We got a system going. Sawyer took the heavy boxes. I took the rest. The cottage was small enough that it didn't take long—twelve boxes plus the duffel bags plus the lamp, three trips each, stacked in the living room in a rough order that she could sort out herself.
Millie came in on the second trip.
I heard her before I saw her—the screen door, then her footsteps on the wood floor, then a silence that meant she was looking at the space.
I set down the box and turned around.
She was standing in the middle of the living room looking at the cottage that I had spent two weeks making as right as I could make it. The freshly painted walls. The ceiling fan turningslow. The kitchen with the window that looked out over the goat pasture. The bedroom door open, the bed made up with the good quilt my mother had dropped off last week without commenting on why I needed it.
She looked at all of it.
Then she looked at the boxes already stacked neatly against the wall, and at Sawyer passing through the front door with the last duffel bag, and something crossed her face that she didn't immediately put away.
"You're almost done," she said.
"Just about." I picked up the lamp. "Where do you want this?"
She looked at the lamp. Then at me. Then at the boxes.
"I didn't help," she said.
"You were introducing yourself to the goats."
"I should have been—" She stopped. Looked around again. "You did all of this."
"Sawyer did half."
"Gage."
I put the lamp down by the window because that seemed like where a lamp went and looked at her. She was still standing in the middle of the room, her bag over her shoulder, her hair loose, and she had an expression on her face I hadn't seen from her yet.
“This place…” She exhaled long and low, shoulders dropping. “It’s so beautiful, Gage.”
“It is,” I nodded, gesturing around. “This was actually the first house on the property—my little house my grandparents lived in before the business took off and they could afford to build the big house.”
“It looks brand new.”
I gave her a lazy smile and shrugged. “May have thrown a new coat of paint on a few spots.”
She looked at me. Something in her face was doing the thing I'd caught twice in the parking lot, the thing she put away fast when she noticed it.
"Come on," I said. "I'll show you the rest."
It didn't take long. The cottage was small—that was the honest truth of it, and I'd said so from the start. Living room, kitchen, one bathroom, one bedroom. I walked her through it pointing out things she'd need to know. Where the water heater was. The breaker box. The window in the kitchen that stuck in humidity and needed to be lifted from the left side.
The kitchen, she liked. She stood at the window and looked out at the goat pasture and the limestone bluffs in the distance and didn't say anything, just stood there, and I stood behind her and looked at the back of her neck where her hair was coming loose and told myself to stop.
The bathroom was fine. Nothing to say about it.
The bedroom was the last room.
I opened the door and she stepped in ahead of me. I followed and immediately understood that I had made an error in spatial reasoning, because the cottage bedroom was not large and the bed was, and two people standing in it were standing close.
She stopped at the foot of the bed. Reached out to touch the quilt. It made her back arch as she bent over just slightly…and it did something to me.
I was ready to get started on this project of ours.
I was ready to get started right now.
