Wet Plans And Dry Stone
By the end of the first week they had established that they disagreed about almost everything.
Not the big things. The big things — that the keeper's quarters should be preserved, that the lantern mechanism deserved to be read as a piece of nineteenth-century industrial design rather than replaced wholesale, that the 1998 work had been partly shoddy and partly criminal — they agreed on by the second afternoon and did not need to discuss again. It was the small things. The scale of a drawing. Whether a wall was load-bearing. Whether the particular seam of mortar above the kitchen door was 1870s or 1930s. Whether to photograph in the morning or the afternoon. Whether the smell in the back hallway was damp rising through the floor or condensation from the unventilated cistern, which was a question that mattered for about four different reasons and which they argued about across three days.
Giulia's argument style was forensic. She set out her reasoning in the order she had arrived at it, numbered her points when she felt that a point might be lost, and ended with the phrase *but I'm open to being wrong*, which she used sincerely and also as a small diplomatic weapon, because it made it difficult for the other person to continue being sharp.
Sara's argument style was the opposite. She heard Giulia out, said *mm*, went away, did something else for two hours, came back, and