Chapter 43B: Thirty Days

A month and a half changed the land. Emiko is now eight months along.

It did not make the estate complete. Nothing so large, so carefully planned, or so expensive could rise fully formed in six weeks. But the property no longer looked like an empty tract waiting for someone to imagine a future upon it.

The wrought-iron fence stood along the front boundary now, black and elegant against the early light. Stone pillars marked the completed main gate. Cameras and access controls had been worked into the design so discreetly that a visitor might see only ironwork, masonry, and a long drive beyond.

The western service gate was different.

It was not beautiful.

It was useful.

Concrete mixers, excavators, gravel haulers, utility crews, lumber deliveries, and heavy equipment entered there. The new loop road carried them around the work zones without bringing them near the current residence or forcing them to reverse through the future barnyard. A tanker had arrived three days before to begin the underground fuel-compound work. The construction superintendent, who had objected to the extra grading, had since admitted that Kaito’s loop-road requirement had saved his crews more than one impossible maneuver.

Kaito had only nodded.

He had expected it would.

On the northern rise, the main residence had a foundation.

The ground had been cut, leveled, drained, reinforced, and poured. Pale concrete basement walls stood against the brown earth. The protected lower structure beneath the future house had been formed in concrete and steel. Above it, framing had begun. The first walls rose cleanly against the sky, and the outline of the house could finally be seen from the road.

Farther west, the maintenance-building slab had been poured.

The barn pad had been graded.

Paddock drainage was in place.

The first interior lines of fencing had begun to appear across the southern fields.

The laboratory site had been leveled and staked, though Hana had held the foundation start until she was satisfied with the laboratory’s internal plan: access, work flow, equipment rooms, storage, receiving, and the separation between ordinary offices and secure research areas.

The helipad was still only a cleared rise beyond the western trees.

The greenhouse was a rectangle of white paint and survey flags, waiting for Midori to decide exactly what it would become.

The estate was becoming real.

But the nursery was finished first.

It was in the family’s present home, at the end of the upstairs hall. The future estate house would not be ready before the baby came, but the nursery did not need to wait for foundations, framing, or crews.

Kaito had chosen the paint himself.

It was not bright pink. He had rejected bright pink after standing in the paint store for almost twenty minutes with a row of sample cards in one hand and the increasingly amused clerk pretending not to watch him take the decision too seriously.

“This one,” he had finally said.

The color was called Rosewater.

It was warm without being loud. Soft without being washed out. In morning light it was nearly white. By evening it carried the faintest bloom of pink across the walls.

Midori had approved at once.

Hana had examined the sample and said, “It is sensible.”

Kaito had accepted that as praise.

Now he stood on a folding step stool with a small roller in his hand, smoothing the final strip near the ceiling. He had taped every edge himself. The straight lines mattered to him.