Erin: You and your logic. Sheesh. I gotta go pry the boys away from their screens. Night-night.
Nora: Hang on, one more thing. How is Grandma?
Erin: Pretty good! As stoic as ever, anyway. Her new fave topic is how she never liked Rufus.
Nora smiled and, buoyed by the exchange with her sister, deleted Rufus’s texts without reading them and his voice mail without listening to it. Grandma was right. He was exhausting. Which, actually, was a relief. Being exhausted by Rufus, rather than hurt by him, felt like progress.
All right. She’d had a lovely evening with new friends, and the clinic would open in two weeks.
The reset button had been fully and firmly pressed.
She typed the last text she would ever send Rufus. I don’t want to talk to you. Here’s my mailing address in Moonflower Bay. If there’s anything we *need* to talk about, legally or whatever, send me a letter. I’m blocking you now. Have a nice life.
That should do it. They hadn’t been married. She had happily left him all the joint possessions they had accumulated. There was nothing left to bind them together. If she was overlooking something, and if it was important enough, he could send her a damn letter.
When she got back home, she went out back, gingerly poked at the rotten deck with her toes until she found a chunk that seemed like it might not collapse under her weight, sat on it, and listened. The ad for this place had said you could hear the lake from the yard.
And she could. Just barely, but yes, there was the sound of waves.
She was alone, and it was okay.
Chapter Four
On Saturday, Nora hit the mall in nearby London to tackle the problem of household linens, and then she put in a long afternoon at the clinic. She was tired and a bit cranky when she got home, but the sight of Jake Ramsey’s truck parked in her driveway made her smile.
And wasn’t that interesting?
There was quite a racket coming from out back. She let herself into the house, dumped her shopping bags, and went straight to the sliding glass door that opened onto the backyard from what would have been the dining room had she had any actual dining furniture.
He was facing away from her, doing something with a power tool she was pretty sure was some kind of saw. He didn’t notice her watching him through the door as he turned and laid a long, flat piece of wood into place.
He was fixing her deck.
Well, crap.
Her throat tightened.
She had spent too much time the last few days pondering the nature of loneliness. Which was the only reason she could think of to explain why this—a little bit of human kindness in the form of a guy building a deck—was going to make her cry.
No. No, it was not. She allowed herself one sniff and looked for something to distract her.
Jake was wearing grungy jeans and beat-up brown work boots.
And he was not wearing a shirt.
It was really hot out.
So that made sense.
Not wearing a shirt when you were working in the heat was a logical, normal thing that logical, normal people of the male variety did.
She, however, was wearing what felt like half a gallon of Benjamin Moore Black Satin. She had spent the afternoon painting the front desk at the clinic. It had been a whim. The desk that had come with the practice had been a 1970s monstrosity made of fake wood paneling. She didn’t want to spend the money to replace it since she was only going to be in town for two years, but she had stopped in at Andersen’s Lakeside Hardware to ask if, theoretically, a person could paint over fake wood paneling. She’d had an odd encounter with the owner, an older man named Karl, who had assured her that yes, she could paint over the paneling and had amassed the necessary supplies but then refused to take payment for them.
But something had gone wrong. The primer had seemed like it was going on funny, but then she’d thought, what the hell did she know about primer? So she’d plowed on. And who knew? Maybe the problem wasn’t the primer so much as the fact that she was spectacularly bad at painting. She’d tipped over the can at one point, and in her attempt to right it, her entire left arm had ended up covered.
But whatever. She was standing in the kitchen staring at Jake, and it would be weird to keep doing that. It would also be weird to pretend she hadn’t seen him. So she slid open the door.
He had returned to the saw or whatever it was, so his back was to her. His tanned, muscly back. A fact she noted with clinical detachment. Mostly.
He turned on the tool, but he must have sensed her presence, because he stopped it right away, turned around, and took off the protective glasses he’d been wearing. Slid them up on his head, actually, like sunglasses. His hair looked like it had begun the day in a bun, but enough of it had fallen out that the glasses were actually holding a fair amount of hair off his face.
“What are you doing?” she finally said, before her brain could catch up to what a stupid question that was. What do you think he’s doing? Practicing his ballroom dance moves?
“Rebuilding this piece-of-crap deck.”
“That was fast. When I asked if you could do my deck, I meant sometime in the not-too-distant future.”
He shrugged. She kept waiting for him to follow that shrug with some words, but none came. “Okay, well, what do I owe you?”
“Eh, it only took me a couple of hours.” He started putting his shirt on. She wanted to tell him not to do that, but that would be wildly inappropriate. Clinical detachment.
“It only took you a couple of hours?” she echoed dumbly. In her imagination, which admittedly was based on nothing—she didn’t even watch home improvement shows on TV, as evidenced by her painting failure—building a deck was something you measured in days, not hours.
“Yeah. I’m just throwing a quick cap over what’s here. It’s a shortcut. If you owned this place, I’d pull out the old rotten stuff and start from scratch.”
“You would?”
He squinted at her for a moment. Because she was acting like a simpleton, mindlessly repeating everything he said in the form of a question. Maybe he was onto something with all the silence. If you didn’t talk to people, it probably cut down on the frequency with which you had to listen to them say idiotic things.
“Sorry. I guess I should have checked in with you before I started. I just had this pile of scrap wood”—he gestured at the deck, which looked like an honest-to-God deck and not at all like a pile of scrap wood—“and a free afternoon, and…” He shrugged.
Ugh. She was being weird. Coming across as ungrateful. She was just so surprised. It was like she had wished aloud for a deck one day, and the next day, voilà! Deck!
And for some reason, she was inherently skeptical when someone did her a favor. Instantly on the defensive. Wondering what the secret agenda was. How she was going to be made to pay later.
Was that the kind of person she wanted to be?
Okay. She smiled. Started over. “Jake. This is amazing. Thank you.”
He smiled back. Which made her feel good.
So she said some more. “Honestly, I was out-of-proportion disappointed about the deck situation. And it’s been a long day.” She held up her paint-splattered arms, and he chuckled. “So this is a lovely surprise.”
“Well, give me five minutes to lay this last plank, and you can inaugurate your new deck.”