Page 5 of Heartwood and Hardware (Zaftig Ever After #4)

CHAPTER FOUR

DEAN

I watch Riley examine the dragon carving, her eyes widening as she notices the details like the individually carved scales, the wings poised mid-unfurl, and the tiny golden eyes made from inlaid amber.

"This is incredible," she breathes, leaning closer. "How long did it take you to make this?"

"About three weeks, working evenings." I run my hand along Smaug's spine, remembering the hours spent hunched over my workbench. "The scales were the trickiest part."

"I can imagine." She points to the pile of coins beneath the dragon's claws. "You even carved the treasure hoard."

"Can't have Smaug without his gold." I smile, watching her fascination. It's refreshing—the genuine appreciation without the usual platitudes people offer when they think they should admire art but don't really get it.

Riley understands what she's seeing. Her eyes follow the same lines my hands did, seeing the technical challenges, the solutions found in the grain. She doesn't just look—she sees.

"I'm doing another demonstration in about an hour," I find myself saying. "If you want to stick around. It's less noisy than the chainsaw part. I'll be doing detail work on the bear."

She hesitates, and I immediately regret the invitation. Of course she has other plans. She's probably supposed to be networking, not watching some guy carve wood.

"I'd like that," she says, surprising me. "If you don't mind an audience."

"Just you wouldn't be an audience. More like..." I search for the right word, something that doesn't sound presumptuous or weird. "Company."

Her smile reaches her eyes, crinkling the corners. "Company. I like that."

"So how did you get into coding?" I ask, genuinely curious about her path.

Riley settles back into the chair, getting comfortable. The fox carving remains in her hand, her thumb absently stroking its back.

"I built my first website when I was twelve," she says. "It was terrible. Blinking text, auto-playing music, the works. But I was hooked on the idea that I could create something from nothing, just with words that told a computer what to do."

"That's how I feel about carving," I admit. "Taking something raw and revealing what's inside it."

She nods eagerly. "Yes! That's it exactly. Code feels like... like finding the hidden patterns and bringing them to life." She pauses, a slight flush coloring her cheeks. "Sorry, I get carried away talking about this stuff."

"Don't apologize. It's good hearing someone talk about what they love."

Her smile turns shy. "What about you? How did you end up carving dragons with chainsaws?"

I lean against my workbench, considering how to explain.

"My uncle was a carpenter. Traditional stuff like furniture and cabinets.

He taught me the basics when I was a kid.

" The memory warms me—Uncle John's workshop smelling of pine and pipe tobacco, his patient hands guiding mine.

"After he died, I found his old carving tools in the garage. Started messing around with them."

"And the chainsaw part?"

"That came later. I was working construction, clearing land. Saw a fallen oak and just... saw something in it. Borrowed a chainsaw from work and roughed out a hawk." I shrug, downplaying what had been a pivotal moment. "It was terrible, but I was hooked."

"So you're self-taught?" There's admiration in her voice.

"Mostly. Took some classes eventually, learned proper techniques. But a lot of it is just practice. Thousands of hours of making mistakes and figuring out how to fix them."

"That's coding too." She laughs softly. "My work is basically breaking things and then fixing them, over and over, until it finally does what I want."

"Creative destruction," I offer.

"Exactly." Her eyes meet mine with unexpected intensity. "You have to be willing to mess up a thousand times to get it right once."

Something shifts between us in that moment—a recognition, a connection deeper than small talk. We're speaking the same language, just in different dialects, as Parker would say.

We fall into an easy rhythm after that, trading stories about our creative processes.

Riley describes debugging sessions that stretch until dawn, the satisfaction of solving a problem that's stumped her for days.

I tell her about the time a hidden knot ruined a nearly-finished sculpture, forcing me to pivot and create something entirely different.

"That's the thing about wood," I explain, running my hand along the grain of the bear. "It has its own ideas. You can plan all you want, but sometimes the material dictates the final form."

"That's fascinating." Riley leans forward, studying the bear. "So you adapt to what the wood wants, rather than forcing your vision?"

"It's a conversation. I bring the idea, the wood brings its structure and character. We negotiate from there." I smile, realizing how odd this must sound. "That probably sounds?—"

"Perfect," she interrupts. "It sounds perfect. Like you're collaborating with nature instead of just using it."

I blink, surprised by her understanding. Most people think I'm being pretentious or mystical when I talk about wood this way.

"What about your code?" I ask. "Do you ever feel like it has a mind of its own?"

"All the time!" She laughs. "Sometimes I swear my programs develop personalities. This one algorithm I wrote kept finding the most convoluted path to the solution. It was technically correct but so inefficient. Like working with a brilliant but extremely stubborn colleague."

I laugh at the comparison. "So you debug personality flaws?"

"Essentially, yes." She smiles. "Though sometimes the flaws lead to unexpected breakthroughs. Like your knot problem."

Her smile widens, and something warm unfurls in my chest. Before I can say anything else, my phone pings with a payment notification. I pull it out, frowning at the error message on my screen.

"Problem?" Riley asks.

"My payment app is acting up again. Third time this week." I tap at the screen in frustration. "The credit card reader connects but then the app crashes."

Riley's expression shifts to focused interest. "Mind if I take a look? I might be able to help."

I hand her the phone, watching as she examines the app. Her fingers move deftly across the screen, navigating to settings I didn't know existed.

"When does it usually crash? When you open it, or when you try to process a payment?"

"When I try to process anything over fifty dollars," I explain. "Smaller amounts go through fine."

She nods, continuing to tap through screens. "That suggests a memory allocation issue. The app probably has a buffer limit it's hitting with larger transactions." She looks up. "How old is your phone?"

"Three, maybe four years?"

"That explains it. The app was probably updated for newer devices without proper backwards compatibility." She dives back into the settings. "Let me try something."

I watch, impressed, as she works. Her focus is complete, her movements efficient. There's something beautiful about seeing someone in their element, I realize. The same confidence I feel with a chainsaw in my hands, she has with technology.

"There," she says finally, handing the phone back. "Try it now."

I pull up a test transaction for sixty dollars, bracing for the crash. Instead, the app processes it smoothly, confirming the payment without a hitch.

"How did you do that?" I ask, genuinely amazed.

She shrugs like it's nothing. "The app was trying to use more resources than your phone wanted to give it. I just negotiated a better agreement between them."

"Like a conversation," I say, thinking of what I'd told her about wood.

She looks pleased. "Exactly like that. The phone and the app just needed to understand each other better."

People are gathering now for my demonstration. I should be focusing on them, on the carving, but I find myself reluctant to end this moment with Riley.

"Thank you," I say, meaning it for more than just the phone fix. "Not many people would take the time."

"Not many people would give a stranger a hand-carved fox," she counters with a smile. "Consider us even."

As I turn to greet the small crowd, setting up my tools and explaining what I'll be demonstrating, I'm acutely aware of Riley sitting slightly apart, watching with genuine interest. When I make a joke about the bear's expression, her laugh rises clear above the others.

For the first time in years, I don't mind having an audience. Because it's not really an audience at all.

It's company. Her company.

And as I guide my chisel along the bear's face, revealing the character hidden in the wood, I realize something has shifted in me too—something that's been dormant for a long time, now slowly coming to life under her curious, accepting gaze.

Like the wood taking shape beneath my hands, I feel myself becoming more than I was before she wandered into my workspace.