The house smelled of salt and stone dust. I knew it before I put the key in the lock, before I even got out of the car and set foot on the path of loose flagstones that my grandmother Amelia had let be overgrown with mallow. Thirty-four years, a portfolio of luxury housing projects in the capital and, even so, the smell of that threshold made my stomach clench as if I were ten.
The key turned. I pushed. The door opened with a creak that sounded like a reproach.
"Wow," I said out loud, because the silence was prickling at me. "Grandma, you've outdone yourself."
The hallway had a crack that climbed from the baseboard to the ceiling like a root drawn in chalk. The stairs creaked in three different places when I stepped on them. In the kitchen, the tap dripped onto a chipped ceramic sink and one of the shutters hung from a single hinge, banging against the wall in the north wind. I took out my phone and opened the note I had written on the train, that list of seventeen numbered repairs that had kept me sane over the last few hours.
1. Structural crack in hallway. 2. Stairs. 3. Plumbing.
I stopped at number four. Because behind the banging shutter, in the back garden, there was a man kneeling next to the tool shed, a grey T-shirt stuck to his back and a wrench in his hand.
I recognized him by the back of his neck. By the way he wiped his forearm across his forehead before bending down again, a gesture I had seen a hundred times and hadn't seen in eight years.
"You've got to be kidding me," I muttered.
Nico raised his head. He had a grey hair at his temple and the same absurd eyelashes. He wasn't surprised. That was the worst part: he wasn't surprised.
"Mara," he said, as if he were saying "Tuesday."
"What are you doing here?"
"What I was hired to do." He wiped his hands on his trousers and stood up. "Your grandmother gave me the key in March. I changed the fuse box, shored up the hallway floor and fixed the roof leak. I've been coming in here for months."
"Months?"
"Months."
I crossed my arms. The breeze moved my hair and I regretted not having tied it back.
"I'm an architect, Nico. I can renovate my own house."
"You can draw it." He pointed at the facade with his chin. "But the garden wall is falling down and it has to be rebuilt before winter. Do you have a trowel?"
I had a trowel. It was in the boot. But I didn't tell him.
"How much do you charge?"
"Your grandmother paid in advance."
"How much?"
"Ask the notary."
And that was the end of the conversation, because Nico knelt back down next to the shed and I stayed in the middle of the garden, the list of seventeen repairs crumpling in my fist.
Seventeen repairs and a silence
We read the will two days before I arrived, in the notary's office, between a green-shaded lamp and a folder that smelled of damp. There was a clause the man read in the same tone he might have used to read a recipe:
"To my granddaughter Mara I leave the house on Calle del Mar, on the condition that she renovates it before selling it, and I entrust the work to the contractor who already knows it. The money is deposited. Let them not argue."
"Let us not argue?" I said, and the notary looked at me over his glasses.
"Your grandmother was very farsighted."
Farsighted. My grandmother had spent months hiring her granddaughter's ex without telling me, saving the surprise for me like someone hiding a sweet in their pocket. The old witch.
The first few days were a choreography of avoidance. I worked in the living room with my laptop and the plans, marking the demolition zones with a red marker. Nico worked in the garden, on the floor, on the cornices, and came in only when he needed water. He helped himself from the tap without asking permission, drank standing up and went back out.
"The garden wall needs underpinning," he told me on the third day, from the doorway. "But if you're going to knock down the hallway partition, I'll wait."
"I'm knocking down the partition."
"Okay."
And he left. That's how everything was.
There were silences you could carry. Not that one. It was a silence with texture, with years inside it. When he passed by my side to get the angle grinder, he smelled of sawdust and workshop soap, and I pressed my fingers on the keyboard and told myself that at thirty-four I had already learned not to look at men who leave.
But Nico hadn't left. He was still there, every morning at eight, with his toolbox and his grey T-shirt. And when I slept badly — I always sleep badly, always have, since him — I heard him arrive with the first light and stayed in bed, eyes open, listening to the hammer blows like someone listening to the pulse of a house that isn't entirely hers.
The note in the drawer
Grandma had left notes. In the cutlery drawer: "The kitchen tap has to be replaced entirely, Mara, don't patch it up. I know you'd patch it up." On the bathroom mirror, stuck with tape: "The hot water takes a while. Be patient." On the windowsill of her room: "Nico knows where everything is. Ask him, that's what he's there for."
I gathered them in a pile on the living room table, not quite knowing what to do with them. It was as if the house were talking to me in her convent-school handwriting, small and slanted, correcting me from the other side.
On the sixth day, while Nico was lifting the hallway floor, I found among the rolled-up plans in the cupboard a cardboard folder that wasn't mine. Inside was an envelope. White, with a worn edge, with my name written on it in a handwriting I recognized instantly because I had spent four years looking at it in notes and fridge messages.
