Chapter 36: THE UNIVERSE IS AGAINST ME TODAY
Chapter 37
Lumi
Neve’s eyes swept the lobby the second she stepped fully inside, they didn’t stop moving.
She took in the cracked ceiling tiles, the bare concrete floor, the dead reception desk with its peeling laminate surface.
Then she looked at the dirty rubber gloves I was still wearing on my hands, and the mop Ren was holding behind me, and her face did something complicated.
"Wait," she said slowly, pointing between the two of us. "Are you both... cleaning this place yourselves?"
"We started on the corner office," I said, pulling the gloves off my hands. "We cleared the broken furniture and scrubbed the floors. Sarah’s team checked the roof and the wiring this morning."
Neve stared at me for another full second, then looked at her brother. "Ren. You carried boxes."
"I’m aware," he said flatly.
"You hate carrying boxes."
"Neve."
"You once made Derek carry your gym bag from the car to the front door of your own building because, and I quote, that’s what he’s paid for." She turned back to me, and her expression had shifted into something genuinely bewildered.
"Why aren’t you hiring a cleaning crew? Between the two of you, you could have a full team in here by tomorrow morning."
I pulled off the second glove and folded both of them neatly over the edge of a cardboard box. "Because I’m not spending money on a cleaning crew when I have two working hands and time," I said, keeping my voice light but firm.
"Every coin I save right now goes into the actual renovation. The structural repairs, the electrical rewiring, the elevator. I need to be smart about where the money goes, Neve, and I also need to be here.
I need to be in this building, doing the work with my own hands, because this is my mother’s company and I don’t want to just write cheques at it from the outside. I want to understand every inch of what needs fixing before anyone else touches it."
Neve held my gaze for a moment, and something shifted in her expression, something quiet and soft that she didn’t say straight away.
Then she reached up, unclipped her handbag from her shoulder, set it carefully on the edge of the reception desk, and picked up the spare pair of rubber gloves sitting on top of the open cardboard box.
"Right," she said, pulling them on with a sharp snap. "Where do we start?"
"Neve, you don’t have to...you just..."
"Lumi." She cut me off with a single look, the kind she had perfected over fifteen years of friendship, the one that said the conversation was already over and she had already won. "Show me where we start."
Ren watched the whole exchange from the corridor entrance without saying a single word.
I caught the faintest trace of something on his face as he turned back toward the office, something that looked almost like relief, though he buried it quickly enough that I wasn’t sure I’d seen it at all.
But then I had to keep my distance from him, so I acted like I didn’t see him.
We went back to the corner office together, and within ten minutes Neve had already decided that the broken desk we’d dragged halfway out needed to go all the way out, and she was helping Ren lift the other end of it down the corridor toward the skip outside.
"Left a bit," she instructed, walking backwards with her end of the desk gripped in both gloved hands.
"I know how a corridor works," Ren said behind her.
"You’re about to take out that light fitting."
"I’m not."
"You’re literally about to..."
There was a dull metallic clang as the corner of the desk clipped the wall bracket overhead, and a small shower of plaster dust rained down onto Ren’s hair.
Neve burst out laughing, a full sound that rang off the walls, and even Ren, shaking the dust out of his hair with one hand while somehow still holding the desk steady with the other, made a low sound in his chest.
I stood at the office doorway watching them, and for a moment, the guilt and the heaviness all fell completely away
It was nice watching them bickering. You could see they value each other dearly.
I couldn’t come between this. I can’t. I pushed my focus back to the work ahead.
We worked steadily for the next hour, and slowly the corner office began to look like something almost inhabitable. The cracked plaster was still there, and the window frame still had a split running down the left side, but the floor was clean and the broken furniture was gone.
I was scrubbing the last stretch of skirting board when Neve stopped beside me and looked around the empty room with a long, quiet look on her face.
"Your mum used to have a photo of you on her desk," she said softly. "A little one in a silver frame. You were maybe five or six, and you were sitting on the bonnet of her car in the car park out front, wearing her reading glasses and holding a folder like you were about to conduct a board meeting." My hands slowed on the skirting board.
"I saw it the last time I came into her office to ask why I haven’t seen you around." Neve continued, and her voice had dropped into something careful and warm.
I remembered when she was referring to. It was when my dad first left us. My mom had stopped me from going out because people were talking.
Those times were really tough on her because my dad didn’t just cheat, he left us and chose someone else.
People said she was someone who’d bought a man with money, brought him into a community where he didn’t belong because she was wealthy.
But her money couldn’t keep him, so all that happened to her was her fault.
Thinking about it now, I still wonder if she died because he left or because of the words of people.
She used to be the most strongest person I know. And it still hurts that she’s no more.
"She said you were the most determined person she had ever met in her life, and she was including herself in that." Neve said bringing me from my train of thought.
"She would be so proud of you right now, Lumi. So completely and totally proud of you. You know that, right?"
I sat back on my heels and looked at my hands in the rubber gloves, I pressed my lips together hard and breathed through my nose until the tightness in my throat eased enough to speak.
"I hope so," I said, and my voice came out smaller than I intended.
Neve crouched down beside me and put her arm around my shoulders, squeezed once, firm and certain. I leaned into it for exactly three seconds before I straightened up and got back to scrubbing.
By half past five, the light through the glass had turned amber and the temperature inside the building had dropped enough that I could feel it in my fingers through the gloves.
Neve had been crouching over the far corner of the room for the last twenty minutes, cleaning the base of the old built-in shelving unit with a level of focus that would have impressed any professional crew.
But her movements had started to slow and she kept shifting her weight from one knee to the other in the way she always did when her back was starting to bother her, though she would never in a million years admit it.
"Neve," I said, straightening up and pressing my palm against the small of my own back. "We should probably stop for today. We’ve done enough."
"I’m fine," she said immediately, not looking up.
"Your back is..."
"My back is absolutely fine."
"Neve, we can come back tomorrow and..."
"Lumi, I said I’m..."
"We should stop for today."
"I think we should stop for today."
The words came from behind me at the exact same moment mine did, low, flat and completely certain.
Both Neve and I turned our heads at the same time to look at Ren, who was leaning in the office doorway with his arms folded across his chest, looking at his sister.
There was a beat of complete silence.
Neve looked at me, and looked at her brother, a slow smile spread across her face that I couldn’t quite read.
"Alright," she said simply, peeling off her gloves. "We stop."
She stood up, stretching her arms above her head, and reached for her bag on the windowsill.
But before she picked it up, she looked between the two of us again with that same quiet, particular smile, and she said, almost to herself, "It’s really good, you know. That you two are close."
She said it so easily and so casually, but something in the way her eyes lingered just a fraction of a second too long made the back of my neck go warm.
I couldn’t say anything.
The restaurant Neve picked was a small Italian place two streets from the building. Warm, loud and smelling of garlic. After a day of dust and cold air it felt like being wrapped in something kind.
We took a corner table and ordered quickly, and for a while the conversation moved easily.
Neve had opinions about how the company should go, sharp and considered ones. Listening to her think out loud about the space made the whole project feel less enormous and more like something with edges and shape.
It was only when the mains arrived and the conversation found a natural lull that Neve set down her fork, picked up her wine glass, and looked at Ren with a slightly different expression.
"Ren, what about your fiancé?" She asked.
My hands on the wine glass tightened.
Seem like the universe is against me today.
