, echoing quality to the sound, like she was in a large, empty room.
“Hey,” she finally said. Her voice was quiet, stripped bare.
“Hey.” He leaned back against the workbench, the edge digging into his thighs. “You at the cottage?”
“Yeah.” Another pause. He heard a faint tap-tap, like a fingernail on a hard surface. “It smells like lemon cleaner and regret. I scrubbed the bathroom. I couldn’t sit still.”
He could see it. Her, on the floor of that small bathroom, scouring the sink Leo had used, trying to erase the physical proof of a life she’d walked away from. “Sounds productive.”
“It was disgusting.” A short, humorless laugh escaped her. “I found one of his hairs in the drain. A single, brown hair. I just stared at it. Then I cleaned it out. It felt… violently final.”
Drake closed his eyes. He could offer no comfort that wouldn’t sound like victory. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” The tapping stopped. “That’s not why I called.”
The line hummed between them. He waited.
“I looked at the drawings again,” she said, her words coming faster now, a controlled rush. “I laid them all out on my grandmother’s dining table. That weird formal table we never used. I just… looked at them. For a long time.”
He said nothing. His palm was slick against the phone.
“That version of me you drew… she seemed so sure. She’s laughing, or she’s thoughtful, or she’s just… being. She isn’t waiting for permission. I think I lost her somewhere. I think I started building my life around what felt permissible. What made sense to everyone else.” Her voice cracked, then steadied. “Leo was permissible.”
Drake’s throat felt tight. “Mandy—”
“I’m not finished.” She took a sharp breath. “When I left the workshop, I was scared. Because those drawings felt like a claim. And I’ve just spent three years letting someone else have a quiet, gentle claim on me, and I’m so tired of being claimed. But driving home, I realized… they’re not a claim. They’re a record. You were just the only one keeping it.”
He could hear the soft rustle of paper. She was touching them, right now.
“You saw me,” she whispered, the defiance leaching away, leaving something raw and awed. “Even when I was looking the other way, you were paying that much attention.”
“It wasn’t a chore,” he said, the words rough.
“I know.” Silence settled again, but it was softer now, a shared space. “I’m still scared, Drake.”
“I know that, too.”
“But I’m more scared of going back to what’s permissible.” She paused. “Can you come over?”
The question was simple. Direct. It wasn’t an invitation to nostalgia or to hide from the world. It was a step into the messy, scrubbed-clean present. His mouth was dry. “Now?”
“Yes.” A beat. “I don’t want to be alone with my grandmother’s china and my ex-boyfriend’s drain hair. I want to be with someone who has a record of me. Is that okay?”
He was already moving, grabbing his keys from the hook by the door. “I’m on my way.”
“Okay.” He heard the faintest exhale of relief. “The door’s unlocked.”
“The door’s unlocked.”
The line went dead.
Drake stared at the phone for half a second, the screen fading to black. Then he moved. He was out of the workshop, sliding the heavy door shut with a bang that echoed across the empty field. He didn’t lock it. The evening air was cool, smelling of cut grass and coming rain. His truck door groaned on its hinges.
DRAKE HEADS OVER.
The engine turned over, a rough, faithful growl. He reversed too fast, gravel pinging against the undercarriage. The headlights cut swaths through the deep blue twilight as he hit the paved road out of the farmyard.
His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. Every nerve felt scraped raw. The drawings were with her, scattered on that formal dining table. A record. She’d called it a record. The word echoed in the tight space of the cab, mixing with the thrum of the tires on asphalt.
He passed the old boat launch. It was just a darker smudge against the charcoal water now. Neutral ground. That felt a lifetime ago. This was different. This was her territory, a place he hadn’t stepped foot in since her grandmother’s funeral three years back. A place Leo had inhabited.
He flicked on the radio, then snapped it off. The silence was better. It let him think. Or tried to. His brain was just a replay of her voice. I want to be with someone who has a record of me.
What did that mean for right now, tonight? He had no script. He never did with her.
The town’s few streetlights winked on as he drove through the silent main drag. The hardware store was dark. The diner’s neon ‘OPEN’ sign buzzed, casting a pink glow on the empty parking lot. He turned onto her street, a lane of small, older houses with deep porches and sprawling peony bushes.