Nico's handwriting.
It wasn't open. The seal was still stuck down, yellowed, intact.
"Nico."
The hammer stopped.
"What?"
"There's an envelope here."
He leaned into the hallway with his knee smeared with plaster. When he saw it in my hands, something changed in his face. It wasn't surprise. It was something slower, deeper, like when you look at an old scar.
"Ah," he said. "That one."
"What is it?"
"The letter."
"What letter?"
"The one I wrote you when we. " He wiped his hands, slowly. "I left it here. Your grandmother said she'd give it to you. Then she said she'd better keep it herself, that you'd find it."
"And you never gave it to me?"
"I thought she had."
I stood there with the envelope in my palm, weighing like a brick. Eight years. Eight years of having broken up with him over a letter that stayed in a cupboard.
"Open it," Nico said.
"Not now."
"Mara."
"Not now, it'll show on my face."
And I went out to the garden with the envelope in my pocket, without opening it, because he was right: it was going to show on my face.
The storm
The storm arrived on the ninth day, with a woman's name and a wind that tore off the remaining shutter and threw it into the garden. Nico picked it up and carried it to the living room while the sea turned white at the end of the street.
"There's a red alert," he said. "And the road bridge gets cut off with the tide."
"And?"
"And I'm staying. Either I stay or the water takes me."
He stayed. At seven the power went out. At eight the signal went. At nine, the whole house was a black box with two candles in the kitchen and the wind howling on the roof like a big animal.
Nico had carried the toolbox up to the living room and set it next to the fireplace, which we lit with wood from the shed. We sat on the floor, each on one side of the fire, a blanket over our shoulders and a bottle of Grandma's wine between us.
"Three days," he said. "They say three days of storm."
"Great."
"We can get ahead on indoor work. With the candles."
"Are you going to make me work in the dark?"
"You're going to make me work. You're the architect."
I laughed without meaning to. It was a short, ugly sound, and he caught it on the fly and smiled at the bottle.
"She still has the same laugh," he said.
"He still has the same nerve."
We drank. The wine was sweet and bad. By the second glass, Nico stretched to stir the fire and the blanket slipped off his shoulder. His forearms had construction scratches, his hands had calluses at the base of the fingers, and I found myself counting them like someone counting floor tiles so as not to look up.
"Why didn't you look for me?" he said suddenly.
"I did look for you. You told me you were going to Tarragona and that you wouldn't come back."
"I told you I was going to Tarragona for a three-month job."
"And I told you not to go."
"And I wrote you a letter."
We looked at each other over the fire. The candle on the shelf sputtered.
"The letter says I was staying," Nico said, very quietly. "That I was turning down the job. That if you wanted, I'd stay."
My throat closed up. I drank to open it.
"Well then."
"Well then."
"Grandma had a shit sense of humor."
"She had a shit sense of humor," he agreed. "And good eyesight."
The wind hit the window and we both jumped. We laughed again, without an edge now, and at some point between the laughter and the wine the blankets ended up in the same place and so did our knees.
The kitchen
It was the next morning, with the storm overhead and the house in darkness, when the kitchen tap decided to burst.
"Nico!"
He came running with the shut-off valve in his hand and water spraying into his face from the burst pipe. He shut the valve with a blow. The sink overflowing, the floor flooded, the two of us soaked to the chest.
"We have to replace the whole section," he panted. "I have it in the van, but with this wind I can't open the door."
"And what do we do?"
"Hold out until it dies down. And dry up."
We got to it with Grandma's rags, crouched, pushing the water toward the garden door. The kitchen was a mess of plaster and dust, with the partition half knocked down and the wires hanging. When we finished drying what could be dried, we were both on our knees on the floor, breathless, soaked, and Nico looked at me from down there with his hair stuck to his forehead and a drop falling from his chin.
"You're shaking," he said.
"It's the cold."
"Sure."
He came closer. He didn't kiss me. He stayed a hand's breadth away, waiting, breathing hard, and I was the one who closed the gap because I had spent eight years wanting to close it.
The kiss was urgent and tasted of pipe water and morning coffee. He grabbed my waist with both hands and pressed me against the edge of the sink, and I ran my fingers through his wet hair and pulled. He groaned into my mouth. That groan, God, I had missed that groan more than his face.
"Mara," he said against my lips. "Mara, stop."
"No."
"I've spent eight years thinking about this and I'm going to last two minutes."
"Then last two minutes and do it again after."
He laughed with his forehead against mine and lifted me suddenly, hands under my thighs, and sat me on the counter. The counter was cold and damp and gave me a shiver that turned into something else when he stood between my legs and opened my T-shirt.
