But then there was Jake. Sneaking up on her. Strong, steady, gruff, kind, gorgeous Jake who also did not want a relationship.
The thing about Jake, though, was that in addition to all that, he was damaged. He was hurt, perhaps irreparably, by all that had happened to him. That wasn’t a recipe for a clean rebound fling. And, perhaps more to the point, he was her friend. He had never given her any indication that he thought of her as more than that.
So yeah, if there was going to be any no-strings-attached-ing, it wasn’t going to be with Jake.
Which was too bad, because she really, really wanted to jump him.
So all she could do was lean against him—in a totally platonic way—and sigh.
But that wasn’t nothing. And this cove felt like a perfect little secret the universe had deigned to reveal to her. She was sitting in maybe the prettiest place she’d ever seen, watching the October sun paint pink stripes across the sky, while her friend—a good, true man—cooked her fish he’d caught himself. She sighed again, but tried to make it a more contented one.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. I was just thinking that this is exactly what I imagined as a best-case scenario when I decided to come to Moonflower Bay.”
“Yeah?”
“I mean, not this exactly, but I had this idea of getting out of my own head, right? I had this romantic notion of standing next to a Great Lake—living next to a Great Lake—being a curative, somehow. Like, it would be beautiful but also…I don’t know, powerful. Capable of scouring me clean.” She lifted her head from his shoulder and shook it. “Listen to me, all hippie-dippy. I sound like Wynd.”
“No. I know what you mean. The lake can be pretty, like it is right now, but you should see it in a storm. It’s raw, merciless power then. You look at it for long enough, in enough different moods, and you do sort of start to think of it as a force. As something with the power to change you.”
“To heal you, you think?”
“No. Not that. It’s a sort of temporary comfort because it’s so indifferent. Whatever happens, the lake goes on.”
“Even when people don’t.”
“Even when people don’t,” he echoed.
She stood and walked to the edge of the deck, picking up her wine along the way. “So you used to fish commercially?”
“Yeah, my dad and his dad before him fished this lake. I grew up on my dad’s boat, and he formally cut me in when I graduated high school. I told you Kerrie went back to work when Jude was three months old?”
She nodded. She had wondered about that. Canada offered a one-year parental leave program, and most women took the whole year.
“Once she went back, we agreed that I’d take the rest of the leave and look after him until he was one,” Jake went on. “It just made more sense because she earned a lot more money than I did. So he and I were going to hang out until he was one, then he was going to go to day care, I was going to go back to work, and Dad was going to retire.”
“And then Jude died and so much for that plan?” He didn’t answer right away, so she turned back to look at him. “I’m sorry. That was too blunt.”
He shook his head. “No. I like blunt. Everyone always walks on eggshells around the topic. I was just thinking about how to answer. All I know is I didn’t want to go out on the boat afterward. I did, a bit, but when Sawyer and I started the carpentry business, it did well from the start. Also, when my mom died, she left her estate to me and my brother. You can’t tell from this”—he waved a hand back at the cottage—“but she did really well. Financially, I mean. She lived a modest life, but she had dealers in Toronto and New York.”
“Wow.”
“And I don’t have any expenses, really. I live here rent-free, though I keep trying to get my brother to take some kind of buyout.”
“And you get your hair cut for free.”
He chuckled. “Exactly.”
He turned to stare at the last of the sunset. “I never really thought about it this way, but I think I stopped wanting to fish because I always imagined Jude and I would do it together someday. He loved the water. You know how some people stick a baby in the car and drive them around to get them to calm down?”
“Yes. I’ve heard lots of stories like that both from my sister and from patients.”
He pointed to a rack near the foot of the deck that contained a canoe. “I’d take him out in the canoe. I rigged it so I could snap the car seat into it. We’d get going, and he’d conk right out. I’ll admit I probably had a romantic notion of this unbroken line of Ramsey men fishing the lake. And then Jude was gone, and…I don’t know.” He shook his head like he was disgusted with himself.
“You lost your vision of the future along with your son,” Nora said softly.
“I never thought about it like that, but yeah, I think so. And Kerrie didn’t want me going out at first. She had this irrational fear that I was going to die, too, so she didn’t like it when I was away all day, especially out on the lake. And for the record, I don’t say ‘irrational’ like I’m dismissing it. We all reacted in our own ways. I respected it.”
She wanted to ask what had happened with Kerrie. She knew, intellectually, that the stats on marriages surviving the death of a child were not great. But it sounded like Kerrie had clung to Jake, at least initially. She also found herself intensely curious over what kind of woman Jake would marry.
“I really only go out on the fishing rig—it’s in a marina up the river a ways—once a week these days, and even that only because people expect it.”
“What do you mean, people expect it?”
“My dad used to pull the boat up to the pier on the little beach every Tuesday afternoon and sell to the townspeople directly. So I do, too. I don’t want to let people down.”
Wow, this guy was honorable to a fault. “I think people would survive without your fish.”
He smirked. “Yeah, but then they’d get their fish from the grocery store.”
“Again, I’m going to go with: I think they’d survive.”
He got up, went to the grill, and picked up a pair of tongs. “After you taste my fish, you’ll see.”
Chapter Nine
A few days later, Nora pushed open the door to Lakeside Hardware before opening the clinic. Four sets of eyes swung toward her as she made her way into the dim, old-school store stocked floor to ceiling with all sorts of hardware.
“Good morning,” she said, wishing she’d changed first. She had taken to getting up early, driving to the clinic, and going for a run before starting her workday. She was suddenly aware of how hot and sweaty and unprofessional she looked.
“Nora.” Karl greeted her. “Nice to see you. I know you know Pearl, but have you met everyone else?”
“Eiko Anzai.” The woman next to Pearl waved. “We met at the salon your first day in town.”
“You’re the newspaper editor.”
“And you’re the new doctor who was supposed to contact me about an interview.”
“Right. Sorry about that. I hit the ground running trying to get the clinic ready to open, and things have been busier than I expected now that I am open.” But actually, maybe now would be a good time for an interview. She and Amber and Wynd were starting to hit their stride, and work was feeling slightly less all-consuming. And the exposure a newspaper article would provide would be good.