Chapter 9: Steel and Glass

Helen didn’t look back as she walked toward the orchard, her boots sinking into the soft, rain-heavy earth of Cypress Bend, but Arthur watched her until the hem of her coat disappeared behind the line of skeletal peach trees. He stood alone in the center of the clearing he’d spent three weeks level-grading. Around him lay the skeleton of a wish: eighty-four structural steel beams, three hundred panes of tempered glass still crated in timber, and a mountain of rivets that caught the pale, watery winter sun.

He picked up the heavy-duty ratcheting wrench, the cold of the tool biting through his leather work gloves. The project was meant to be a surprise for the spring thaw—a controlled environment where Helen could start her heirloom seedlings without the erratic frost-cycles of the valley killing them off. It was also a monument to the permanence he wanted to give her. Wood rotted. Stone shifted. But steel and glass, if engineered with enough precision, held their ground.

Arthur set the first vertical joist into the concrete anchor. He worked with a meticulous, rhythmic silence, the metal clanging in the quiet air like a slow-burning percussion. 

By mid-morning, the four corners were set. His breath came in steady, white plumes. He reached for a cross-beam, a twelve-foot length of galvanized steel that weighed enough to strain his shoulders. He didn’t use the winch; he liked the feel of the weight. He liked knowing exactly how much effort it took to hold the world together. 

He hoisted the beam, stepping onto the second rung of the ladder. He needed to slide the tongue of the horizontal into the groove of the corner post. It required a specific twist of the torso, a bracing of the core. 

Then it happened.

It wasn't a dull ache or a slow build. It was a jagged, diamond-edged spike driven directly through his sternum. 

Arthur’s vision didn’t blur; it sharpened into a terrifying, high-definition clarity. He saw the individual flakes of rust on a discarded bolt five feet below him. He saw the microscopic fraying of his glove. The air in his lungs turned to shattered glass. He couldn't inhale, and he couldn't drop the beam—if he let go now, the weight would shear the vertical post clean off its mounting, ruining weeks of foundation work.

He clamped his jaw so hard his molars screamed. He forced his leaden arms to hold the steel. *One more inch. Slide it in.* 

The metal groaned against metal, a screech that vibrated through his bones. The bolt hole lined up. With a trembling left hand, he shoved the pin through. The structure took the weight.

Arthur collapsed back against the ladder, his hand flying to his chest. His heart wasn't beating; it was a panicked bird thrashing against a cage of ribs. The pain radiated outward, numbing his left pinky and searing his throat. He waited for the darkness to take him. He waited for the ground to rise up and meet him.

"Arthur? Did you drop something?"

Helen’s voice drifted from the porch, distant but sharp. 

The adrenaline hit him like a cold bucket of water. He forced his hand away from his chest and gripped the ladder rail. He swallowed the metallic taste rising in the back of his throat. He couldn't let her see him like this. If she saw him frail, the greenhouse wasn't a gift anymore—it was a burden. A reminder of what was coming.

"Just a bolt, Hel!" he shouted back. His voice sounded thin to his own ears, like paper being torn, but it carried. 

"Don't stay out there if you're losing your grip!" she called. There was a smile in her tone, that effortless, teasing warmth that had anchored him for forty years. "Lunch is in ten!"

"Ten minutes!" he echoed.

He stayed on the ladder until he heard the screen door whistle shut. Only then did he allow himself to slide down to the dirt. He sat in the shadow of the steel frame, pressing his back against the cold concrete. He took tiny, shallow sips of air, afraid that a full breath would re-awaken the spike in his chest. 

He looked at his hands. They were shaking—a fine, high-frequency tremor he couldn't stop. He wiped a bead of cold sweat from his upper lip and stared at the greenhouse. It looked like a ribcage. A great, empty thorax waiting for a heart.

*It’s the cold,* he told himself. *The cold and the lifting. I’m sixty-four, not twenty. It’s a muscle strain.*

But he knew what a muscle strain felt like. This was something else. This was the house signaling a fault in the foundation.

By the time he walked into the kitchen, he had forced the tremor into his pockets. He stripped off his heavy canvas jacket and hung it on the peg, lingering there for a second to ensure his legs would hold. 

Helen was at the stove, stirring a pot of potato leek soup. The steam curled around her face, softening the lines of age, making her look for a fleeting second like the woman he’d met in the university library forty years ago. She turned, a wooden spoon dripping over a paper towel.

"You look pale," she said, her eyes narrowing in that way that usually meant he was about to be interrogated.

"It's twenty degrees out there, Helen. Most people turn pale when they're freezing." He walked to the sink and ran his hands under the hot water. The sensation was agonizing, the blood rushing back into his numbed fingers like a thousand needles. He kept his back to her. 

"You're working too hard on that thing," she said, sliding a bowl of soup onto the wooden table. "It’s a greenhouse, Arthur, not a cathedral. The tomatoes won't mind if the joints aren't perfectly flush."

"I mind," he said. He sat down, careful not to move his chest too quickly. The pain had subsided into a dull, pulsing heat behind his ribs. "If we’re doing it, we’re doing it right. I want that glass to survive a hailback."

"Eat your soup." She sat across from him, resting her chin on her hand. She was watching him. She always watched him. "You're sure you're alright? Your breathing sounds… heavy."

Arthur took a spoonful of soup. It tasted like nothing. "Just the wind. My sinuses are acting up."

He lied with the practiced ease of a man who believed protection was the highest form of love. If he told her, the doctors would come. The tests would come. The "taking it easy" would start. The greenhouse would sit unfinished, a skeleton in the yard, a monument to his failure to provide. He couldn't have her looking at him with pity. He needed her to look at him with the same sturdy reliance she always had. 

"I thought about the glass today," he said, shifting the subject. "I think we should go with the frosted tint on the roof panels. It’ll diffuse the light, keep the leaves from scorching in July."

Helen smiled, though her eyes stayed searching. "Frosted sounds lovely. But only if you promise to take the afternoon off. The steel isn't going anywhere."

"I've got two more joists to set," he said. "Then I'll call it."

But he didn't set two more joists. 

After lunch, once Helen had gone to the study to look over the farm accounts, Arthur went back out. He didn't pick up the wrench. He stood in the center of the frame and looked up at the grey sky. He tried to imagine the glass in place. He tried to imagine the smell of damp earth and blooming jasmine trapped inside while the snow fell outside. 

He reached out and touched the steel. It was solid. It was certain. 

He leaned his forehead against the cold metal, his hand creeping up to clutch at his shirt, right over the spot where the spike had been. The pain was gone, but the ghost of it remained—a shadow sitting in the corner of his consciousness, waiting for him to move the wrong way again.

He stayed there for a long time, a man built of flesh and blood trying to borrow the strength of the iron he’d raised, terrified that for the first time in his life, his will wouldn't be enough to keep the roof from falling in.

He heard the gravel crunch behind him. He straightened instantly, stripping the fear from his face like old paint. 

It was just the wind, kicking a stray bolt across the concrete.

Arthur picked up the bolt, his knuckles white, and tucked it into his pocket before heading back into the house to pretend he was whole. He didn’t see the way the wind caught the blueprint she’d left on the bench, flipping the pages until it reached the blank one at the back, fluttering frantically like a heart held in a tight, cold fist.