The demo took most of Wednesday. Kayla watched Tomas pull down the tile she'd spent two days setting, working methodically from the corner toward the door, and felt the kind of anger that sits behind your teeth.
"The substrate's wrong," he said, not looking at her. "Moisture barrier's compromised behind the original backing. If we set on top of it, the whole thing lifts in eighteen months."
"You could have checked before I started."
"I did check. The readings were fine. Readings were wrong." He stacked the salvageable pieces in a cardboard flat, handling each one the way you'd handle something you planned to use again. "It happens."
Kayla had been on the job six weeks. Long enough to stop asking where things were, not long enough to stop taking tearouts personally. She'd laid that tile on her knees, level by level, spacers measured twice, thinset mixed exactly to the spec he'd shown her. It had been good work.
"The tile's fine," Tomas said, as though answering something she hadn't said. "Your work was fine. The thing under it was wrong."
"So we start over."
"We start from where it's still good." He pointed toward the far wall. "Those four rows are on solid substrate. We go from there."
She looked at the four rows. Two days of work, and what survived was a strip along the back wall that nobody would ever see behind the vanity.
"That's nothing."
"That's the seed." He stood up, brushed his knees. "Nobody plans these things from finished to finished. You get a starting point, you trust your method, and when you hit something you didn't expect, you back up until you're standing on something solid."
"And if you back up to the beginning?"
"Then you know more than you did." He opened a utility knife and began cutting away the compromised membrane. "I tore out a full kitchen once. Three weeks in. Client had a plumbing reroute nobody documented. Permits said one thing, pipes said another."
"Three weeks?"
"Every tile." He didn't say it like a war story. He said it the way you'd mention that it rained on a Tuesday. "The second time went faster. Not because I rushed. Because I'd already solved every problem the layout could give me. I just had to solve them again on a surface that would hold."
Kayla picked up the flat of salvaged tiles and carried it to the staging area. They were still good. Dusty backing, clean faces. She ran her thumb across one, felt the slight texture that had made the client choose this particular stone.
"The part that bothers me," she said, coming back, "is that the work was right."
Tomas looked at her for the first time all morning. Something in his expression suggested she'd said something he remembered someone else saying, once.
"Yeah," he said. "That's the part that always bothers people. The thing you did was right and it still has to come undone. There's no version of this where right means permanent." He cut another strip of membrane. "But here's the thing nobody tells you when you're starting out: the work was right. It stays right. The tile doesn't know it got pulled up. Your hands still learned what they learned."
He went back to cutting. Kayla went to get the moisture barrier material from the truck. The parking lot was bright and ordinary, sparrows on the median strip, heat shimmering off asphalt. She found the roll in the back of the van, right where he'd said it would be.
By Thursday they were back to where she'd been on Monday, minus the flaw underneath.