Chapter Sixteen – Autumn
In the car, I’d texted my parents and let them know Colton had found some things in the house that I wanted to look at and not to stay up for me. Even though I was twenty-four, I knew that I needed to check in with my parents. It was their home after all.
Of course, not long after the group chat with my sisters lit up with a message from Aspen. I quickly realized Mom had informed her about where I was headed. I ignored their teasing as Colton pulled up to his house. I was certain they were going to make me pay for it later.
It was still strange to think of the house belonging to anyone but me. I’d called it mine for as long as I could remember. But I was slowly learning to accept it despite the ache it left in my chest.
“Everything all right?” Colton asked me as he parked the truck. That was when I noticed there was no one around.
“Yeah. Didn’t you say that the crew works around the clock?” I asked as I jumped down from the truck and strolled up to the front door behind him.
“When I asked you out earlier, I gave the night crew the day off.”
Stepping inside the house that smelled of freshly sanded wood and sawdust, I joked, “I guess I was a sure thing, huh.”
“Not at all. I was just hopeful.”
“Mmhmm,” I mumbled as I headed toward the back of the house, noting how all of the details around the stairs stood out with the freshly painted stain.
“Oh, wow. The kitchen is laid out.”
“Yeah. They were working on installing the new cabinets when I came to get you. They’re in the butler’s pantry too.”
The kitchen layout was fascinating to me. It was so small compared to modern day kitchens with a large porcelain sink beneath the window, but the butler’s pantry was twice the size. That was where one of the original fireplaces still resided.
There were swatches of color on an extra cabinet door, and I loved the choices I’d helped Colton select at our first meeting. The dark blue stood out to me the most and I let Colton know as he joined me.
Across the way, the sunroom was serving more like a storage space, but I could see its potential with the new windows installed. They climbed all the way to the ceiling and gave a majestic view of the land surrounding the farm.
“This place is really coming along. I’m amazed at how quickly they were able to gut and then renovate.”
I knew that most projects took months and one of this magnitude should have taken years, but Colton seemed to have luck on his side. And my father, it seemed. He had spent time and money when the house was vacant, making sure that it didn’t wither away into a pile of rubble.
“Want to check out what we found?” I spun around at Colton’s question and faced him.
“Yes, please,” I replied eagerly, immediately moving toward the front staircase.
I noticed my makeshift tool bag sitting against the wall on one of the steps along with my cheap canvas toolbelt folded on top. Beside that was a small chest no larger than a shoe box that was covered in dirt and grim. The kind you couldn’t wash away with soap and water and it spoke of years of neglect.
“Is that it?” I asked, my knees shaking in anticipation and I gripped the railing to steady myself.
“It is.”
Without hesitation, I dove for the box and settled it on my lap as I sat on the stairs. I quickly forgot the hard wood as I lifted the lid and came face to face with my family’s treasures.
“There really isn’t much in there,” Colton said beside me and I’d already forgotten that he was in the foyer with me.
Folded on top was a hand drawn blueprint of the house. It was more simplistic than layouts today with dimensions and such. This was just a generic layout of the house broken out into three levels.
“Wow. You see here, on the second story, there used to be a dumb waiter. That’s so neat,” I exclaimed, pointing out the small opening that would feed into the butler’s pantry. I knew just from the walk-throughs that the service had been torn out at some point. “Maybe you could look at having it installed again, or something similar, before the walls are closed in.”
“That’s a really great idea.” Whipping out his phone, Colton typed something while I set the piece aside.
Beneath the blueprint were some letters from my great-great-grandfather to the woman he would build this house for and pictures of their family. My great-great-grandmother had been a transplant from Carson, North Carolina, another small town built before the population flourished. My parents would go nuts for these images. I’d wondered if they’d ever seen them before.
More pictures filled the box, along with costume jewelry. I wistfully held a ring that contained a pink stone to the light, admiring the way it shimmered.
“This is really great, Colton.”
“Sorry it isn’t more. So far, we haven’t found much more in the walls other than scraps of newspaper.”
“That’s okay. This is more than enough. Are you okay if I take this to my parents? I think they’d really enjoy having these.”
“Of course. That was the plan, sweetheart.”
I quietly filled the box back the way I found it, sighing as I restored each item into the containers.
“Sorry it wasn’t as exciting as you probably imagined it being,” Colton said and I immediately apologized. “Colton, this was great. Thank you. I’m only sighing because the night is over.”
That smirk that creased the corner of his eye appeared and I felt my stomach flutter with the telltale sign of butterflies.
Leaning over, Colton snatched the box from my hands and set it back on the step. “It doesn’t have to be.”
“What?” I asked in confusion, my eyes searching his as he loomed over me.
“The night. It doesn’t have to be over,” he replied, reaching up to tuck a piece of hair behind my ear. “Unless, you know, you have somewhere else to be.”
My voice caught in my throat as I watched those dark spots in his irises grow. They took me in, all of me, and never faltered.
