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“I think the hinges are just a little rusty. We’re not taking the whole thing down.”

Cat tried to swing the door again, and it resisted with a piercing screech.

The sound combined with the glare of the overhead fluorescents and the depressing off-white of the walls to make Spencer want to flee the hallway, but he held firm. He was the reason she was here, after all. “I don’t think we should start by pulling the whole thing down, but I figured the three of us should be here in case it’s necessary.”

He passed a can of WD-40 from hand to hand. It was Sunday night, and he and Cat would have probably been hanging out together anyway. If they could also solve this problem, it was as good a use of their time as any.

“I thought I was just here to look pretty.”

Raj was leaning one shoulder against the wall of the narrow hallway, looking at his phone. Spencer had to admit, he was pretty, but he was also the tallest of them, so it would be easiest for him to reach the top hinge without a ladder.

“It’s your door,”

Cat pointed out, taking the WD-40 from Spencer and getting to work.

Raj had asked them to come to the café after closing because the back door had been sticking for weeks, and it was starting to be a safety hazard. They were all crowded in the hallway that led from said door, which opened out to the employee parking lot, to a tiny office and the kitchen. It ended behind the café’s front counter. “Now who’s standing around looking pretty?”

Raj very blatantly looked Spencer up and down as he leaned back against the wall.

Spencer bit his lip to suppress the wave of excitement that ran up his spine.

He was fairly sure Raj was all talk when he flirted.

They’d been friends for the whole four years Spencer had lived in Pittsfield, and Spencer had a strong rule against fucking friends.

He hadn’t slept with the same guy twice since he’d left New York, and it was more important to him to keep Raj in his life than to hook up with him.

Plus, he didn’t want to have to stop eating Raj’s pastries.

“So was the plan always to just sit there and watch me do all the work?”

Cat was on her tiptoes reaching for the top hinge. She was technically the handiest of all three of them, but Spencer could use a can of WD-40 as well as anyone.

“You’re making it look so easy. And Spencer distracted me.”

Raj was back to looking at his phone screen, tapping through emails at a rate that made Spencer doubt he was even reading most of them.

“What do you want me to do?”

Spencer asked, pulling his hands out of the pockets of his jeans. He had actually intended to help, but he’d gotten distracted by the terrible lighting and Raj’s antics, and somehow this had now become a whole thing.

“Nothing.”

Cat shoved the can of WD-40 back at him and swung the door again. This time, it moved fluidly without any sound.

“See? You didn’t even need us.”

Cat ignored Raj and wiped her hands on her overalls. “Do you have any Danishes left?”

That got Raj to put his phone away and stand up straight. He would tease Spencer until he was blue in the face, but Spencer knew Raj was grateful for their help. “I just packed the donation up for the day. Let me check. You want anything, Spence?”

“Whatever you’ve got is fine. I’m not picky.”

Spencer closed his toolbox. He lived closer, so Cat had agreed to come on the condition that he was the one who brought everything.

Raj headed into the kitchen and came back out with two pastry bags. “Thanks for coming out, guys. You saved my ass.”

“It was nothing.”

Spencer looked inside the bag Raj had handed him to find what looked like a blueberry scone. Not exactly dinner, but he’d scrounge something together.

“Says the person who didn’t do shit.”

Cat took her Danish and headed out the newly lubricated door to her truck.

“Oh my god.”

Spencer picked up his toolbox and followed her. He was never going to live this down.

Raj locked up behind them and carried a big box of leftover food to his car to drive to the shelter down the street like he did every day after the café closed. He waved before driving off.

“Are you coming over?”

“Nah, I need to get organized for that client meeting tomorrow.”

“The one on Brown Street?”

Cat leaned against the tailgate of her ancient F-50. She’d had it since she was sixteen, and it had belonged to someone in her family before that. She always said she’d drive it until it broke down, which could honestly be at any second, as far as Spencer could tell.

“Yeah. Ian Collier, I think?”

Cat scrunched up her face, clearly trying to place the name. “No idea. As far as I know, that house has been vacant since the old lady who lived there moved out a few years ago.”

Unlike Spencer, Cat had lived in Pittsfield her whole life and knew a good number of the residents.

Spencer switched his toolbox to his other hand to redistribute the weight. “Well, I’ll let you know how it goes. It would be nice to pick up this job because the one on Tyler is almost done.”

“It would be nice if this one could be a little more fun.”

Cat took her Danish out of the pastry bag, checked to make sure it wasn’t cherry, and took a big bite. Spencer knew she’d never look a gift Danish in the mouth, but she really hated cherries.

“Yes, I’ll suggest to the client that he spend an inordinate amount of his own money solely for our amusement.”

He rolled his eyes. His toolbox was getting heavy.

“I think you have the charm to pull it off.”

Cat hugged him, half a Danish still in her hand, and went around to the cab. “Text me later.”

