The bell above the door at Kenworthy's Hardware announced their arrival with a brass clang that had probably sounded the same way for fifty years. Eliza stepped inside first, her boots leaving damp prints on the scuffed linoleum, and was immediately swallowed by the perfume of cedar shavings, machine oil, and something faintly sweet that she could not place until she spotted a basket of potpourri near the register. The store stretched deep and narrow, its wooden shelves bowing under the weight of coiled rope, paint cans stacked like ceramic coins, and rows of hand tools hanging from pegboard with the careful order of a taxonomy.
Nico followed three steps behind, his camera bag slung over one shoulder, his expression suggesting he had been dragged to his own execution. He had not been dragged, technically. Eliza had simply told him, in the flat tone that ended conversations, that she needed someone to carry things. He had volunteered.
She moved toward the lumber aisle, but a voice cut across the store before she reached the second turn.
"Well, I'll be damned. Eliza Calloway, in the flesh."
The man behind the register looked up from a crossword puzzle with the slow delight of a cat spotting a sparrow. He was perhaps sixty, with a face that had been weathered into leather by decades of salt wind and a belly that strained the buttons of a red flannel shirt. His name tag read ARTHUR, and below it, in smaller letters, OWNER. He wore reading glasses pushed up onto his forehead and a wedding ring that caught the overhead fluorescents.
"Arthur Kenworthy," Eliza said, and her mouth did something complicated, halfway between a smile and a grimace. "It's been a while."
"A while. That's one way to put it. Last time you were in here you were buying paint for that treehouse your father never finished." Arthur set down his pencil with theatrical care. "Must have been fifteen years."
"Twelve."
"Twelve, fifteen. Who's counting." His gaze drifted past her shoulder, and his eyebrows climbed his forehead like two determined hikers. "And who's this?"
Nico stepped forward and extended a hand with the easy confidence of someone who had introduced himself to strangers in a hundred towns. "Nico Vargas. I'm working with Eliza on a project up at the point."
Arthur's handshake was brief and assessing. His eyes moved between them with the unhurried precision of a man who had spent a lifetime watching locals marry, divorce, and bury each other.
"Working with her," Arthur repeated.
"On the lighthouse restoration," Nico clarified, though no clarification had been requested.
"The lighthouse." Arthur leaned both elbows on the counter. "Eliza's lighthouse. Edmund Halloran's lighthouse."
"Yes."
"And you're helping."
"With the documentation," Nico said. "Photography. Historical record."
"Mm-hmm." Arthur made a sound that could have meant anything from skepticism to approval. His attention swung back to Eliza. "And how is it, being back? Must be strange. The old place falling down around your ears and your mentor not there to tell you what to do."
Something in Eliza's jaw tightened, a small motion visible only because Nico had been watching her with the peripheral attention of someone cataloguing details for later. She did not answer immediately. When she did, her voice was even.
"I'm managing."
"Managing. Sure." Arthur pushed his glasses down onto his nose and peered over them. "You know, I remember when you used to come in here with your sketchbooks. Edmund would set you up at the counter with a soda and you'd draw the whole building, every nut and bolt. He said you had the eye."
"He was generous."
"He was accurate." Arthur straightened and crossed his arms. "So. What do you need? And don't say lumber, because if you're going to try to match the original beadboard I can tell you right now you're going to have a bad time. That mill's been closed since before you were born."
Eliza set her hands on the counter, fingers spread, as if bracing herself against something. "I need a list," she said, and began to recite from memory: galvanized brackets, marine-grade caulk, wood preservative, a quantity of replacement shingles, and a particular brand of weatherproof sealant that she pronounced with the reverence of a sommelier.
Arthur listened, nodding occasionally, making small marks on a pad. When she finished, he looked up.
"That's going to run you. Contractor rates, I can knock off fifteen percent. But I'd need to see some kind of project registration."
"I have the permits," Eliza said, already reaching into her bag.
