Her first week at the house went by slowly. Slowly, to the point that it shocked her. She and Ruth were getting more settled, though she didn't dare get so comfortable that they'd have another afternoon like the one in the gazebo. That didn't sit right with her, or rather her resolve to not get attached. She didn't want to be in that situation again. So she did her best not to pull away completely. Just... pull back a little. She didn't call her Gran, and Ruth didn't call her Ducky. It was better that way anyhow.

She got a routine down quickly. She woke up at a reasonable time, ranging from 8am to 9, ate breakfast then went for a run. Following her run would be a nice cool shower, a snack, and then she'd enjoy a cup of coffee on the porch, usually the side that overlooked Sam's work space. He rarely came as early as he did the morning he woke her. But he had no schedule, he came and went whenever. Her afternoons were either spent with a book or going through the boxes of her things that were sitting in the attic, after Ruth asked if there was anything she still wanted.

Then the late afternoon and evening would usually be sitting outside again, waiting for Ruth to come along and chat Sam up since she rarely felt like interfering while he was around the power tools. She understood the summer wouldn't be a thrilling one, but it was moving more slowly than she anticipated.

But at least there were days of the week where things were changed up, and a different rhythm set in.

Andy watched as Boo ran circles around Sam as he unloaded the roofing tin from the truck a couple of days later, barking and howling, demanding he be allowed to have free run of the property.

"Okay." Sam said sharply, gesturing widely, letting Boo know he was free.

He heaved the sheets onto his shoulder and carried them out to the base of the to-be-greenhouse structure, and let them crash to the ground, banging against one another. Then he checked his wrist watch, and looked to her bedroom window, and a small smile crept to her mouth. He must be wondering if she was awake yet.

"Sam!" Cecelia called out from her sear at the table. Sam looked off to the gazebo, where Andy was sitting on the steps, her grandmother and her friends crowded around a table. He turned towards them and raised his hand in a wave, and Andy kept a smile of her own pressed tightly between her lips.

"Hello Mrs. Irving." Sam called back, then nodded to Ruth who sat there smiling, amused.

Today, Andy learned, was the weekly cribbage get together. A couple of Ruth's neighbours from way down the road stopped by to gossip and sip iced tea, the game a simple excuse. Ruth told her sometimes they abandoned the crib game only a couple of hands in, start talking about the accomplishments of their children and grandchildren, the secrets of the housewives in town, things overheard at the hair salon. Sam had overheard it all. Ruth doubts there isn't one bit of gossip he's missed.

Cecelia returned his wave, a raised eyebrow and playful smile on her lips, Andy watched Sam get a little sheepish, stuffing his hands into his pockets. He turned away quite quickly, pretending to be too busy to chat. They liked to flirt with him, and it was harmless, Ruth said.

Sometimes he even played along, but today, with Andy sitting on the gazebo steps reading her book, he must not have felt like he could get away with it. Ruth was bad enough, teasing him well after they leave. That was kind of becoming their thing... getting on each other's cases.

"I do love when the weather changes. I wish you hosted every week Ruth." Cecelia noted, catching Andy's attention, as she was practically yelling it after Sam. "Those t-shirts..."

"Cecelia." Ruth warned, laughing along all the while.

"When it's too warm for a t-shirt at all-"

"Cecelia!"

"Oh Ruth, I'm just admiring the scenery. Arthur maybe cynical and have a bum knee, but I love him. He's my cynic."

"And even then, Arthur didn't look like that back in his prime." Patty snickered, ignoring Cecelia's glare. "A fine specimen that man is ladies. No doubt about it."

Andy shook her head, laughing along with the other two women at the table and tried to focus on her place on the page again, but wasn't allowed to.

"Andy, dearest, you're unattached aren't you?" Patty remarked, sounding so much like her Great Aunt Matilda.

Andy just smiled tightly, nodding, not trusting herself to say something sweet and polite in return.

She watched Patty's eyebrow go up and her lips purse, and immediately dove back into the pages of her book, wishing she had the ability to teleport herself out of there. Hell, she'd go and hang around Sam instead, but she didn't think she could deal with the little old' ladies looks and laughs.

"He's unattached as well. Right Ruth?"

"I think so, yes... He hasn't been back long. We haven't chatted much. But- he's here. I can't imagine a girlfriend being aright with such a long absence." Her grandmother noted.

