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"What is it?"

"Water damage behind the drywall."

I take another look under the sink and find more corrosion. Not just the little leak I came here to fix.

"Is that bad?"

"It's not good."

"How not good?"

"I need to look at the other bathrooms."

Katy leads me down the hall, and for the first time since I got here, I'm focused on work instead of the sound of her voice. Eight bathrooms in this house, Phil told me. Yes, I questioned him too, but he confirmed it: eight bathrooms. I check them methodically, moving fast now that I'm thinking again.

The second bathroom has another leak under the sink.

The third has water getting into the wall.

By the time I reach the master bathroom and find more damage, I already know what I'm dealing with.

Every bathroom has some version of the same problem. Old plumbing. Small leaks that have been ignored for too long. Water damage that's been building for years.

"How bad is it?"

Katy's in the hallway when I come back downstairs, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed and one foot propped behind her on the baseboard. Her hair is completely down now, waves falling past her shoulders.

"Bad."

"Like expensive bad or like 'the house might fall down' bad?"

"Expensive bad. The house won't fall down, but your plumbing is failing in eight different places. Not disastrous, but something that should be fixed. Regular maintenance preserves value, right?"

"Eight? All of them?"

"All of them."

She runs a hand through her hair, pushing it back from her face. "My dad's going to love that. My parents get back next week, but I do have a flight tonight. A trip with my friends."

"What time?"

She checks her phone. "Ten PM, yeah. I think. Nothing’s confirmed. Is that odd, or what? But we can figure something out. You could come back tomorrow for the rest of it?"

"Yeah. Okay."

"Are you hungry? I made pasta earlier. We could eat, and then you could come back in the morning?"

Dinner is a bad idea, but it's not the first today. "Okay."

The kitchen is big, open-plan with an island and bar stools. Katy plates rigatoni with red sauce, nothing fancy, and sets two plates on the granite countertop. Two forks, two glasses of water. She sits across from me at the island.

The barstool is too small for me. My knees bump the underside of the counter, and I feel like an adult sitting at a child's desk. But the pasta is good, and she's still talking, though something's different now. The rambling is slower, more directed. She's asking questions and waiting for answers instead of launching straight into her next tangent.

"How did you know you wanted to run a business instead of just doing the work?"

"I didn't plan it. Hired one guy, then another. It grew."

"But you must have wanted to grow it, right? You didn't accidentally hire forty-three people."