"Permits are city. I need to see you're official." Arthur tapped his pencil against the pad. "You know how it is. People come in here, say they're fixing up a place, next thing I know I'm hearing about some out-of-town buyer gutting the Halloran estate for a wedding venue. I have to protect the building supply chain."
"The building supply chain," Nico echoed.
"It's a real thing. I read about it." Arthur shrugged. "So unless you've got documentation showing you're the registered contractor on the job, I can't give you the discount."
Eliza's mouth thinned. The permits she had were extensive, comprehensive, and currently at the bottom of her bag beneath a thermos, two sketchbooks, and a tangle of charger cables she had been meaning to organize since March. She could feel the bag's contents shifting against her hip like a reluctant puzzle.
Nico stepped forward before she could speak.
"She's registered," he said. "I'm her assistant project manager. I can verify it."
Arthur looked at him with the expression of a man being told a joke he had heard before. "Her what."
"Assistant. Project. Manager." Nico said each word as if laying down a card. "Part of the restoration team. We can show you credentials if you need, but honestly, Arthur, we're on a tight timeline. The lighthouse has structural issues that need addressing before the next storm cycle, and every day we spend in paperwork is a day the salt air is eating another joist."
Arthur's gaze shifted between them with the slow enjoyment of a man who had just been handed a new crossword.
"You two," he said, drawing out the words. "You're together."
The silence that followed had texture. Eliza could hear the hum of the overhead lights, the creak of a shopping cart two aisles over, the small thump of Nico's camera bag against his hip as he shifted his weight.
"For the project," Nico said smoothly. "We're together for the project."
"For the project," Arthur repeated.
"Yes."
"Working together. On the lighthouse. Just the two of you."
Nico did not hesitate. "Just the two of us. It's a small team. Focused."
Eliza closed her eyes for a fraction of a second, the only betrayal of what she was feeling. When she opened them, her expression had been carefully reset to neutral.
"We're colleagues," she said.
"Colleagues," Arthur said, savoring the word. "Sure. I have colleagues like that. Me and my wife were colleagues for six months before I proposed." He held up a hand before either of them could respond. "I'm not saying anything. I'm just saying. Colleagues."
"Arthur," Eliza said, in the tone of someone addressing a natural disaster, "can we please discuss the bracket sizes?"
"The brackets, yes. Absolutely. Let's talk brackets." Arthur produced a sample from beneath the counter, a galvanized L-shaped piece that he set down with ceremony. "This is what you'd use for standard joist repair. If you're doing structural reinforcement on a lighthouse, which I assume you are, given the whole point of the restoration, you'd want something heavier."
He held up a second bracket, twice the size of the first.
"This is what I'd recommend. Marine grade, hot-dipped galvanized. Holds up to the salt. Price difference is significant, but with the contractor discount, you'd be looking at, let's say, a number that won't make you cry in your truck."
Nico leaned on the counter, angling his body toward Arthur with the practiced ease of someone who understood the choreography of small-town commerce. "We'd need what, thirty of those? Forty, given the scope?"
"Forty-two," Eliza said without looking up from the list she had been mentally compiling. "With ten percent overage for cutting errors."
"Cutting errors." Arthur raised an eyebrow at Nico. "She does that too. Edmund used to say she could measure a beam to the sixteenth and still account for the wood's bad moods."
"He was exaggerating."
"He was not." Arthur reached beneath the counter and produced a calculator, an actual physical calculator, and began tapping numbers with the focus of a surgeon. "Forty-two brackets. Caulk, let's say six cases. Preservative, you're looking at fifteen gallons if you're doing the full exterior. Sealant, twelve tubes. Shingles, and here's where it gets interesting, because the cedar shingle you want is not the cedar shingle they sell anymore."
"I know," Eliza said. "I've sourced reclaimed stock."
Arthur stopped tapping. He stared at her over his glasses. "Reclaimed."
"From the original supplier's remaining inventory. There was a barn."
"There was a barn," Arthur said softly. He removed his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt, which was a gesture Eliza recognized from her father, who had done the same thing when he was trying not to show emotion. "That barn belonged to old Tom Renwick. He passed in ninety-eight."