Andy thought about that. His "long absence", as Ruth put it, from the city. Why there seemed to be so many in his life. Who is this man? Who leaves their lives behind to fix an old lady's house and deal with a not-so-nice sister anyway?

Why does she want to know so badly?

"Hmm. You should offer him a lemonade." Cecelia laughed, giving Andy a suggestive look that had her on her feet in two seconds flat.

"Andy, Love, sit down, they're just being uh. What do you call them? Cougars?" Ruth laughed, scooping up the card deck and the board. "We'll go inside, you stay out here. It's gotten too windy anyway."

Ruth was already standing before Andy could object, and her friends followed, offering cheeky smiles on their way by, making her feel foolish.

She can take teasing. She got it all the time. Hazing, ribbing, goading... she's a good sport. But, for some reason, she just feels exposed in front of her grandmother. Ruth has always been looking right past her tells and walls since she was a kid, and she feels like it's not much different. She feels like she doesn't have a poker face anymore.

She continued standing on the steps as the women disappear into the house and watched Sam measure the tin on his makeshift bench, scribbling down numbers on his yellow pad of paper every so often.

He was leaned over, staring at the page, deep in thought, blocking everything out; Boo, who was splashing around in the creek, cooling off, the ladies hooting and laughing in the living room now... and her. Though she was doing nothing to attract attention... she felt oddly irrelevant without his.

She dog eared her page and laid the book on the stair she was on, making her way down to the grass. Boo intercepted her on her way to Sam, drawing attention to himself after sniffing her properly, placing where he knew her from. He followed close behind her as she marched on to his owner, whining a little, tail wagging quickly behind him.

That got Sam's attention, the whining, and he looked up to Andy with a confused look on his face.

"What's up?" He asked, figuring she was interrupting for a good reason.

Maybe she should've brought him something to drink. But he hadn't actually done any physical labour yet...

"Don't you have a day job?" She blurted instead, regretting it almost immediately.

Sam's eyebrows crept up and he took a tiny step back, opening himself up to Andy, facing her now, maybe to get a handle on which field that flew out of.

"What?"

"I'm sorry, I mean- I- What do you... do?" She asked again, this time honestly just asking, not trying to-

She just wants a better handle on him.

"What do I do?" He repeated, eyebrows drawn together and eyes squinted, making her feel even more insane.

"Well, you're up here a lot, apparently, but you live in the city... This just seems like a getaway place or something. So I was just wondering..."

She felt as stupid as she was acting, but unfortunately being self aware didn't stop her. The beat where Sam's face went from 'what the hell' to slightly more understanding calmed her very little. She still felt like a petulant child mostly, with how he was watching her.

"I'm a cop."

And it became Andy's turn to take a step back.

That she did not see coming. A little warning from Ruth might've been nice. Especially since she had been so quick to tell Sam about how she wanted to be one as a child, and maybe because there was a bit of a rough patch when she asked about his education.

"Seriously?" She asked, genuinely surprised. Shocked, even.

"What, that so hard to believe?" He smiled, tightly, a little sarcastic as he turned back to his table, leaning over it again, looking at the numbers on the page.

"Yeah... since you didn't mention it before." She scoffed back.

She didn't know what to expect when she asked him, but it wasn't that.

"And since when do cop's get months off at a time? I mean, I think I'd remember that being a perk of the job. My dad-"

"Is a detective, I know, Andy. I'm in the TPS too." He sighed, picking up his measuring tape again. "I'm a UC cop. Trying to get a spot in Guns and Gangs."

"As a detective?"

"Yeah."

"So you're technically a detective?"

"I guess."

"And how old are you?" She blurted, once again, just satisfying her curiosity while she was already on a rampage.

"Twenty-eight. What does that matter?"

Andy stopped as he continued past her to grab some wood, sliding it onto the table to be cut.

"So why didn't you tell me?" She asked, studying his build, his face too. The face that didn't seem to be giving much away right now. Other than that she was annoying him.

"Why didn't I tell you I'm a cop?"

"Yeah."

"It didn't come up."

Andy groaned, dropping her head back in frustration, then rubbed at her temples.

"Um, how can you say that? It totally did!"

"We were talking about you, not me." He said simply, standing up face her again. He was holding something in his hands now, something she hadn't seen him pick up.

He handed her a pair of safety glasses, before dropping a pair over his own eyes, and she noticed that this conversation didn't warrant a break in his efforts. So she really did have awful timing with him.