Spencer lived at the opposite end of the same block Raj’s café was on, so it only took him a minute to walk home. He lived in a studio apartment above a commercial space at the end of the block, so he had to immediately face a flight of stairs. He dropped his toolbox in the corner of the upper landing and kicked his Vans off onto the shoe rack before going inside his apartment.

He hadn’t known anything about Pittsfield really when he’d picked this place, so he was lucky that it ended up being a convenient location and a decent enough setup to live and work out of.

The front half of the apartment was his living room, with his couch and TV and desk. In the back corner was an L-shaped kitchen with butcher-block counters and secondhand cabinets that managed to just fit in the space. Next to that was the bathroom, and then his bed was in the little alcove created between the bathroom wall and the exposed brick of the outer wall. The hardwood floors were worn and gouged, everything just a little bit loved. Spencer really liked that about it.

Norman, his golden retriever, was running excitedly in circles, probably because he knew it was time for dinner. “Okay, bud.”

Spencer tossed his scone on the kitchen counter and poured kibble into Norman’s dish before turning on his rice cooker and searching his refrigerator for leftovers that were going to add up to a meal. He was a perfectly responsible adult, but he wasn’t really interested in cooking, and he spent as little time doing it as possible.

He’d just decided to fry an egg and be done with it when he checked the time. It was seven in Pittsfield, which meant it was four in California, which meant it was time for his weekly call to his parents.

They answered on the third ring. “Spencer, are you eating enough?”

his mom asked in Mandarin.

“Hi, Mom.”

Spencer’s Mandarin was rusty at best. There were very few Chinese people in Pittsfield, or in Berkshire County as a whole, so he only spoke when he called home.

“Is it Spencer?”

His dad picked up the other landline handset.

“Hi, Dad. I’m making dinner right now.”

He slid the egg from the pan to a bowl of rice and grabbed a clean fork from the drying rack. Maybe he should get some soy sauce or something. “How are you doing?”

That gave him some time to eat standing at his kitchen counter while his parents told him about their weeks at work. His dad had played golf the previous day, and his mom had had her book club, which, as far as Spencer could tell, included much more wine than reading.

“Jenny is coming down next weekend,”

his mother said pointedly. What she didn’t say was that Spencer hadn’t been home since he’d moved to Massachusetts. Or for years before that, honestly.

That was what made this hard. Spencer wanted to have a relationship with his parents, he really did. He’d started making these weekly calls as a way to bridge the gap that had gotten way too wide. But every time, there was something hanging between them that none of them could quite shake. “Are you going to go paddle boarding?”

he deflected. That was his sister’s favorite thing to do when she was back in SoCal because the San Francisco Bay was way too cold to swim in.

“You know I’m too old for that.”

His mom had been saying that about anything that required touching the ocean since he was old enough to swim. Spencer didn’t necessarily miss the ocean since moving away from California, but he and Jenny had been loud, messy kids, and he was sure his mom was more than happy to unleash that on the beach instead of inside her own home.

They exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then Spencer made his excuses. They didn’t need to know that the only thing he was going to do for the rest of the night was watch TV with Norman. “Love you.”

His parents echoed their love before they hung up.

Norman was napping on the couch at this point, having finished his dinner within minutes. The brown plaid upholstery wasn’t what Spencer would have picked necessarily, but it had been a solid Goodwill find, and frankly, Norman spent most of the day on that couch, so he didn’t need anything that nice. “That wasn’t so bad, was it, bud?”

Spencer flipped on his electric kettle and brewed himself a cup of chamomile tea before joining Norman on the couch with his scone. Norman put his head on Spencer’s thigh, waiting for the inevitable crumbs. “Butt out.”

But giving Norman a stern look never worked. He just stared back with his big, innocent eyes, and Spencer relented immediately, scratching behind his ears.

Once he was done eating, he took his tea over to the massive drafting table he used as a desk to review everything he knew about the house he was going to see the next day. He only had the bare bones—an address and the total square footage, plus the info he’d been able to look up in the city’s records. He didn’t even have photos. The client had been pretty vague over email, which wasn’t common, but Spencer figured he’d go see the space and try to get the client talking in person.

He had an old black JanSport backpack that he used for client meetings.

When he’d first moved to Pittsfield and started his business, he honestly hadn’t known what people would expect of him.

Some designers on TV looked so fancy.

But it turned out that most of the people who lived in this city had families that had been here for generations, and they were often just trying to keep their houses fixed up and structurally sound.

So they weren’t very worried about whether he was wearing jeans.

While Spencer could dress up if the occasion required, he’d been embracing the laid-back look since he was old enough to convince his parents they no longer needed to part his hair for him.

He picked his backpack up off the floor where he’d left it by the front door and packed a notebook and some pens, then cleaned all his work stuff away and settled in to sketch for a bit before bed.