"I know."
"And you got his stock."
"I know him too. Or I knew him. I bought it from his granddaughter in Portland. She runs a architectural salvage yard now." Eliza's voice had gone quieter, the formal polish slipping just enough to reveal something underneath, something that was not coastal New England reserve but something younger, something that remembered climbing in that barn when she was a girl. "The shingles are in good condition. Stored dry."
Arthur put his glasses back on. He looked at her for a long moment, and something in his weathered face shifted into an expression that was not quite softness but adjacent to it.
"Edmund would have liked that," he said. "Using the old stock. He was always going on about provenance. About how buildings remember."
Nico, who had been watching this exchange with the particular stillness of a photographer waiting for a shot to align, spoke into the pause. "So. The discount."
"The discount," Arthur said, returning to his calculator with the air of a man who had been momentarily distracted from his purpose. "Right. Contractor rates. Fifteen percent off the lot, and I'll throw in delivery to the point for free because my nephew has a truck and he owes me a favor."
"Arthur," Eliza said, "I can pay full price. I don't need the discount."
"Everyone needs the discount. It's why I offer it." Arthur waved a hand. "Now. About this documentation. I still need to see something official. Something with a letterhead, maybe. A project registration number."
Eliza opened her bag.
The thermos came out first, followed by a sketchbook, then a second sketchbook, then a tangle of cables that she attempted to coil with one hand while maintaining eye contact with Arthur, an effort that failed when a pencil rolled off the counter and Nico caught it before it hit the floor.
"Permits," she said, digging deeper. "I have the permits. Somewhere."
"Take your time," Arthur said, in the tone of a man who was enjoying himself enormously.
Nico set the pencil on the counter and shifted his camera bag to his other shoulder. He reached into the front pocket of his jacket and produced a slim leather wallet, from which he extracted a folded document.
"Project registration," he said, sliding it across the counter. "Issued by the county historical preservation board. We're listed as a two-person restoration team under the Halloran Estate designation."
Arthur unfolded the document and studied it with the careful attention of a man who did not believe in reading quickly. He turned it over. He checked the date. He looked up at Nico, then at Eliza, then back at the document.
"This lists you both," he said.
"It does."
"As co-managers."
"Yes."
"Of the same project."
"That's generally what co-managers implies," Nico said, with a smile that contained exactly the right amount of professional warmth and zero percent of anything personal.
Arthur folded the document and slid it back across the counter. He removed his glasses again, this time setting them on the counter with the deliberateness of a judge setting down a gavel.
"So," he said. "Co-managers. Colleagues. Working together. On a remote lighthouse. Just the two of you."
"Yes," Nico said.
"Just the two of you," Arthur repeated.
"Yes."
"In a historic building with multiple floors and, I'm guessing, some kind of living quarters."
Eliza's hand, still inside her bag, went still. She straightened slowly, and her gaze met Nico's with the cold precision of someone who had just recognized the terrain collapsing beneath her.
"Arthur," she said, in a voice that could have frozen the harbor, "is there a problem with the contractor discount?"
Arthur held up both hands. "No problem. No problem at all. I think young people should live their lives however they want. I saw a thing on the television about it."
"A thing," Eliza said.
"About how things are different now. How people work together in new ways." Arthur's mouth twitched. "I'm very modern. My wife makes me watch the news."
Nico made a sound that might have been a laugh, might have been a cough, and was quickly converted into a professional smile. "We're very grateful for the discount, Arthur. And the delivery. When can the nephew bring the materials?"
"Materials." Arthur made a note on his pad. "Thursday, probably. Weather depending. I'll have him call you."
"Perfect."
"And you," Arthur said, pointing at Eliza with his pencil, "you make sure you come back in here and tell me how the brackets hold up. I want a report."
"You'll get a report."
"I want a full report. With photographs, if your colleague is as good as he thinks he is."
Nico placed a hand over his heart. "I will personally document every bracket."