"You might want to plug your ears." He said, turning to the ban saw, ready to bring it down.

She listened to him, slipping the glasses on first, and watched him get saw the massive beam.

When he let go and the motor stopped, he took the small piece of scrap wood, and turned tossing it into the back of his truck. But while his back was turned, the larger piece began to slip off the table now that it's mass had lessened and it's weight no longer evenly distributed, threatening to tumble onto the clueless dogs head.

Andy saw it out of the corner of her eye and turned back quickly, wrapping both her arms around it quickly. It was heavier than she expected and the grunt that came from her lips caught Sam's attention. He didn't waste any time chasing Boo away and helping her heave it back up.

It took her a moment to slow her heartbeat, trying not to think about what might've happened if she hadn't caught it.

"Dumb mutt," Sam breathed as they dropped it down, crisis averted. "And you. you can't just come over here while I'm working, you're distracting me."

Andy grinned smugly, enjoying that fact that he had lost his cool the second time in the short time they've known each other.

"Please, that was not my fault."

"Well the dog loves you, so yeah, he follows you around and that happens. He usually leaves me alone."

She took a minute to stop fighting him and smiled proudly, happy that the dog liked her that much. That he hated how much Boo loved her. As much as he had made her nervous, she really liked this, getting him wound up. Making that little vain in his neck pop, making his eyes pop out of his head a little.

She couldn't understand why, but more than all that, she loved watching the way his chest heaved as his breathing went back to normal after yelling. Well, he hasn't yelled. But raised his voice to win an argument.

"No, you know what it is?"

"What?" He snapped, shortly, not finding as much amusement in this as her.

"You need another set of hands."

It took a minute for Sam to understand what she was saying, but eventually his face went to pure disbelief and he laughed.

"What, you?"

"Yeah, me. You don't have to pay me, and I don't have anything better to do anyway."

"Nice." He said sarcastically. "You know you're supposed to be spending time with Ruth, right?"

"Oh please. I can't be with her every waking minute. Besides, this is the first summer I haven't worked since I was fifteen, I'm getting restless."

Sam seemed to consider it for a moment, before shaking his head, but Andy jumped in one last time before he could refuse her.

"Just one week. If at the end of the week, you don't want me to keep helping, then I'll stop." She insisted, trying to come off more sincere now that she was asking a favour of him.

He seemed to have cooled off from the whole 'you're in my way' spiel, and was now expelling a long and rough breath, groaning as he nodded in agreement.

"Sam, seriously, I'm not going to be in the way. I just need something to do."

"Well we're not short of that." He said, one corner of his mouth turned up as he reached into his back pocket.

He produced the list for the week. Things Ruth wanted looked at or fixed, and it was endless. Things that really didn't need to be done.

Clean out the gutters, although it hadn't rained at all in the week and a half she'd been there. Paint the shutters, though it looks like no one has given them any thought in the last twenty years. Add gravel to the driveway.

Other than the odd fix ups inside, and the obvious upkeep outside, the jobs seemed like busy work. And Andy couldn't imagine why her grandmother was thinking up reasons to keep Sam around.

"If you're a UC cop, that doesn't explain why you're up here for so long."

He was refolding the list when that idea popped out of her mouth, and he stopped for a moment, before turning his gaze to her, shields up, from what she could tell.

"Once you've done a job, you get time off." He said coldly, eyes down, not caring to elaborate.

She knew that. But it was usually weeks, not months. But Sam didn't stick around for the follow up, he picked up the beam and carried it away, making room for something else.

"You can start tomorrow."

Andy left Sam alone the rest of the day. She wasn't really sure where they were after that abrupt end to the conversation. She knew she definitely wasn't going to revisit the topic of his latest undercover stint, but man did she feel like she was on a dangerous edge with him. Working so closely might not be the best idea anymore. But she was in it now.

She came back into the house to find quiet, oddly enough. The ladies were shushing each other when she came around the corner to the living room, and they were all giving themselves away with just their faces. Cecelia was concentrating awfully hard on her cards, refusing to look at Andy, Patty couldn't keep the smile off her lips and not so subtle looks at Andy, and Ruth just looked sorry. They probably heard a great deal of the conversation, the loud parts at least.

Andy just shrugged it off, smiling, barely, and disappeared into her bedroom, closing the door a little too loudly.

Her first day with Sam...

