"Neither does Noah."
The truth of that settled between them. Daniel finished securing the temporary section, packed his tools, and went to retrieve his son. The kitchen smelled of toasted bread, and the two children were sitting at the island with a worksheet covered in crossed-out numbers. Lily was insisting that one of the answers had been right for the wrong reason, which Noah considered a dangerous philosophical position. Daniel had to call him twice before he agreed to leave.
At the front door, Catherine said, "Thank you for today."
"Fence isn't finished," Daniel replied. "I'll be back early tomorrow."
"I know." She hesitated. "I wasn't talking about the fence."
He held her gaze for one moment, then nodded and walked to the truck. Noah fell asleep within twelve minutes, a cracker still in one hand, and the evening traffic folded around them as they headed back toward Charlotte. Daniel kept his eyes on the road. He told himself he was thinking about concrete curing times and the weather forecast, about the rust on the old hinges and how much new hardware would cost.
He was not thinking about the woman who had held a fence post with both hands as if keeping it upright was the only thing she could control. He was not thinking about the young girl who could remember precisely how many minutes used to pass between her mother's visits. He was certainly not thinking about how Catherine had thanked him while looking at his face rather than his work. But sometime between two highway exits, he realized the small burn on his hand had stopped hurting, and that he had not noticed when it happened.
Friday began two minutes before Daniel had promised it would. At 6:28 he turned off the truck engine outside Catherine's side gate, then sat for a moment checking a message from Noah's teacher about a class field trip. The morning air had the cool edge that sometimes surprised Charlotte in early autumn, and moisture clung to the grass along the fence line. Through the kitchen window, he could see Catherine standing with a mug held in both hands, fully dressed for work long before most people in the neighborhood were awake. She was looking at her phone but did not appear to be reading it.
Daniel unloaded his tools and made his first inspection of the concrete. The new posts were holding, their bases sound and their alignment true. The little details pleased him more than the visual improvement: the drainage channel would keep runoff from collecting at the footings, and the replacement mesh could move slightly under wind pressure without pulling a post out of place. He marked the next measurements with a pencil and laid out his tools on a clean sheet of plywood.