Arthur studied them both for another long moment, the kind of look that contained entire genealogies, and then he nodded once, decisively, as if closing a file.
"Alright then," he said. "Co-managers. Colleagues. Whatever you are." He began tapping numbers into his calculator again. "Let's talk sealant."
Sealant, as it turned out, could be discussed at length. Arthur had opinions about sealant the way some men had opinions about religion or baseball, with a fervor that suggested personal investment and a willingness to die on the relevant hill. He favored a marine-grade polyurethane he had stocked for thirty-one years, imported from a company in Rhode Island that had since been bought by a conglomerate in Ohio, which Arthur considered a personal betrayal.
"The Ohio people changed the formula," he said, with the gravity of a man describing a murder. "They say it's the same. They say it's improved. You know what improved means? It means cheaper. It means the solvent ratio is different, and now it skins over too fast in salt air, and you get microbubbles, and the microbubbles let the water in, and the water gets behind the flashing, and then, six years later, your clapboards are sponging out from the inside and you're looking at a thirty-thousand-dollar siding job."
"That's vivid," Eliza said.
"I've seen it. Three houses on Harbor Road. All within a year of each other. The Ohio people." Arthur shook his head. "I still stock it because people ask for it, but I tell them. I tell every single one of them."
"What do you recommend instead?" Nico asked.
Arthur brightened. He reached beneath the counter and produced a dented tin of something called HullGuard 900, which he described as "what the lobstermen use on their dories when they can't afford the good stuff, which is to say, what the lobstermen use on their dories."
"Smells like death," he warned them, "but it sticks to anything. Stuck to my glove once for three days. I had to throw the glove away."
"Sold," Eliza said.
They left Arthur's with two tins of HullGuard 900, a coil of copper flashing, a box of stainless steel screws, and a hand-written receipt on a slip of paper the color of old cream. The afternoon had softened while they were inside, the hard edge of the sun gone, and the air over the wharves tasted of low tide and diesel. Eliza carried the bags. Nico carried the camera bag and the receipt, which he had insisted on, since Arthur had written it out to "The Co-Managers, Lighthouse Point," and Nico had found this delightful.
"He likes us," Nico said, as they walked back along the cobbles toward the truck. "I could tell. He was doing the thing where he pretends not to like us, but underneath he actually likes us."
"Arthur likes everyone who respects his sealant opinions."
"That's me. Respectful of sealant."
"And you bought the receipt."
"I bought the receipt," Nico agreed. He patted his jacket pocket. "Co-Managers, Lighthouse Point. It's going in a frame. It's going on the wall of my studio, if I ever have a studio again."
"You don't have a studio?"
"I have a duffel bag and a laptop and a subscription to a cloud service that holds my entire portfolio. That's a studio. The studio of the future. Arthur would hate it."
They reached the truck. Eliza set the bags in the bed and stood for a moment with her hand on the tailgate, looking out past the masts and the gulls toward the open Atlantic. The wind off the water carried the green-rot smell of seaweed and the sharper tang of brine. A working boat, a dragger with rust streaks down its blue hull, was chugging out of the harbor, and a cluster of cormorants lifted off a piling in a ragged V as it passed.
"So," Nico said, after a respectful interval. "Lighthouse Point."
"So."
"You want to tell me about it, or do you want me to keep pretending I'm here for the bracketing?"
Eliza looked at him. He was leaning against the cab of the truck with his arms folded and his head tipped to one side, the way he leaned against things as if all vertical surfaces were equally optional. His expression was pleasant, and his eyes were not.
"Fair enough," she said. "Lighthouse Point was built in 1894 by a man named Henry Calloway."
"Calloway."
"My great-uncle. He made his money in granite quarrying. The stone came from the inland hills, came down by rail, went out by ship. He built the estate as a wedding present for his bride, who, according to family lore, did not want to live on a cliff overlooking the North Atlantic and made him promise to build her a proper library and a conservatory before she would consent to move in."
"And he did?"