Her cottage was at the end. The porch light was on, a single yellow bulb fighting the deep violet of the sky. Her blue hatchback was in the short driveway. He pulled in behind it, killing the engine. The sudden quiet was absolute.
He sat there. The dashboard clock glowed 7:43. Through the front window, he could see the warm glow of a lamp in the living room. No movement. He wiped his palms on his jeans. He hadn’t changed; he still wore the same t-shirt and jeans from the workshop, dust ground into the fibers.
He got out. The air here smelled different—like the lilacs beside her porch were already giving up their scent for the night, sweet and heavy. He walked up the three wooden steps. They creaked the same way he remembered. The front door was a faded blue, paint chipping at the bottom.
It was unlocked.
He turned the knob and pushed. The door swung inward without a sound.
The living room was all soft lamplight and deep shadows. It was cleaner than he’d ever seen it. The surfaces gleamed. The air smelled sharply of artificial lemons, undercut by the faint, perennial scent of old books and the lavender she kept in bowls. It felt like a museum of a life recently interrogated.
She wasn’t in the room. He could see through to the small dining area. The drawings were there, arrayed with careful precision on the dark wood table. From here, they were just ghostly gray rectangles.
“Back here,” her voice came from the kitchen.
He followed the sound, his boots too loud on the hardwood floor. She was at the sink, rinsing a green glass. She wore different clothes—soft-looking gray sweatpants and an oversized navy sweatshirt, her hair down and damp at the ends from a recent shower. She placed the glass in the drainer and turned, leaning back against the counter.
She looked at him. Really looked. Her eyes were clear, but there was a fragility there, like the sheen on a soap bubble.
“You came,” she said.
“You called.”
A ghost of a smile. “I did.” She nodded toward the living room. “Want a drink? It’s not stolen beer from my dad’s garage, but I have whiskey. The kind you drink when you’ve had a day.”
“Sure.”
She took a bottle and two short glasses from a cabinet. Her movements were economical, practiced. She poured two fingers into each glass and handed him one. Their fingers didn’t touch this time. She took a sip, her eyes closing briefly as it went down.
“I put all his stuff in a box,” she said, her gaze floating around the kitchen. “The extra toothbrush. The fancy coffee beans he liked that I hate. A sweatshirt he left. It’s by the back door. I’ll give it to his sister tomorrow.” She took another drink. “It took one box. One medium-sized box. For three years.”
Drake sipped the whiskey. It was smooth, burning a warm path down his chest. He didn’t know what to say to that. The arithmetic of it was horrifying.
“The drawings needed the whole table,” she continued, her voice quieter. “They needed space. They sprawled.” She looked at him. “You want to see?”
He followed her back to the dining table. Up close, the effect was staggering. His own teenage longing stared back at him, a silent jury. She had arranged them not chronologically, but by feeling. The pensive ones together. The joyful ones in a row. The profile studies.
She stood beside him, her arm almost touching his. He could feel the heat coming off her in the cool, cleaned room.
“This one,” she said, pointing to the laughing sketch. “That was the day we skipped physics and drove to the bluffs. I’d just gotten my acceptance letter for community college. You got yours for the city the week before.”
He remembered. The wind had been fierce, whipping her hair across her face. She’d shouted something into the gale, laughing, and he’d thought his heart would crack his ribs.
“I looked like that to you?” she asked.
“You were that,” he said. “It wasn’t an interpretation.”
She was silent for a long moment, just looking at the lines on the paper. Then she spoke, her voice so low he had to lean in. “I don’t know how to be her for you. Not anymore. I’m twenty-four. I’ve made choices. Safe ones. I’m a person who scrubs bathrooms to avoid feeling.”
“I’m not asking you to be her,” he said, turning to face her. “That girl didn’t know me, either. Not really. She never saw these.” He gestured at the table. “The guy who drew these was scared of his own shadow. He left. We’re different people, Mandy.”
“Are we?” Her eyes searched his, desperate for the truth. “Then why does this,” she waved a hand between them, “feel like picking up a conversation we only paused?”
