planks sanded and varnished to a sheen but still sporting irregular dark knots, for a look that was both casually masculine and absolutely beautiful. The kitchen was up-to-the minute, with darker wood cabinets, stainless-steel appliances, and benchtops in some kind of amber, speckled stone, and the bathroom, when I peeked in there, was just as nice. No tub this time, and the shower was smaller, but it was warm and bright and spare and clean. A stacked washer and dryer stood in an alcove, and the two bedrooms had the same varnished-plank walls, but no ceilings. Instead, the walls stopped partway up, which meant that you would lie in bed and look up at that soaring space, that pleasing arrangement of pale umbrella-spike beams, and a little bit of the night sky, maybe even a star or two. There was a friendly dark-green wood-burner in the tidy living area, a wooden table and chairs for four, and a little loft over the kitchen, and you could stand in one place and see it all.
I headed up an almost-ladder made of stripped varnished-pine poles to check it out as Obedience opened kitchen cabinets below me, tried out the icemaker with some shrieking, and turned on stove burners. Both she and Fruitful, who was perched on a stool at the island, exclaimed over all of it as if they’d never seen anything like it, as excited as if they’d been transported to a foreign country, which they more or less had.
The loft was floored with Japanese mats. Tatami, they were called, made of pale woven stuff. Bamboo, I thought. There was a big window with an extra-large sill stretching around the outer arc of the loft. A flat cushion sat below the central open part of that sill, while a single shelf ran just above the floor on either side. A desk and shelves. A desk you had to sit on the floor to use, where you’d be looking out over the orchard and the gardens and the sea, all of it even more visible from up here. Sliding doors made of strips of dark blue with rice-paper inserts ran along the back wall of the loft. I guessed they hid storage space. The rest of the room, I imagined, would be for stretching, and maybe something more strenuous. Those long, low shelves could hold books, and they could also hold weights.
I wanted to stay in that tiny, wood-railed loft-room room forever, bathed in light and space and serenity.
Right now, though, I had to do something else.
Gray
It wasn’t fifteen minutes before I heard a knock on the door. It was barely ten. I stopped filling food and water dishes for the dog and went to open it.
Daisy.
“Gray, I—” she started to say, then stopped.
“Yeh, well,” I said, “I told you it was a terrible house.”
She started to laugh, and I had to smile myself. “I know,” I said. “That’s why it wasn’t nearly as dear as it ought to have been. The whole house was like this, and the section as well. Pretty shocking, all of it. Also, the house wasn’t insulated, and it had bad pipes and scary electrical. Oh, and a hole in the roof and a leaky sewer line that we won’t go into, because nobody needs to imagine that. The whole place stank like a mother—” I stopped myself. “Like a pigsty. They’d left the furniture, too. As you see.”
“But you haven’t changed it,” she said.
“I just told you I did,” I said, trying to be offended.
“Most people,” she told me, “would have painted.”
“Yeh, well, I’m a builder. Builders always have rubbish houses, because the last thing we want to do when we come home is build some more. Anyway, you don’t paint until after you remodel, and as you can see, that’s not done.”
“Why aren’t you living in the yurt, then?” she asked.
“I have to live here to see what I want to do, what feels right. But I got busy, so … it hasn’t happened. And then there was Iris. She needed a place to stay, so … Never mind, I’m hardly ever here, and I have room for a gym. It’s insulated, also. Did I mention the insulation?”
“I can’t see the insulation or the plumbing or the roof,” she said, “through the green.”
The lounge was indeed green. Deep-green walls, but pale-blue carpet, for interesting contrast. Also a tufted blue couch and a huge monster of a coffee table with round, bulbous legs. If this had