"He built her four libraries, eventually, and two conservatories. The original library is the round room on the east side, with the conical roof. The conservatory was destroyed in the storm of '78 and never rebuilt. My great-uncle Henry died in 1931. His wife died in 1962. The estate passed to my grandfather, then to my father, then to my uncle Marcus Bane."
"Marcus Bane."
"The uncle who raised me, after my parents died. He was an architect. You probably guessed that." She was aware, as she said it, that Nico had not guessed anything, that he had known all along, that the framing of the question had been a courtesy. She appreciated the courtesy, and resented it a little, and appreciated the resentment. "Marcus restored the estate over a forty-year career. He is the reason the bones are still good. He is also the reason I became an architect. He is also the reason I am standing on this wharf arguing about sealant with a man I met three days ago."
"What happened to him?"
"He died. Six weeks ago."
"I'm sorry."
"He was eighty-one. He had a good innings, as the English say. He was ready. He was more than ready. He had been telling me for a year that he was done, and I kept not hearing him."
"That's a particular kind of guilt."
"Yes. It is." Eliza looked at the dragger, now a small blue shape against the gray-green water. "He left me the estate. Not his practice, not his money, not his many awards. The estate. And a note, in his handwriting, that said, Finish it. Don't let them have it."
"Don't let who have it?"
Eliza was quiet for a moment. The cormorants had settled on a new piling, and a gull was screaming at them about it. "There's a developer. A man named Julian Thorne. Based in Seattle. He has been trying to buy the Lighthouse Point property for eleven years. He wants to subdivide it. He wants to build twelve coastal-modernist retreats on the cliff, each one with a price tag north of nine million, each one designed to disappear into the landscape in the way that coastal-modernist retreats do, which is to say, by not looking like anything, which is to say, by looking like nothing at all."
"Ah," Nico said.
"You know the type."
"I know the type." Nico unfolded his arms. His voice had lost some of its smoothness. "Julian Thorne. Thorne Coastal Group. Out of Seattle."
"You know him?"
"I know of him. I've photographed three of his projects. Two in Big Sur, one in the San Juans. They're the houses that win awards and get photographed for magazines and then nobody ever actually lives in them because the cantilevered deck is too cold for eight months of the year and the floor-to-ceiling glass makes the air conditioning bill obscene and the whole thing has the soul of a hotel suite."
"That sounds like a personal grievance."
"It's a professional grievance. I make my living photographing houses, Eliza. I have photographed a lot of houses. I have photographed a lot of bad houses. The Thorne houses are not the worst houses I have ever photographed. They are, however, the most cynical." He picked up a pebble from the cobbles, weighed it in his palm, and tossed it into the harbor. It made a small, unimpressive splash. "He also stole a project from under me."
"From under you?"
"Not the project itself. The photograph. I was hired to shoot his Big Sur house for Architectural Digest. We did the shoot. We spent four days on it. He saw the proofs, approved them, and then, two weeks before publication, he pulled the story. Said the magazine wasn't the right fit anymore. Said his in-house team was going to handle the photography going forward."
"That must have been expensive."
"That was the point. He didn't want to pay the kill fee. By pulling the story before publication, he argued the contract hadn't been fulfilled. His lawyers were very persuasive. His lawyers are, in fact, the best in Seattle." Nico's smile was thin. "I spent four days on a cliff for a man who never had any intention of paying me, and the house went on to win a AIA award the following spring, photographed by his in-house team, and the photographs were, I am told, terrible."
"That's awful."
"It was a professional education. The kind of education you can only get by being treated like a piece of furniture by a man who thinks furniture should be free." Nico looked at her. "So. If Julian Thorne wants your lighthouse, I understand the feeling."
"He doesn't get it."
"He won't get it."
"He won't get it because I am going to restore it. I am going to finish what Marcus started. I am going to make it the kind of building that Julian Thorne would not be able to look at without understanding, on some level he cannot articulate, that everything he does is a betrayal of the craft."
