Chapter 4 - The Midnight Audit
Marcus didn’t get out of the car. He didn’t need to. He simply let the headlights pin Claire and me together on the porch for ten deliberate, mocking seconds before hitting the gas, his tires screeching as he sped off down the quiet residential street.
Claire stiffened in my arms, pulling back. The vulnerability that had softened her features vanished, replaced by an icy, focused rage.
“He wanted to see me panic,” she said, her voice dropping an octave. “He wanted to drive by and see me packing my car in tears.”
“He’s going to see you at that podium on Monday morning stripping the skin off his back,” I answered. “Get your coat. We’re going to the shop.”
By midnight, Cole Restoration was lit up like a surgical suite.
The overhead halogen lamps buzzed against the cavernous ceiling. We cleared the central assembly table—a twenty-foot slab of reclaimed white oak—and began dumping seven years of project archives across its surface. Blueprints, municipal permits, timber-grade certifications, hand-annotated elevation drawings, and ledger books formed towering paper barricades around us.
Claire kicked off her heels, pulled a faded Cole Restoration hoodie from my office hook, and tied her hair up with a rubber band. Watching her move around my workshop in my oversized sweater, barking out requisition numbers while running a highlighter through mill invoices, hit me with a fierce wave of domestic possessiveness.
“Here,” she said, slamming a laminated structural diagram down. “The load-bearing recalculation for the theater balcony. Marcus claimed in his petition that we swapped forty-foot steel I-beams for salvaged yellow pine to pocket the forty-thousand-dollar municipal difference.”
I pulled a steel ledger from the bottom drawer of my desk and dropped it beside her diagram with a heavy thud. “Tell that to the Virginia Historic Trust. The original 1924 blueprints explicitly forbade steel retrofit on the east mezzanine because the masonry mortar can’t withstand modern vibration anchoring. The salvaged yellow pine wasn’t a cost-cut; it was a state-mandated conservation requirement.”
Claire flipped through the pages, her highlighter flying. “Do you have the state inspector’s sign-off stamp?”
“Page forty-eight. Signed by Chief Inspector Caldwell himself three months ago.”
Claire let out a breathless, triumphant laugh. She looked up at me across the paper-strewn table, her cheeks flushed with adrenaline. “Ethan, you’re an absolute hoarder, and I have never loved you more.”
The word hung in the air between us, vibrating with the intensity of a struck tuning fork.
Claire caught herself, her highlighter freezing an inch above the paper. The playful bravado drained from her expression, leaving her wide-eyed and vulnerable once more. She hadn’t meant to let the word slip. Just like I hadn't meant to say ‘baby’ on the ladder.
I walked slowly around the oak table. The smell of cedar, old paper, and her perfume surrounded us. I stopped directly in front of her stool, resting one hand on the edge of the wood beside her hip.
“Say that again,” I said quietly.
Claire swallowed. Her fingers tightened around the highlighter until her knuckles paled. “Ethan, we have an audit to finish.”
“The audit can wait sixty seconds. Say it again.”
She looked up at me, refusing to flinch. “I love you. I’ve loved you since the day you spent four hours rebuilding a busted dining chair for a girl who couldn't even afford to pay your bench fee. I loved you when you were too broken to see it, and I love you now when it’s the most inconvenient, terrifying thing either of us could possibly do.”
My hand reached out, sliding around the back of her neck, pulling her up from the stool. I captured her mouth with a fierce, possessive kiss that answered every unspoken doubt she’d harbored for seven years. She gasped against my lips, her arms wrapping around my shoulders, pressing her entire body against mine amid the sawdust and paperwork.
“I’m not letting you go to Chicago wondering,” I whispered against her lips. “I love you, Claire. I’ve loved you so long it’s built into my bones.”
Her eyes welled with tears, but before she could speak, the shop’s rear security light flickered through the frosted glass of the loading dock.
Then came the sound of splintering wood.
I shoved Claire behind me in a single motion, reaching for the twenty-four-inch steel framing square hanging from the tool rack beside my bench.
“Stay here,” I ordered under my breath.
“Ethan, no—”
May you like
The heavy double doors of the loading dock groaned on their hinges. Two silhouettes stepped through the shadows of the rear bay, flashlight beams cutting through the airborne dust. They weren’t petty thieves looking for copper pipe.
They were carrying commercial crowbars, heading straight for the archive filing cabinets.
