She nodded, then handed me a card instead of letting me go through the office line. « Use this number when you come back, » she said, directly to me. « It will save time.
» There was nothing strange in the way she said it, nothing I could point to. Still, I looked at the card once I was in the van, with the rain still hammering the roof, and sat there a second longer than I needed to, because all I’d done was my job, but somehow it didn’t feel like only that anymore.
I told myself I wasn’t thinking about Samantha after that stormy service call, which was obviously a lie because I checked that card more than once the next day. Her number sat in my phone with no message under it, no reason for it to matter, and still I caught myself wondering what her house looked like when it wasn’t full of alarms and people talking over each other.
I also kept hearing that one line in my head, « You were the first person who made it feel fixable. » Nobody says that to me. Usually, I fix the problem, hand over the invoice, and disappear.
3 days later, right around lunch, my phone buzzed while I was parked outside a strip mall job. It was her. Not a long message, just « The terrace lights are flickering again.
I’d rather not have another circus. Can you come by this evening? » I stared at it longer than I should have, then answered that I could be there after 6. By the time I pulled up to the house again, the sky was clear and the place looked completely different.
No storm, no panic, no people running around, just low light across the driveway, a wide view over the hillside, and the kind of silence money seems to buy. She opened the door herself before I even knocked.
« No emergency this time, » she said. « You text like it was one. That was deliberate. I wanted the same electrician. »
I laughed once, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do with that. Inside, the house felt warmer than I remembered.
The sharp edges from the first night were gone. I followed her through the back hall, checked the terrace run, and found the problem fast. One of the temporary connections I’d put in to stabilize things had done its job, but the damaged section needed the full replacement now.