Nico was quiet for a moment. The gull had stopped screaming. The dragger was gone. The harbor settled into the particular hush of late afternoon on the coast, when the wind drops and the water flattens and the whole world feels briefly held.
"That," he said, "is the kind of sentence that should be on a plaque."
"Don't you put it on a plaque."
"I will absolutely put it on a plaque. I will carve it into the cornerstone of the restored library. I'll do it in copperplate. I'll do it in a font that hasn't been used since the death of Marcus Bane."
"Stop it."
"Stop what?"
"Being charming about my vendetta."
"I am not being charming about your vendetta. I am being sympathetic to your vendetta. There is a difference. Charm implies I am trying to get something. Sympathy implies I simply enjoy your company and the specific nature of your rage."
Eliza felt her mouth do something she had not authorized. It was the beginning of a smile. She converted it, with effort, into a more dignified arrangement of features. "You are trouble."
"I am a freelance architectural photographer with a duffel bag and a cloud subscription. I am not trouble. I am, at most, a minor logistical inconvenience."
"You are trouble, and you know it, and you are going to be trouble for the entire duration of this restoration, and I am going to regret hiring you, and then I am going to be glad I hired you, and then I am going to be sorry to see you go, and you know that too."
Nico's eyebrows went up. He considered this for a moment. "That is a very specific prediction."
"I am very specific about trouble. I have had a lot of practice."
The wind picked up again, off the water, carrying the smell of kelp and the faint metallic tang of the fog that would, by evening, come creeping over the breakwater. Eliza opened the door of the truck and climbed in. Nico climbed in on the other side. The cab smelled of old vinyl and Arthur's receipt and the brine that worked its way into everything on this coast.
"Lighthouse Point," Nico said. "Show me."
Eliza started the engine.
The drive took twenty-two minutes. Nico spent the first three of them pointing his camera out the passenger window at things Eliza considered unremarkable: a rusting boat cradle, a stand of sea grass bent flat by prevailing winds, a stretch of cracked pavement where wild fennel had colonized the cracks and was blooming yellow against the gray.
"What are you shooting?" she asked.
"Texture," he said. "Decay has texture. Restoration has texture. The thing between them has the best texture of all."
She glanced at him. He had angled himself in the seat, one knee drawn up, the camera braced against the window frame, and he was utterly absorbed. The play of late light across his features made him look younger than he had on the pier, and also, briefly, like someone she might have known in another life. She returned her eyes to the road.
"You will not get a single marketable shot from this truck," she said.
"I have gotten four already."
"Show me."
He scrolled back through the camera without lifting it from his eye, found the first frame, and held the screen toward her. A close crop of peeling paint on a clapboard wall, the curl of the flakes catching the light, the bare wood beneath silvered and fibrous.
"See the grain," he said. "That is a hundred years of weather. That is a story."
"That is rot."
"That is also a story."
They argued about it for another mile.
The turnoff to Lighthouse Point was unmarked. Eliza knew it by the feel of the road, the moment the pavement surrendered to packed earth and the trees closed in overhead. She slowed the truck, watching for the ruts that had eaten the track during the spring rains, and the oaks arched above them, still heavy with their dark summer canopy, the light filtering through in long green shafts.
"You take this road often," Nico observed.
"I grew up taking this road."
"You grew up here?"
"I grew up in the next cove over. My mother sold flowers at the harbor market. My father fished until his hands gave out, and then he repaired motors until his heart gave out. I left at seventeen to study architecture in Boston. I came back three weeks ago."
The truck jolted over a root and Nico braced himself with one hand on the ceiling.
"And now you are restoring the lighthouse estate for your dead mentor," he said, not making it a question.
"Yes."
"How does that feel?"
"Like being asked to rebuild a cathedral with a butter knife."
He considered this. "Butter knives are underrated. Very good for spreading."
Eliza laughed before she could stop herself, a single sharp sound that surprised them both. She covered it with a cough, which fooled no one.
The trees parted and the estate appeared.
