* * *
Ira arrived before the heat set in.
The parsonage looked different in early morning light—less like a project and more like what it had been before anyone decided to save it. Just a house. Peeling paint and sagging porch and windows that hadn't seen clarity in decades. He stood in the lot for a moment, coffee cooling in his hand, and tried to see it the way Hagarty saw it. A symbol. A statement. Something that could be leveraged into newsletters and donor updates and photographs of smiling volunteers.
He couldn't hold it. The house kept slipping back into itself. Wood and nails and rot that needed cutting out.
Real rot. The kind in the walls.
He went inside.
The east wall was framed now, new studs pale against the old. Rowan's work, mostly. Ira had held boards and handed tools and learned to swing a hammer without flinching at the sound, but the structure itself was Rowan's. He knew where to sister a joist, how to read the grain, which boards could be saved and which had gone too soft to trust.
Ira set his coffee on an overturned bucket and stood in the middle of the gutted living room. Dust motes drifted in the early light. Somewhere outside, a bird was singing something repetitive and untroubled.
He thought about Ellie.
It was like watching someone flip you over and look for seams.
She'd seen it. She'd seen him fold, collapse, become the version of himself that knew how to receive Hagarty's concern like a gift. And she'd named it without flinching.
He didn't know what to do with that.
For years, Ellie had been the person who saw him. The one who noticed when he was struggling, who created reasons to check in, who made space for him to fall apart in manageable increments. He'd thought that was intimacy. He'd thought that was being known.
But she'd needed him small. She'd said so herself.
And Hagarty—
He couldn't think about Hagarty yet. The words were still too loud. Shortcuts. Soft numbers.
She'd been talking about Rowan. Warning him away from the one person who'd never asked him to perform.
A truck door slammed outside.
* * *
Rowan came in carrying a pry bar and a thermos that had seen better decades. He didn't say good morning. He just nodded once, surveyed the room, and headed for the north wall where the last of the rotted framing waited to come down.
They worked in silence for the first hour.
This was the part Ira had learned to trust. The rhythm of labor, the physicality of it, the way Rowan's presence didn't demand anything. No performance required. No careful modulation of tone or expression. Just the work, and the heat building, and the house slowly becoming something new.
By nine, they'd pulled the last of the damaged studs. Ira's shoulders ached. His hands were scraped in places he hadn't noticed until the sweat found them.
Rowan sat on an overturned crate, drinking from his thermos. Ira leaned against the new framing and looked at him.
"She said some things about your dad."
Rowan didn't react. Just waited.
"Yesterday. At the Freeze." Ira heard his own voice, steadier than he expected. "Hagarty. She saw me with Ellie and came over. And when I mentioned you were helping with the project, she—" He stopped. Started again. "She said Dale has a reputation. Shortcuts. Soft numbers. Said I should be careful who I let close to this."
He waited for something. Defensiveness, maybe. Anger. The need to manage Rowan's reaction.
Rowan exhaled slowly. Took another drink from his thermos.
"Yeah," he said. "She's got a version of everyone."
That was it. No flare of temper. No wounded pride. No demand that Ira explain himself or apologize for repeating it.
"I nodded," Ira said. "When she said it. I thanked her."
"You always do."
It wasn't an accusation. Just an observation. Ira felt something loosen in his chest.
"I didn't know what else to do."
"Now you do." Rowan shrugged. "You're telling me."
The simplicity of it sat between them. Ira had expected—what? A confrontation. A processing session. The need to excavate and examine and arrive at some mutual understanding about what it meant.
Rowan was just sitting there. Drinking his coffee. Waiting to get back to work.
"Is it true?" Ira asked. "What she said about your dad."
Rowan was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was even. Undefended.
"Dad cuts corners. He also kept the yard open when no one else would hire half the guys who work there." He looked at Ira. "Both things are true."
Ira didn't know what to say to that. It wasn't a defense. It wasn't a confession. It was just—
Both things true. No clean story.