His hands were rough. He ran them over my breasts over my bra and then under it, and the contrast of the callus against my skin arched my back. He pulled my bra down and took a nipple in his mouth, sucking, and I threw my head back and banged the back of my head on the cupboard above.
"Ow."
"Sorry."
"Don't stop."
He didn't stop. He unbuttoned my trousers and pulled them down in yanks, and when he put his hand in my knickers I was already soaked and it wasn't entirely the tap's fault. He found my clit with his thumb and traced slow circles, and I dug my nails into his shoulder and bit his collarbone.
"Fuck," he whispered. "You're soaked."
"Shut up and keep going."
"Yes, ma'am architect."
He pushed two fingers in and curled them, and I had to hold on to the counter with both hands so I wouldn't fall backward. The plaster dust got into my open mouth. It smelled of gypsum, of stagnant water, of him. He fucked me with his hand slowly, watching me, and when he felt me start to tighten he changed the rhythm, faster, harder, his palm pressing on my clit, and I came on the half-renovated counter of my grandmother's house with a long moan that bounced off the empty walls.
"Now you," I gasped, and pulled down his zip before he could answer.
I took out his cock, hard and heavy, and stroked it up and down while he leaned on the counter with one hand and threw his head back. His eyes were closed and his mouth open and a vein stood out in his neck. I pressed the head with my thumb and he let out a slash of air.
"Stop, stop," he said. "Stop or I'll come."
"Then come."
"I want to be inside."
"Then get on."
He put on a condom with trembling hands, from a box in Grandma's drawer — Grandma's, yes, and we laughed about that later — and grabbed my hip and pulled me to the edge. He pushed in slowly, looking into my eyes, and I wrapped my legs around his waist and bit his jaw.
"Move."
He moved. First deep and slow, then faster, his pelvis slamming me against the counter and the cupboard above rattling. I grabbed his arse with both hands and guided him deeper, and he leaned in, took me by the nape and kissed me while he fucked me, swallowing my gasps. Sweat mixed with the water on the floor. At some point one of my legs slipped and I braced it on the stove top, my foot on the unlit burner, and like that, twisted, one leg on the counter and the other on the stove, I felt him fully inside me and came again, clenching, and he held out three more thrusts before going rigid and letting out a hoarse groan against my neck.
We stayed like that, stuck together, sliding. The wind kept howling outside.
"The counter is broken," he said at last, his voice hoarse.
"The counter was broken before."
"Okay. But now it's broken and fucked."
I laughed with my face buried in his shoulder. He held me tighter.
The shower
The hot water went with the power, because the heater was electric. Nico found a way to get the tank to release what was left lukewarm and then, when that ran out, what was left cold.
"We have to get the plaster off," he said. "And the water off the floor, it's sticking to us."
"It's freezing."
"Yeah. But it's that or sleep with sand in our armpits."
We got into the shower laughing and the laughter cut off with the first stream. The water came out like needles. I let out a yelp and a jump and he pulled me against his chest, his body in front of mine, taking the cold on his back.
"Come here," he said. "Come here, I'll take it."
Goosebumps rose all over my body, on my arms, on my thighs, on my nipples, and he ran his hands over me as if drying me, rubbing, and the friction of his warm palms on my prickled skin was almost more than I could bear. I was shaking all over. He was shaking all over too.
"This is a shit idea," I said, teeth chattering.
"Yes," he said, and kissed me. "But look how hard you are."
He slid his hand down my belly, between my thighs, and found my clit numb from the cold and rubbed it with two fingers until it stopped hurting and started burning in another way. The water fell on us. I held on to his shoulders and threw my head back and the stream hit my face and blinded me, and even so I kept going, hips rocking against his hand, seeking the heat where there was none.
"Turn around," he said.
I turned. He put my hands on the wall and parted my legs with his knee, and when he pushed into me with his cock the cold of the wall against my breasts and the heat of him inside was a contrast that pulled a moan out of me, one of those you can't cover up. He fucked me slowly, his forehead on my nape, one hand on my hip and the other in front, on my clit again, never stopping the rubbing. The water slid down our bodies and carried off the soap and the plaster and the dust, and I pushed back seeking him, and he bit my shoulder and said things in my ear, short things, like that, like that, so tight, Mara, fuck, and I came with a broken moan and my knees buckling, and he finished behind me with a growl that vibrated in my back.
We got out of the shower holding each other, a towel each and our teeth still chattering, and we slept on the same mattress in the living room, next to the fireplace, covered with three blankets and with Grandma's clothes on top.
The letter
The storm died down the next morning. With the light came the signal, and with the signal an avalanche of messages from the studio that I left unanswered. We had breakfast standing in the kitchen, amid the mess, and Nico looked at me over his coffee.
