We did the walk on the sixth, a gray Monday with the kind of cold that got into the glass and stayed there. Inez brought a clipboard and a flashlight, and I brought the boiler schematic I hadn't looked at in years, because I'd promised her every pipe and I intended to keep that promise more literally than she'd probably expected.
The scheduled service tech was due at ten to bleed the lines before the next freeze, and I used his visit as cover to do what I should have done back in 2009 instead of just tracing it on a borrowed drawing. I got down on the concrete beside the manifold in the east propagation house and followed the loop with my own hand, cold iron under my glove, until I found the branch that still ran, exactly as it always had, into what used to be the north wing.
"Here," I said. "This is the line I almost sold out from under you sixteen years ago. Still feeding both buildings off one boiler. I never separated it. Never had the money when it would've mattered."
Inez crouched next to me and ran her own flashlight along the pipe, quiet for a moment. "So if I buy this place and the boiler goes, it's not a repair. It's a rebuild."
"Yes." I didn't soften it. "And it's not the only thing. The west glazing's original, forty years old. I've been patching instead of replacing because patching was what I could afford. The irrigation pump's on borrowed time. I haven't budgeted properly for either." I took her to a patched panel and held the flashlight while she examined its edge. She pressed the old seal with her thumbnail, then wrote on her clipboard. "Put that in the file," she said. I marked the panel on the schematic. It looked small there, one penciled cross, nothing like the cost of replacing a whole run.
She sat back on her heels. "You're telling me this now, during the sale, instead of letting me find it myself after closing."
"I'm telling you now," I said, "because I don't want you buying gratitude. I want you buying a building, with its actual bones, bad pipe included."
She was quiet long enough that the service tech's radio crackled somewhere behind us, calling out line pressure to nobody in particular. Then she said, "Three-ten doesn't work anymore. Not if I'm also carrying a boiler rebuild inside five years."
"I didn't expect it would, once you knew."
"I want two-eighty," she said, "with a repair reserve built into the note schedule, so if the boiler goes in year two I'm not choosing between paying you and fixing the heat."
It was less than I'd offered her two days before, less than I'd quietly hoped the number would settle at, and some old reflex in me wanted to say that taking less was its own kind of penance, a fair price for what I owed her. I didn't say it. I'd learned, slowly, that the reflex itself was part of what I needed to stop doing. "Two-eighty," I said instead. "With the reserve. All right."
"Don't thank me for talking you down," she said, standing, brushing concrete dust off her knees. "I'm not doing you a favor. I'm just not buying a building I don't understand." And somehow that, more than any kindness she could have offered, made me trust the whole arrangement more than I had an hour before.