For the most part, he viewed her quest as a pet obsession. Something that would pass. She didn’t understand these sort of people. They didn’t care about comfort or money. It wasn’t realistic to think she could talk someone who had lived his entire life in that cabin, on that land, into giving it up. Even if she used all her powers of persuasion, which were plentiful. Henry kept hoping she’d find another spot on one of her epic drives. Everything on his end was coming together, and he was eager to make the final adjustments based on location. He wasn’t going to fight her on it, but he didn’t want her to feel like a failure. It was Mr. Miller’s stubbornness, not her lack of skills.

“I think he just likes his cabin, Claudine.”

“Not everyone likes everything to remain exactly the same—every day, day in, day out. Not all people are like you. You keep working on the designs. I’ll get the property.”

Lately she’d been slipping insults in with normal conversation. Just that morning he’d gotten up a half hour after she did and got a “You certainly slept well.” He pretended like he didn’t hear her. Wine, whiskey, vodka. It hardly mattered anymore. It tasted all the better on the heels of one of her stingers. Her fixation was morphing her into someone he barely recognized. She’d exhausted every idea. Each time the hired hand shooed her off the property, the verbal assaults took off. This became his favorite time. He loved when she’d start insulting him more directly, more harshly. It was like handing him a free pass to start drinking no matter what time of day it was.

Most times, he wedged himself in the built-in breakfast nook beside the kitchen, where he liked to work on sketches of the house. Claudine expected them soon, and usually by the third or fourth or seventh drink he was enjoying it. Having forgotten his inadequacies, he could get lost in the possibility of a high arch of an entrance or the curve of a banister at the bottom of a wide staircase. Through his work he was discovering a lot about himself. How flow was important to him. Getting from here to there. From one room to the next. He spent hours building solid philosophies behind each choice, not caring if the reasoning was apparent only to him. The very thought was a reminder that there was an art to it all. It wasn’t all bullshit. It was how he made sense of the world. He’d sit for hours contemplating what it meant to be deliberate versus instinctual, respecting that they each had their place, especially in relationship to design.