First Sight

The delivery van’s air conditioning had given up somewhere around the third traffic light, and Wren Casey was sweating through her one good blouse by the time she pulled into the gravel lot behind Ashworth & Sons.

She sat for a second with her hands on the wheel, looking at the building through the windshield. Old brick, tall windows, a sign in hand-carved letters that probably cost more than her rent. She’d restored the piece in the back of the van herself — a water-damaged oak sideboard some interior designer had begged her to save for a client who apparently trusted no one else with it — and she’d spent six weeks on it in her mother’s garage, sanding until her shoulders ached, matching stain by lamplight because the color chart lied about everything.

It was, she was fairly sure, the best work she’d ever done.

She was also fairly sure she was about to hand it over to people who wouldn’t know the difference.

That thought lasted exactly as long as it took her to walk through the workshop’s open bay doors and see the inside.

It smelled like sawdust and orange oil. Sunlight came down through a row of skylights and landed on a room full of half-finished furniture — a chair with no seat yet, a table missing two legs, wood in a dozen different states of becoming something. It wasn’t messy. It was mid-sentence.

“Can I help you?”

She turned. A man was coming toward her from somewhere in the back, wiping his hands on a rag, and for one full second Wren simply stared, because he was — objectively, undeniably — the best-looking person who had ever asked her a question in a workshop.

Dark hair, a few days of stubble, forearms that suggested he did more with his hands than sign paperwork. He had the kind of face that made you forget what you were doing there.

“I’m looking for—” She checked her phone. “Declan Ashworth?”

Something flickered across his face. Not quite a smile. “That’s not me.”

“Oh.” Heat climbed her neck, and it wasn’t the van’s broken air conditioning this time. “Sorry. I have a delivery, and the email said—”

“Declan’s inside. I’ll get him.” He didn’t move right away, though. He looked past her, out toward the van, and something in his expression changed — sharpened, almost. “Is that the Whitfield sideboard?”

“You know it?”

“I’ve been hearing about it for six weeks. Client wouldn’t stop calling to ask if we’d ‘checked on it.’” He said it dry, but there was warmth buried in it, and Wren felt an unreasonable spike of pride that a stranger in a workshop had heard about her work before he’d heard her name.

“I’m Wren,” she said, holding out a hand that still had a faint stain of walnut oil under one nail.

“Rory.” His hand was warm, rough at the knuckles in a way that told her exactly what he did all day. He held on maybe half a second longer than a handshake required, then seemed to notice and let go like he’d touched something hot. “I’ll get my brother.”

Brother. That explained it — the specific, unsettling déjà vu of a stranger’s face.

She didn’t have time to brace herself before the second one arrived.

He came through the same doorway at twice the speed, already talking. “Is this her? Please tell me this is her, I have had Marion Whitfield leave four voicemails this week and I genuinely think she believes we’ve been holding her furniture hostage—”

He stopped in front of Wren and grinned, and it was — objectively, undeniably — the exact same face she’d just met sixty seconds ago, except every line of it was pitched differently. Where Rory’s stillness had felt like a held breath, this brother’s energy filled the whole room before he’d finished a sentence.

“Declan,” he said, and shook her hand with both of his, which should have felt like too much and somehow didn’t. “You’re a lifesaver. Truly. Come in, let me see it, let me see you, actually — no offense, but I was picturing someone about sixty with reading glasses on a chain.”

“I get that a lot,” Wren said, and he laughed like it was the funniest thing anyone had said to him all week.

Rory had already gone quiet behind him, arms crossed, watching with an expression she couldn’t read. She found herself glancing at him even while Declan talked, the way you’d glance at a second doorway in a room even while walking through the first.

“Let’s see the patient,” Declan said, and led the way out to the van like he owned the sunlight.

The sideboard came out of the van on a dolly, wrapped in moving blankets Wren had washed twice to make sure no lint would catch in the new finish. She peeled the blanket back with the particular care of someone unveiling something they were, secretly, a little in love with.

Declan whistled low. “Okay. Okay, that’s — Rory, come look at this.”

Rory came. He didn’t whistle. He crouched down instead, ran two fingers along the grain of the top panel without quite touching it, the way you’d read braille you weren’t sure you were allowed to touch.

“You matched the stain by hand,” he said. Not a question.

“The chart was off by half a shade in this light. It would’ve read orange under her chandelier.”

“How’d you know what her chandelier looks like?”

“I asked her.” Wren shrugged. “You can’t fix something for a room you haven’t pictured.”

Rory looked up at her then, and for a second the workshop and Declan and the van full of moving blankets all seemed to recede a step, the way a room does when you’re actually listening to someone. “That’s the right way to do it,” he said. “Most people don’t bother.”

“Most people are wrong,” Wren said, and he almost smiled — she watched it start and get caught somewhere before it finished, like he’d changed his mind about letting her see it.

Declan, meanwhile, had already produced his phone and was texting someone — Marion Whitfield, presumably, based on the number of exclamation points he typed with his thumbs. “She’s going to cry,” he said without looking up. “I mean that as the highest compliment. This woman does not cry.”

“High praise,” Wren agreed.

“You should come to the unveiling. Client loves an audience for gratitude, and frankly you’ve earned the applause.” Declan glanced up from his phone, and there was something assessing in the look — quick, easy, already three moves ahead. “Also I want an excuse to pick your brain. We’ve got a commission coming up that needs someone who thinks about a room before they touch the wood. That’s rarer than you’d think.”

“I’d have to check with my firm—”

“Bring your firm. Bring everyone. I’m serious, this could be a real partnership, not just a favor.” He said it like it was already decided, in the specific way of a man who was usually right about things like this.

Behind him, Rory had gone back to the sideboard, running his hand along a drawer joint she’d spent an entire evening fitting by candlelight because the power had gone out and she’d refused to stop.

“You dovetailed this by hand,” he said quietly, to no one in particular, or maybe to her, or maybe just to the wood itself.

“I did.”

“Nobody does that anymore.”

“I know,” Wren said. “That’s sort of the point.”

He looked up at her again, and this time the almost-smile actually finished itself, small and real and gone as fast as it came, and something in Wren’s chest did an inconvenient, unauthorized thing in response.

Declan was already talking again — dates, a proposal he’d email over, a joke about Marion Whitfield’s voicemails that made Wren laugh for real — and it was easy, all of it, easy the way sunlight through the skylights was easy, warm and immediate and asking nothing of her.

But when she got back in the van twenty minutes later, blankets folded on the passenger seat, engine coughing to life in the heat, it wasn’t Declan’s laugh she was still hearing.

It was three words, spoken low over a hand-fitted drawer: nobody does that anymore.

She didn’t know yet that she’d remember exactly how he’d said it for the rest of her life.

She pulled out of the gravel lot and told herself, with the particular firmness of someone who does not yet believe herself, that it didn’t mean anything at all.