Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 95 of 115

The last of the workers rolled their wagons home at dusk. The rain had passed. Eduardo and Kiersten walked out to the road and turned to face the house they had built. It stood whole now, dry and shut against the weather. Yesterday it had been bones. Today it was a home. Eduardo looked at the two front doors hung side by side. He looked at the porch rail and the painted shutters and the chimney standing straight. Every board had a name attached to it. Aurelius's lumber. Quantum's nails. Emilio's water passed to tired hands. Kiersten's eyes on every measure. His own were there too, but they were not alone anymore. "We did it," Eduardo said. The old urge rose in him, to claim it, to say he had made it stand. He let the urge go. "They did it. You did it." Kiersten did not answer at first. She studied the house the way she studied his ledgers, slow and whole, missing nothing. Her auburn eyes moved along the roofline. Then they dropped, and her hand went to the locket at her throat. "It's beautiful," she said. Three words. She stopped there. Eduardo waited. He had learned to wait. He did not fill her silence with his own voice. "A house like this needs a name," she said. "Not a deed name. A real one." "What would you call it?" She was quiet. Her thumb opened the locket. It was still empty. She had filled it with nothing demanded, nothing proven. She had said she would fill it with what they made together. "A home built on a vow," she said. "That's what it is." Eduardo felt his chest tighten, not with fear this time. He had spent years afraid that needing her made him weak. Standing on the road, he needed her, and he was not afraid. The feeling held steady, like the roof over the rooms behind them. "Then that's its name," he said. Kiersten turned to him. For the first time he could remember, she reached first. She took his hand. Her tattooed fingers closed over his rough ones. She did not pull away and she did not hold too long. She held exactly as long as she chose. "I don't feel an ending," she said. "I used to feel them coming. I don't feel one here." That was the most she had ever given him. Eduardo knew what it cost her to say it plain. Then her hand went still in his. Her eyes narrowed at the house, past the doors, to the empty rooms inside. "It's shut in," she said. "But there's nothing in it. No table. No bed. No chairs. A roof over empty floors." She looked at him. "We built the walls. Now we have to fill them. And I don't think either of us knows how to make a home from the inside." Eduardo looked at the house they loved and had no idea how to live in.