“Because some parts don’t change.” The words came out before he could measure them. “The core things. What you pay attention to. What moves you. I paid attention to you then. I pay attention to you now. That hasn’t changed. The rest is just… life. Grime on the window. You can clean it off.”
She let out a shaky breath, a puff of air that stirred the hair near her temple. “Leo texted again. While I was cleaning.”
Drake went still. “What did he say?”
“He asked if I was sure. He said we could talk, with a counselor. That what we had was worth saving.” She wrapped her arms around herself, the sleeve of her sweatshirt swallowing her hands. “And a part of me, a big, conditioned part, screamed that he was right. That this is insanity. That I should call him right now and fix it.”
The air in the room felt thin. Drake forced himself to breathe. “What does the other part say?”
“The other part,” she whispered, “looked at these drawings. And it remembers the weight of that shingle in my hand. And it heard your voice on the phone today. And it thinks ‘worth saving’ should feel like a heartbeat, not a negotiation.” A tear finally escaped, tracking a clean line through the faint sawdust still on her cheek. “I’m so tired of negotiating my own life.”
He couldn’t not touch her then. He reached out, his hand rough and scarred, and brushed the tear away with his thumb. His touch lingered on her skin, a point of stunning warmth. She didn’t pull back. She leaned into it, just slightly, her eyes closing.
“I don’t know what happens tomorrow,” he said, his voice gravel. “I don’t have a plan. I just have a workshop. And a record.”
She opened her eyes. They were inches apart. The lemon-cleaner air, the silent house, the ghosts of a boy and a girl on the table—it all receded, tunneling down to the space between their mouths.
“Stay,” she said. It wasn’t a question. It was a decision, spoken aloud.
It wasn’t an invitation to her bedroom. They both knew that. It was an agreement to not be alone in the aftermath. To share the same air, the same quiet, through the night.
“Okay,” he said.
She nodded, a firm, final dip of her chin. Then she turned and started gathering the drawings, stacking them with a new tenderness. She didn’t put them away. She carried the pile to the old armchair by the lamp and set them on the side table. She’d look at them again. He knew it.
“You take the couch,” she said, her voice regaining a shred of its normal timbre. “It’s brutal, but it’s a couch. I’ll get you a blanket.”
He stood in the center of the clean, quiet room as she bustled down the hall. He heard a closet door open, the rustle of linen. She returned with a folded quilt—not roses, but a simple geometric pattern—and a pillow. She thrust them at him, her movements brisk, avoiding his eyes again.
“Bathroom’s down the hall. Extra toothbrush in the cabinet. Don’t judge the brand.”
“I won’t.”
An awkward stalemate. The charge from a moment before had banked to a low, steady hum.
“Okay then,” she said. “Goodnight, Drake.”
“Goodnight, Mandy.”
She turned and walked to her bedroom door. She paused, her hand on the knob, and looked back at him. The lamplight caught the gold in her hair, the uncertain curve of her mouth. For a second, she looked exactly like the girl in the sketches. Then she gave him a smile that was wholly, heartbreakingly present—tired, scared, and real.
She went inside and closed the door. Not a slam. A soft, definite click.
Drake stood there holding the blanket. He listened to the faint sounds of her moving behind the door, then silence. He looked at the couch, then at the drawings on the side table. The one on top was her in profile, looking at something far away.
He unfolded the quilt, the fabric smelling of cedar and sunshine. He turned off the lamp, plunging the room into darkness broken only by the faint porch light filtering through the curtains. He lay down on the couch, which was, as advertised, brutally uncomfortable. The springs dug into his back.
He stared at the ceiling. In the deep quiet, he could hear the faint, regular sound of her breathing through the wall. It was the same rhythm he’d listened to in the rose-covered guest room just last night. It was the sound of her being alive, nearby.
He breathed in time with it. The lemon smell was fading, lost to the older, deeper scent of the house and the wool of the quilt. His mind should have been racing, but a strange calm settled over him. She was in there. He was out here. The door between them was just a door. It wasn’t a city. It wasn’t three years. It was a piece of wood she could open if she chose.
For now, this was enough. It was more than he’d had in a long, long time. He listened to the sound of her breathing until his own eyes grew heavy, and the deep, familiar quiet of the town at night wrapped around the little blue house, holding them both.