Page 17 of Restored By You

Tyler glances at me, then back at Rhett. “Maybe.”

“Grab the camera, then,” he says, the same way he told him to get the shop vac last night—easy, matter of fact, no room for argument, but no pressure either. “Walkthrough footage is good content.”

Tyler stares at him for a beat, then picks up the camera and stands.

I follow Rhett, the camera trailing us, and feel something warm and inconvenient bloom in my chest as I force myself to focus.

Rhett moves through the space the way he does everything else—quietly, deliberately, taking it all in before he speaks. He crouches at the base of the fireplace, running a thumb along the original brick. Stands and checks the window seals. Knocks on walls in a way that must mean something to him because his expression shifts slightly each time.

Tyler follows two steps behind, camera raised, and I’d bet money he’s actually paying attention even though he’d never admit it. He’s a hard nut to crack, my surprise stepbrother, but I’m learning his quirks, slowly but surely.

“Original hardwood under here?” Rhett asks, toeing at the edge of a curling patch of linoleum someone laid over the living room floor sometime in what I can only assume was a deeply misguided decade.

“I think so,” I say, pulling out my phone to reference the notes from the home listing. “The records say the original floors are intact beneath the updates. And I use the term updates very loosely.”

He crouches and peels back the corner of the linoleum with one careful hand, revealing a strip of honey-toned oak beneath.

I gasp. “Oh, my!”

“There they are.” He glances up at me, and something in his expression does something unfair to my pulse. “You’ve got good bones here.”

Tyler snorts behind the camera.

I ignore him and feel my face stretch with excitement. “I know, right!”

Rhett straightens and we move through to the kitchen. The cabinets are a painted-over oak, the countertops are cracked laminate in a color I can only describe as a sad beige, and the linoleum in here is a pattern of brown diamonds that appears to have survived several presidential administrations.

“Original layout is actually smart,” Rhett says, more to himself than to me, turning a slow circle. “Good flow, nice window over the sink, decent square footage.” He opens a cabinet door, checks the hinges. “Bones are solid. This is mostly cosmetic.”

“Mostly?” I ask carefully.

He gives me a look. “Plumbing needs a full assessment after last night. Electrical, too. Odds are it’s been updated once, but not recently.”

“How recently is not recently?”

“I’ll have my guy take a look.” He makes a note on a mini spiral notebook he pulls out of his back pocket. “Could be nothing, could be a full rewire. We won’t know until we get in the walls.”

I nod, a lot. Excessively, really.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Oh, yeah,” I say. “Totally fine.”

Tyler lowers the camera approximately two inches to look at me over the top of it.

“Rewires happen, it’s…fine,” I repeat, mostly to myself at the same time I guesstimate how much something like that would cost considering I am funding this whole thing out of pocket.

The corner of Rhett’s mouth pulls upward. He nods toward the stairs. “Show me the upstairs.”

The upstairs tells a similar story to the main floor—good structure, bad decisions made somewhere between 1975 and 1999. Two bedrooms with original trim hiding under layers of paint, a third that someone converted into a half-hearted office, and a bathroom that, beyond last night’s incident, has good bones but dated everything.

Rhett checks every window, every doorframe, every suspicious water stain on the ceiling with the same focus he’s applied to everything else. Tyler gets it all on camera, occasionally zooming in on something without being asked, which I’m choosing to count as personal growth.

The basement takes another fifteen minutes. I follow Rhett down the narrow stairs and hover at the bottom while he moves through it with a flashlight from his belt, checking the foundation walls, the HVAC unit, the water heater that’s older than I am.

“Heater needs replacing,” he says.

“Noted,” I say, a safe distance away from a suspicious corner I decided not to investigate personally.