It sat on a small rise above the water, a Victorian pile of granite and timber with a square tower rising from its eastern corner, the whole thing softened by decades of salt wind into a color that was not quite gray and not quite silver and not quite green. The roofline sagged in three places. Two of the dormer windows were boarded. The wraparound porch listed subtly to starboard, the rails warped, the balusters missing in irregular intervals like teeth. A stand of bayberry had pushed up through the foundation on the north side, and somewhere inside, a shutter worked loose in the breeze, tapping against its frame in a slow, patient rhythm.
"Jesus," Nico said softly.
"Yes."
"It is beautiful."
"It is a disaster."
"It is both." He had the camera up again. "Hand me that."
She handed him the bag from the footwell without thinking, then caught herself doing it. He unzipped it, swapped lenses with the practiced economy of long habit, and was out of the truck before she had cut the engine.
She watched him walk the perimeter from the cab, framing shots she could not see, occasionally crouching, occasionally circling a feature as though negotiating with it. He did not ask permission. He did not announce his intentions. He moved through the space as though he had always been permitted to be there, and after a moment, Eliza recognized the trick: he had asked permission so far in advance, and so thoroughly, that by the time he arrived, there was nothing left to ask.
She climbed out and joined him.
They worked their way along the porch first. Eliza tested each baluster with her palm, marking the rotten ones with a length of blue painter's tape she kept in her jacket pocket. Nico photographed the marks, then the underlying wood, then the places where the rot had traveled into the rail. He was quiet while he worked. She had not expected that.
"My mentor bought this place in 1962," she said, more to the house than to him. "He was twenty-six. He had just won a small competition for a community center in Hartford and used the prize money as a down payment. He spent the rest of his life restoring it."
"And when he died?"
"He left it to me."
Nico lowered the camera. "Why you?"
"Because I was the only one who ever understood what he was doing here."
"What was he doing?"
"Saving a thing that wanted to be saved."
Nico studied the porch, the sag, the warped rails, the empty intervals between balusters. "And what do you want to do?"
"The same thing. Differently."
He nodded once, as though this answer had satisfied something, and raised the camera again.
They circled to the east side, where the tower rose. Its copper cupola had gone the soft pale green of old coins, and one of its four corner finials was missing entirely, leaving a stub of bare wood that the gulls used as a perch. Eliza tilted her head back, looking up the tower face.
"The cupola has to come down," she said. "It is not original. It was added in the eighties and it is not structurally integrated. We will replace it with a copper one, properly flashed."
"You sound like you are already designing."
"I am always designing."
"When do you sleep?"
"I sleep when the designing is finished."
"That is not an answer."
"It is the only one I have."
He turned the camera on her then, quickly, almost apologetically. She heard the shutter click and made a face at him.
"Do not."
"It was the light."
"The light is the same in every direction."
"It is not. You were backlit by the tower, and your expression was doing something interesting."
"My expression was tolerating you."
"That is what made it interesting."
She waved him off, but she did not order him to delete the frame, and he noticed, and tucked the camera against his chest like a small, satisfied animal.
By the time they reached the north elevation, the sun had dropped behind the tree line and the air had begun to cool. Eliza could hear the ocean more clearly now, a low, constant murmur beneath the wind. She walked the foundation, testing each pier, and stopped where the bayberry had pushed through. She crouched, parting the stems, and the smell of the crushed leaves rose up, sharp and resinous.
"The sills are gone here," she said. "We will need to sister new ones in. Arthur has the stock. I called him this morning."
"You and Arthur."
"We are an old alliance. He has the materials. I have the patience to listen to him talk about the Patriots."
"He does talk about the Patriots."
"At length. With statistics. With feeling."
Nico grinned and moved past her, circling the corner of the house toward the west. She heard him stop. Then she heard him swear, softly, in a language she did not recognize.
She followed the sound and found him standing beneath the gutter line, looking up. The gutter had pulled free of the fascia in a long, curling section, and water had been running down the face of the clapboards for what looked like years. The paint was gone in a wide gray streak. Beneath it, the clapboards themselves were darkened, and in one place, swollen and split.
