Maya's POV
The house looked different in daylight.
I'd seen it twice before. Once, when Luca first showed me and once after, the walls came down. Both times it had been a project. A structure in progress. Something I was looking at from the outside.
This time, Aria ran up the front steps ahead of us and stood at the door like she lived there, and I felt the difference in my chest.
Luca unlocked the door.
She went in first.
I followed and stood in the entrance and looked at what six weeks of work had done. The kitchen floor was new. Pale wood, broad planks, exactly right for the bones of the house. The walls were opened up the way he'd planned, the space between the kitchen and the front room gone, the whole floor breathing now.
"Wow," Aria said.
It was the right word.
"The floor w