"Hagarty doesn't do that," Ira said slowly. "The both things. She just—picks the version that works."
"Most people do."
"You don't."
Rowan stood, stretching his back. "I don't have the energy." He picked up the pry bar. "You want to stand there thinking about it, or you want to help me frame this window?"
Ira pushed off the wall. His body ached. His mind was still turning over the shape of what had just happened—the way he'd braced for impact and found only ground.
He'd told Rowan what Hagarty said. And the world hadn't reorganized around it.
That was new.
* * *
Miri sat at the kitchen table with the scholarship flyer smoothed flat in front of her.
She'd found it again that morning, tucked into her desk drawer where she'd put it after the Whitmore visit. Adoptee Achievement Scholarship. The words were printed in a font meant to suggest warmth and encouragement. Below them, in smaller type: Tell us about your adoption story.
She'd been staring at it for twenty minutes.
Her mother was in the garden. Her father was at work. The house was quiet in that particular summer way—windows open, ceiling fan turning slow, the neighbor's wind chimes offering occasional commentary.
Tell us about your adoption story.
The sentence assumed so much. That she had a story. That it was hers to tell. That she could sit down and narrate her own origin with the coherence of someone who'd been there, who remembered, who possessed the facts.
What Miri had was paperwork.
She knew she was born in Seoul. She knew her birth mother's name was Park Yuna. She knew she'd been held for three days before the relinquishment—her mother had told her that, voice careful, in the kitchen after Miri asked. Three days. Long enough to be named. Long enough to be known. Not long enough to remember.
Everything else was someone else's story.
The agency had a story: a young woman making a difficult choice for her child's future. The Lunares had a story: a daughter who arrived at six months and completed something that had been waiting. Ellie, at the bonfire, had a story too: You remind me of someone I know.
Everyone had a version of Miri. What Miri didn't have was her own.
She thought about Priya in the car, driving back from Whitmore. The lavender sachets. The confession about the extra-grace-required girl. I made her invisible.
Miri had held that. She'd held Priya's guilt without offering absolution, and something in her had recognized the weight as familiar. Holdable. Right.
But this was different. This wasn't someone else's weight to carry. This was the gap at the center of her own story, the place where the narrative should begin and instead just... opened.
Tell us about your adoption story.
She couldn't tell a story she didn't have.
* * *
The stone from Lake Aurelia was in her pocket. She'd started carrying it after the Whitmore trip, the smooth gray weight a kind of anchor. She took it out now and set it on the flyer, watching the way it held the paper flat.
Her father's message from worship came back to her. Jesus carrying the cross to Golgotha, never explaining why. Never narrating his suffering for the crowd. Maybe his silence makes space for ours to be rewritten.
But Miri didn't want silence. Not anymore.
She wanted to know. Not just the facts—the dates, the paperwork, the clinical language of relinquishment. She wanted to know why. What Park Yuna had felt in those three days. What she'd whispered to the baby she was about to give away. Whether she'd wanted to keep her and couldn't, or hadn't wanted to and did anyway for three days before she could bear to let go.
The gap wasn't empty. It was full of someone else's story—a story Miri had never been allowed to hear.
She picked up the stone. Turned it over in her palm.
"I need to know where I came from," she said aloud. The words hung in the kitchen, solid and strange.
But underneath them, quieter: I need to be the one who tells it.
She didn't know how to find Park Yuna. She didn't know if it was possible, if the records existed, if the woman who'd held her for three days was even still alive.
But she knew she needed to try.
She folded the flyer and put it back in her pocket, next to the stone.
* * *
The light had gone golden by the time they finished for the day.
Rowan was loading tools into the back of his truck.
"Same time tomorrow?" Ira asked.
"If you're here."
"Hey. Thanks."
Rowan paused, a circular saw in his hands. "For what?"
"For the help."
Rowan nodded once. Loaded the saw. Closed the tailgate.
"See you tomorrow, Jensen."
The truck pulled away. Ira locked the parsonage door and walked to the Civic.