"This is leaking into the wall," Nico said.
"I know."
"How long has it been leaking?"
"Since before he died, I think. Possibly longer."
"Can it wait?"
"It cannot wait through the next storm. There is one forecast for Thursday. If the sheathing is saturated, the interior plaster will start to fail. The library ceiling. The stair hall."
She said it flatly, the way she said anything that frightened her, and Nico looked at her for a long moment.
"Tonight, then," he said.
"Tonight."
They went back to the truck for supplies. Arthur had set aside a roll of flashing, a box of spiral shanks, a tube of sealant, a tarp, and a coil of nylon rope. Eliza hauled the rope and the sealant. Nico took the rest.
"We do not have a ladder," she said.
"There is a ladder in the she'd. I saw it."
"You saw it from the perimeter?"
"I saw the reflection of the aluminum off the window. I am a photographer. I notice reflections."
She shook her head, but she followed him to the she'd, and the ladder was there, an eight-footer with a bent rail and a missing foot, the kind of thing a safety inspector would weep over.
"It will hold us," she said, with more confidence than she felt.
"You first," he said.
"Why me first?"
"Because you are lighter, and because you will not let me go first, and because if I argue, you will argue back, and we will lose an hour of daylight."
She considered denying this. She could not, in good conscience, deny this. She set the ladder against the fascia, tested the rung with her weight, and began to climb.
The clapboards were rough under her palms. The smell of the wet wood rose up as she neared the gutter line, a sour, vegetal scent that meant rot had set in, but not far, not fatally, not yet. She could work with this. She could save this.
She reached the top of the ladder and braced herself against the fascia with one hip. Below, Nico was coiling the rope over his shoulder and the tarp over his arm, and the angle of his body against the gray clapboards made him look, for a moment, like something out of one of his own photographs: a figure in a landscape, scaled down by the architecture, made small and specific by the frame.
She looked away.
"Pass up the flashing," she said.
He passed it. Their fingers brushed on the transfer, briefly, across the cold aluminum edge, and she felt the contact travel up her arm and into a place she had not authorized it to enter. She gripped the flashing harder. He stepped back and busied himself with the rope, and they did not mention it.
She set to work.
The flashing was twenty-four gauge, pre-bent, but the bend was wrong for this profile. She marked the adjustment with the tip of her utility knife, then pried the old section free with the flat of a pry bar. The gutter sagged further and she braced it with her shoulder, holding it steady while Nico, below, fed the rope around the downspout and took up the slack.
"Hold," she said.
"Holding."
She pried another six inches free. A smear of black water ran down the fascia and over her wrist, cold, gritty, smelling of leaf rot and something older. She did not flinch. She set the new flashing in place, tucked it under the upper course of shingles, and began to drive the spiral shanks.
The first shank went in clean. The second split the edge of the flashing, and she swore, very quietly, and pulled it, and started over. Nico, below, glanced up.
"Bad shank?"
"Split the edge."
"Use the next one inboard. You have three inches."
She had three inches. She used three inches. The second shank bit, held, seated. She drove the third. The fourth. The fifth.
"You are very particular," Nico observed.
"I am restoring a house."
"You are restoring a house in a very particular way."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because my mentor taught me that every fastener is a conversation with the next person who has to open this wall. I want that conversation to be a kind one."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "He taught you well."
"He did."
The gutter was secure. She taped the seam with the sealant, smoothed it with her thumb, and sat back on her heels on the top rung. Below, Nico held the rope steady. The wind had picked up, off the water, and the trees along the perimeter were beginning to toss, and the first pale veils of fog were drawing in across the breakwater, ghosting the outline of the old breakwater lighthouse on the far point.
"The tarp," she said.
He handed up the folded tarp. She spread it over the repaired section, weighted the corners with the remaining shanks, and tucked the lower edge under the lowest course of intact shingles. When she was satisfied, she climbed down, rung by rung, and set her boots on the ground.