“Dad says I’m good at projects,” Jamie beams. “Not like school, but real stuff. I made a whole fort in our backyard. Just needed a little help.”
“That’s impressive,” Owen says, and I can hear the genuine respect in his voice. “Building things is a skill.”
Jamie pauses, then tilts his head. “Are you guys gonna live here when it’s done?”
The question lands like a brick in the middle of the room. I freeze, brush mid-stroke. “It’s a pretty small house,” Jamie adds quickly, “but it’s really cool.”
“I’ll be living here,” I say, careful not to glance at Owen. “It’s mine.”
“But you both work on it,” Jamie points out. “So I thought maybe you were building it to live in together.”
The silence that follows is the heavy, awkwardkind only kids can create with their blunt honesty. I sneak a glance at Owen, but his face is unreadable, jaw a little tighter than before.
“Sometimes people build things together even if they don’t live in them,” I say at last. “Owen’s helping me because he’s a professional. This is what he does.”
Jamie thinks about it. “Like how my teacher helps me learn stuff but she doesn’t come home with me after school?”
“Exactly,” I say. “Just like that.”
We redirect the conversation to safer territory—Maple Festival plans, Halloween costumes, whether primer smells worse than feet. By the time we wrap up, Jamie’s covered in paint specks and grinning with pride.
“I made something for you,” he says, digging into his backpack. “It’s your house. I drew it yesterday.”
He hands me a crumpled sheet of construction paper. The drawing is all bright colors and uneven lines, a house with massive windows and a wildly incorrect chimney. But scrawled across the top in blocky, earnest handwriting is a single word:HOME.
Not “The Sequin Shack.” Not “Ms. Penny’s House.” Just…home.
My throat tightens unexpectedly. “Jamie, this is amazing. Thank you.”
“You can hang it up when it’s done,” he says, pleased. “Mom calls it a housewarming present.”
“I’m going to keep it somewhere safe right now,” I say, blinking more than necessary. “But I’ll hang it up the minute we’re finished.”
As I step outside to take it to the camper, I feel unexpectedly rattled. It’s just a child’s drawing. But something about seeing this odd little project namedhome—by someone so sure of it—feels like a declaration. One I wasn’t ready for.
When I return, Owen is showing Jamie how primer helps paint stick. He glances up, and when he sees my face, something in his expression shifts.
“You okay?” he asks quietly.
“Fine,” I say, my voice not quite convincing. “Just... it was a really nice drawing.”
Owen holds my gaze. “Yeah. It was.”
We don’t say more. Jamie’s dad arrives soon after, and the boy leaves, waving through the window with his arms still smudged with primer.
Later, as I tape Jamie’s drawing to the wall of the camper with painter’s tape, I catch Owen watching me from the house. He doesn’t say anything.
He doesn’t have to.
Some gestures say more than any explanation ever could.
The approaching storm has stalled,meteorological predictions proving as unreliable as emotional ones. Instead of the forecasted downpour, we’re stuck in a lingering heaviness—the kind that promises rain without delivering it. The kind that makes the air thick and strange. The kind that feels like a metaphor I’m trying not to examine too closely.
We’re working in the main living area, where the drywall installation is nearly done. Owen is focused on a complicated corner section while I sort through the piles of books, magazines, and reference materials that have slowly migrated from his truck into the house over the past few months.
“Do you want these grouped by subject?” I ask, flipping through stacks of architectural journals and building code manuals. “Or alphabetically? Or by how likely you are to actually use them before next Tuesday?”
“Subject’s fine,” he answers without looking up. “Reference on the left, code books in the middle, design resources on the right.”