"Open it," he said.
I took the envelope out of my coat pocket. It had been there for two days, the edge of the name worn away by my fingers. I opened it slowly, thumb under the seal, and unfolded a squared sheet torn from a construction pad.
Mara:
I've turned down the Tarragona job. I've told them I have something to tie up here. It's not a lie. It's the only true thing I've said in months.
If you want me, I'll stay. If not, I'll go anyway, but I'll go knowing I tried.
I love you. I'll say that too, since later I don't say it.
N.
I stood there with the sheet in my hands. My coffee went cold in front of me.
"I loved you," I said. "Eight years, Nico. Eight years believing you'd just left."
"And me believing you'd got the letter and told me no."
"And you didn't look for me?"
"For what?" He ran a hand over his nape. "I wrote a letter and there was no reply. Well, there you go. Foolish pride."
"Foolish pride on my part."
He came over and carefully took it from my hands, and set it on the table, next to Grandma's notes.
"Look at that," he said. "All of them here together. She, of course, had a good time."
I laughed, and this time it wasn't an ugly sound.
The strange will
I read the whole clause on the twelfth day, in the notary's office, with the house half standing and the garden wall still to be rebuilt.
It wasn't just "the contractor who already knows it." There was a second line, which the man read with the same poker face:
"To Nico I leave the key he already has and the usufruct of the garden shed for as long as he lives in the village. Let Mara keep it if she earns it."
"Usufruct of the shed?" I said.
"It's an unusual figure," the notary admitted, "but valid."
"It's a three-square-meter shed."
"Your grandmother was very farsighted."
I left the office with the paper in my hand and called Nico from the notary's door.
"Did you know about the shed?"
"The shed, no. The contractor, yes."
"And you didn't think it was strange?"
"I thought it was Amelia," he said, and hung up.
That night I went up to my grandmother's room and opened the wardrobe. It smelled of camphor and her usual perfume. In the bottom drawer, among folded jumpers, there was a shoebox with the construction invoices, all paid, and a hardcover notebook in her small handwriting.
It wasn't a diary. It was a list of names and dates. "Nico, March, fuse box. Nico, April, roof. Nico, May, floor." And then, on the last page, underlined twice:
"Let them see each other. Let them talk. The house fixes itself if people stay."
I sat on the bedroom floor with the notebook in my lap and cried a little, in that foolish way you cry when you've been loved well and late.
The finished house
The garden wall went up. The hallway crack was stitched with resin and sealed with mortar. We changed the tap, the heater, the entire staircase, step by step. I drew by day and at night I slept in my grandmother's bed, with Nico, and every morning I woke with his hand open on my hip like a root.
We argued about the color of the facade. About the hallway floor. About a window he wanted bigger and I didn't.
"It's my house," I told him once.
"Yeah," he said, and kept measuring.
It was the last night, with the construction boxes already outside and the smell of fresh paint everywhere, when he turned off the hallway light and led me by the hand to the bedroom. The house no longer creaked. That was a little sad too.
He undressed me slowly, button by button, unhurried, and laid me face up on the bed. He knelt between my legs looking at me the way you look at a finished plan.
"You're leaving tomorrow," he said.
"I have to go back to the studio."
"Yeah."
He bent down and kissed my belly. He kissed my hips, my thighs, the inside of my knees, and then came up and kissed my mouth and opened my legs with his hand.
"Tell me you'll come back," he said.
"I'll come back at weekends."
"Mara."
"Every weekend, Nico. And next weekend I'll bring you the new bed, because this one is my grandmother's and it's had enough."
He laughed against my neck and pushed into me slowly, and this time there was no plaster or cold or water. There was his weight, and his mouth, and his hips rocking long and deep, and I wrapped my arms and legs around his whole back and told him in his ear to stay, to stay, to stay, and he said yes, yes, his voice broken, and I came slowly and long with my face buried in his shoulder and he came inside me a moment later, trembling, and collapsed on his side without pulling out.
We stayed like that, not talking, with the house silent around us.
"I'm going to plant tomatoes in the garden," he said at last, his face in the pillow.
"You're going to plant whatever I say."
"Yes, ma'am architect."
I laughed and bit his shoulder. He pressed me against his chest and turned on the bedside lamp, and on the wall, in the spot where a picture of my grandmother used to hang, the letter now hung, in a wooden frame he had cut and sanded by hand.
Outside the window, the sea rose and fell against the rocks with its usual noise, and on the windowsill, still stuck with tape, Amelia's last note said: "About time."
Nico reached over my head and turned off the light. In the darkness, his hand came down and closed on my hip, his thumb fitted into the hollow of my hip, and like that, with that still, heavy hand, I fell asleep in the house that was finally both of ours.