She should've been prepared, considering how they left things the day before. He wasn't feeling conversation. Every so often, whether out of irritation or habit, he'd clench the fingers of his left hand into a fist, and would grimace in response. Sometimes it happened to be when she spoke, but after she shut up for a few minutes, she noticed him doing it still.

He was making good progress on the greenhouse, from her limited understanding. He had the walls built, he just needed to put them on. Once he had that done, he could put the roofing tin in the sides, and all that was left was to find what material he was going to use for the clear roof. But that had little to do with her.

"Sam?"

"What?" He replied, head still down, trying to get the last few frames of the last wall totally secure.

Andy had wanted to apologize, or say something that might make him smile, make this a little less torturous for them both. But she came up empty when she opened her mouth.

She would've stayed quiet, but Sam finally, finally looked at her, and for the first time, he didn't look mad or irritated. So she didn't bring it up again.

"Want some water?" She finally asked, pushing herself up from her kneeling position next to Sam.

His eyes softened slightly, reminding her that he didn't always wear a stony expression, and he nodded.

"Thanks yeah. And if you're hungry, you know, take a break. Sometimes I forget to do that." He admitted, leaning away from the work in front of him, stretching his legs slowly as he stood.

Andy nodded and was about to leave him be when he reached for elbow, and held on to stop her, and then some.

"Andy, I'm uh- Thanks for helping me out. I think this is gonna be a good thing."

She grinned a little, hearing him say that, unprompted, and she wasn't forgetting what she'd been wanting to say either.

"And I'm sorry about yesterday. You don't need to tell me anything. It's none of my business. Sometimes I just push too hard. I get it."

Andy took a step back toward him, since her feet had been on either side of his toolbox when he turned her.

"Nothing I can't handle, McNally." He smirked, tongue poking the side of his cheek. "It wasn't you. It's my sister. Sometimes she just, gets under my skin."

"She shouldn't mess with a guy with a badge." Andy joked, getting a wider smile out of Sam.

"That kind of thing means very little to Sarah."

"Yeah, but apparently there isn't much you can't handle. I mean, you're basically a handy man extraordinaire."

Sam finally just shook his head slightly, eyes dropping from her stare and he pulled away a bit, causing her to realize how close her step forward had brought them.

"Uh, Sarah kinda gets a pass with me. She's- She hasn't had an easy life. Not by any stretch."

Andy perked up at that admission, and while she wanted to press, while she wanted to him to offer more than that. She didn't press. She took another step away, clearing the tool box this time.

"I'll be back in just a sec."

After a quiet dinner that night, Andy asked Ruth about Sarah, about how they met, how often they spoke, and her relationship with Sam. Andy's inquisitive nature didn't manage to escape Ruth's attention, and she thought about what drove Andy's thirst for knowledge when it came to Sam. She finally fully believed what she thought when the two had first met. There was an energy there. One they needed to explore.

"Why does Sam come up to see her for so long?" Andy asked, having checked off most things on her list.

"Dear, you can keep asking me all these roundabout questions, but eventually we'll only be left with the one you really want the answers to."

Andy sunk in her seat a bit under the eye of her grandma.

"What happened to her?"

Ruth seemed surprised that Andy had put that much together. That there was one large event that had Sarah pegged differently than anyone else she and Sam talked about. With a detective for a father, she shouldn't be surprised, but she is. Now she wonders if Andy would be able to be anything other than a cop.

Ruth put her mug of tea down in front of herself, thinking about how much to say, if she should redirect her to Sam. She shuts that thought down quickly, seeing as Sam was too unpredictable in that respect. It may be better if Andy knows and then she'll put a cap on this line of questioning. It tempted her, but even Andy knew what was coming.

"Something no young girl, no woman, should endure Andy. I'm sure you know what I mean." She said, vaguely, hoping it was enough to keep her quiet on the subject. Quiet until Sam, if he chooses, discloses more information.

Andy nodded solemnly, a little resigned, as Ruth expected. She leaned forward in her seat, placing a hand over Andy's, stroking her thumb over her knuckles briefly.

"And if you have any questions, about our family, all you need to do is ask Andy. Those answers, I can give you."

Andy pulled her hand back, not right away and not abruptly. But Ruth knew she went one step too far. That subject was one that Andy was no where ready to broach.

"Thanks," She replied quietly, her edge of control slipping.

"Goodnight, Love."

"Goodnight."