“A little elbow grease?” she asks, a smile teasing on her lips.

I try to look casual. “It’s a bit cold to test the theory tonight.”

“Weird,” she says softly. “I’m not even a little bit cold.”

I clear my throat awkwardly. “All done up here?”

“Almost,” she says, back to business. “My dad thinks we need another bathroom.” As predicted, she sounds unconvinced.

Right. Dad. Business. TV show. Lyle, that fucker. “Yeah, it’s a three-bedroom, four if you count the den conversion. We need at least one more bathroom, up here, and ideally a second one off the master downstairs. For resale value.”

“Where, though? I don’t want to give up this nook.”

“So,” I say. “I’ve got two ideas. One is easier, but would affect your windows…”

“And the other?”

I make a face. “Don’t you want to at least hear the easy one?”

She grins. “Nope.”

“Fine. The other option is to extend out this way.” I point backward over the other side of the stairs, parallel to the bedroom. “This is over the garage and the laundry room. Which means we could run the water and electric straight up.”

“That doesn’t sound hard.”

“That’s probably because I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“It feels like you do,” she says, her eyes doing that sparkling thing again.

I shift my ball cap and replace it. A nervous twitch. Like letting the steam out of a boiling pot, except the boiling pot is me whenever she looks at me like I’m more than I am.

“I’ve talked to Daniel about it. He wasn’t against it, exactly. Just concerned.”

“Concerned about what?”

I chuckle humorlessly under my breath. “That I’m in over my head. Under time constraints, production deadlines, financial ruin, that kind of thing. Particularly,” I remind her, “since this is a flip, and we aren’t building it for us.”

“Us?”

“You, really. We aren’t building it for you,” I say, feeling inexplicably like a jerk.

“I know we aren’t,” Shelby says with a shrug. “That’s the business of flipping. You might fall in love with aspects of a place … and you should, but in the end, it’s a gift for someone else. And I want to give them the best gift.”

I take a deep breath and release it. That’s the part I’m struggling with, I realize. We’re building this for someone else, but I’m still building it for her.

“But why not do it the easy way?”