“Of course,” Sawyer said quickly. Jake tried not to roll his eyes. They didn’t do decks. They did fine carpentry. As in bookshelves. One-of-a-kind pieces of furniture. Canoes for rich people with more money than sense. “But no charge.”
“You can’t not charge me!”
“Consider it a welcome-to-town gift.”
She started to protest, but Eve chimed in. “Sawyer and Jake are basically this town’s fairy godfathers. Sawyer in a professional capacity, of course, but Jake is always fixing stuff or building stuff.”
“Yeah,” Maya agreed. “Like, if you ever need the back of a wardrobe surgically removed, Jake’s your man.”
Well, busted. He figured he had the time and he had the skills. And he hated seeing a job that needed doing sit undone.
Which was how he found himself signed up to build a deck for Nora Walsh, aka Dr. Hon, aka the pixie doctor.
It occurred to him that he sure had a lot of names for someone he barely knew.
As she unlocked her car, Nora’s head was spinning. So many new faces and names. So much talking. Well, except for Jake. The interesting thing was that everyone accommodated his silence. It was like they expected it, like it didn’t register as out of the ordinary. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he’d just always been that way.
This head spinning was not necessarily a bad thing, though. Nora felt…not happy exactly, but hopeful. Like maybe she’d turned a corner. This week she’d made huge progress on the clinic, gotten most of the important furniture into her new place, and finished things by hanging out at a bar with a bunch of people who seemed like they might become friends.
And she’d discovered that Law and his smoky oven made the best pizza she had ever tasted. Even Maya, who clearly was not a fan of Law’s, agreed, judging by how she’d kept stealing pieces off Nora’s plate and making secret little moaning noises when Law wasn’t looking.
Nora thought back to last weekend, after her haircut, when she’d been hit with a wave of loneliness.
What was loneliness, really? She didn’t mind being alone. She often enjoyed it, in fact, and sometimes craved it. And if the alternative to loneliness was the kind of sublimation of the self she’d gradually done the last few years, eating sushi instead of pizza with Rufus, taking his shifts when he had a concert he wanted to go to, nodding in agreement when he suggested it was vital that they spend eleven thousand dollars on a sofa, she’d take loneliness any day.
All she knew was she felt better for her night of conversation at the bar. She was starting to wonder if what she’d missed, after a week of working around the clock, was caring about other people’s stories. Having them care about hers. For example, she had listened to Maya talk excitedly about how a kid in her summer camp had overcome his stage fright. And Maya had laughed her head off when Nora whisperingly told her why she had decided to order the night’s special pizza, which was prosciutto, ricotta, and…shaved parsnips.
“Usually I’m a sucker for Hawaiian pizza, which I notice is on the menu, but I couldn’t pass on the parsnips,” Nora had said.
Maya had made an exaggerated choking noise. “Oh no! I was starting to like you, and then you went and ruined it by wanting pineapple on pizza!”
Nora liked Maya. Her expansive theatricality was amusing, and she offered a kind of friendly intimacy that was sudden but seemingly genuine.
So yeah, maybe Nora was a little less lonely tonight as she was taking her first tentative steps into the next phase of her life.
Her phone, in her back pocket, buzzed. It had been on silent, but she’d set it to vibrate, and her butt had been buzzing a lot while she’d been at the bar. She slid into the car and had a look.
Rufus. A bunch of texts and a voice mail.
Nice. Just when she’d been thinking maybe she’d started to turn a corner.
The maddening thing about Rufus was that even though he was the one who’d nuked their relationship, he kept wanting to talk about it. And not even in a groveling I’m-sorry-please-take-me-back sort of way. Not that she would have. It was more him constantly wanting to explain how he felt. They’d met during their residencies—he’d been in his final year, and she’d been in her first. But now that they were staff physicians and had less demanding schedules, he felt neglected. He felt the need for a partner he had more shared interests with. He felt they spent too much time with her family. He felt, he felt, he felt.
And, worse, he wanted to explain how she should feel: “You deserve more than I can give you.”
He wanted to regulate her reaction to the whole thing, was what it came down to. He wanted to get away with it, but he didn’t want her to hold a grudge.
How had she loved such an insecure, manipulative man?
Because she had loved him.
Did she still love him? She didn’t even know anymore. It didn’t feel like she did, but she also questioned if it was possible to stop loving someone at the drop of a hat—even if they did something terrible.
But that wasn’t even the worst of it. Hearts were vulnerable. People gave them to the wrong people all the time. It wasn’t pleasant, but it happened. But she had done more than that. Done worse than that. She had gradually migrated her tastes, her interests, her free time, to align with Rufus’s. Not on purpose. Mostly because she genuinely hadn’t cared about the hand mixer or the sofa, so it had been easier to go along with what he wanted. So the whole “We don’t have shared interests” thing was kind of rich.
But she did care about pizza. And about which medical specialization to go into, for God’s sake.
If everything went according to plan, the Moonflower Bay palate cleanser would work on both broken hearts and subsumed selves. She surveyed Main Street as she got in the car. Most of the merchants had moonflowers growing in pots, and many of them had Little Free Libraries as well. It was almost too adorable.
She just had to work, enjoy the lake and the beach, and not die of cute overload, and, by the end of her time here, she would be herself again.
As if on cue, a text came through from her sister. I know it’s too soon, but I went into this open house. Fact finding. Only $1.4 million, lol.
The text was accompanied by a picture of a typical Toronto redbrick semidetached house.
Nora: Oh “only” 1.4, eh? How many bedrooms?
Erin: Four! Three on the second floor for the boys and me and a fourth-floor master that could be your retreat.
Nora: I told you I don’t need the master! I’ll be coming into this with less money than you will be.
Erin: Yeah but I’ll be coming into this with more humans than you will. Anyway, you need privacy. What if you’re entertaining gentleman callers?
Nora: Not happening.
Erin: Oh, come on. It will happen eventually. Maybe we should look for a duplex so you don’t abandon me when you find a proper man.
Nora: First things first. Let’s talk bedrooms AFTER we have a down payment together. Besides, we talked about this.
They had. They’d agreed that if Erin ever remarried and wanted to expand her family, or if Nora’s domestic circumstances changed, they would sell the house and split the proceeds, each of them ideally walking away with a nice chunk of equity. That part had been important to Nora, despite the fact that she felt certain she was never dating again. But according to Erin and the therapy-industrial complex, eventually that feeling would go away.