“No. But thank you for offering.” He’d be helping soon enough. Only he wouldn’t be helping her, he’d be helping his son and she’d be right there with him making sure the woman who’d birthed him never hurt him again.
“Anytime. Seriously. Don’t hesitate to ask if you need something.”
Every word was like a dagger in her chest. She wanted to be worthy of his support and knew he’d withdraw the offer the second she told him the truth about why she was in Sunnyville. Not wanting to continue with this line of conversation, she changed the topic. “So what do you have planned for the house? Will you move upstairs once Maddox is more comfortable with going up and down stairs?”
“I think we’ll stay down here for a while longer. That way I can decorate a room for him without him having to sleep with the smell of paint.” He shrugged. “I can take my time that way too. I’m in no rush. I like the arrangement as it is.”
She’d seen the fear in his eyes, on his face, when she’d brought Maddox inside earlier. She understood his need to be close to his son for a while yet. If it were her, she’d react the same way. “Are you going to go all out with decorating or just paint the walls blue?”
Jacob smiled. “Yeah, I’m going all out. Did you see Zane’s room at Ry and Maz’s house? I helped them get that done over the last few months and I like the idea of giving Mad something like that again. He had his own room at our previous house and it was all cars and trucks, planes and helicopters on the walls and ceiling. I want to do something similar here.”
“Sounds great. Do you have pictures of his old room I can see?”
“Sure.” Leaning to the side, he reached over and grabbed his phone from the low table that ran the length of the room all the way into the living area where the television sat on the far end.
Mallory had admired the cabinet the first time she’d been here and come to the conclusion that is was actually a built-in unit and not part of Jacob’s furniture. “That’s an interesting cabinet.”
Flicking through his phone he said, “Yeah, I’m not a fan of it but it was here and I haven’t had a chance to demolish it yet.”
“Demolish it? Why would you do that?”
Jacob looked up. “Because it doesn’t go with my furniture and I don’t like how the bulk of it makes the room seem smaller.”
She eyed the unit more closely, then studied the room as a whole. It was a large space but it held living room furniture, a couch and two chairs, as well as the six-seater dining table which split the room in two, and when she thought about how cramped the space was being used as two rooms in one, she realized he was right. The cabinet really did take up a lot of the room. “Huh. I guess it is rather large.”
“The previous owners had this area set up as living room only. They only had a small table in the area in front of the sliding back door.”
“You don’t want to do that?”
“This table doesn’t fit in that area so it had to go here. I’m not worrying about redoing the downstairs until I’ve finished upstairs.” He shrugged. “I might leave it until I’m ready to tackle the whole space or it may annoy the shit out of me and I’ll take a sledgehammer to it on one of my days off.”
“You’re planning to do the work yourself?”
“I’ve done some renovation work before. I’m not good with wires or pipes but the rest—demolition, sheetrock, tiling, laying floors, painting—I can do.” He looked back at his phone. “Ah, here they are.”
She sat up and leaned forward so she could see the screen when he turned the phone her way.
“I did all the work on that room you see. The house was my grandparents. I inherited it when my grandmother passed a few years ago. About six months or so before Mad was born.”
“So this is where you lived before you came here?” Of course she knew the answer, but she asked anyway. Hoped he’d tell her more about their life before they’d moved here.
“Yes. Monterey. My grandparents retired there about fifteen years ago.”
“Oh, it’s lovely.” She swiped to the next picture. “That view!”
“Yeah.” Jacob sighed. “It’s right on the water. That view helped me work through a lot of shit over the years.
“If they retired there, where did they live before that?”
“In LA. Near Santa Monica. Ry lived a few doors down.”
“I can’t get over how you share a last name and look alike and yet you aren’t related at all.”
Jacob laughed. “You’re not the first to have trouble with that. But we’ve done one of those DNA ancestry tests and we’re definitely not related.”
Mallory swiped through more of the pictures on his phone. “This is gorgeous work. Did you paint the cars and trucks and stuff on or are they wallpaper?”
“No, they’re painted. I couldn’t find any wallpaper that wasn’t either too baby-ish or too old for a little boy. I wanted Mad to have a room he could grow into. Well, at least until he hit high school and the dreaded teenage years. Then he’ll probably want to paint his walls black.”
