Someone was watching. Not the house. Not just the project.
Us.
That is what I cannot seem to stop circling.
Not Holt’s house on its own. Not Otter Creek Farm. Not some random curiosity from a woman too restless to leave old trouble alone. The photograph is framed from the tree line in a way that makes the whole thing feel personal and invasive and ugly. A line crossed. A choice made.
And somehow, against every instinct I came here with, the part of it that gets under my skin most is not that I was watched.
It’s that Holt was too.
Bailey stays until the deputy shows up, mostly because Hadley apparently told her if she left me alone, she’d “personally haunt the bookstore forever,” which feels both excessive and entirely in character. Nolan keeps moving through the inn with a sharpened kind of focus, taking notes, answering questions, sketching timelines on the back of a legal pad as if structure can box in chaos if he stacks enough facts around it.
I should find that comforting. Instead, I keep thinking about the way Holt looked when he handed me the photograph. A kind of stillness that made it obvious he was using all his effort to stay where he was instead of immediately moving toward whatever he thought the threat was.
By the time the deputy leaves and the inn empties enough for silence to settle properly, I’m wrung out in a way that has nothing to do with labor. Nolan lingers near the front window after Bailey heads out, one hand braced on the trim as he watches the road like he expects something to come back down it.
“You should go to the farm before dark,” he says.
I’m crouched by the front parlor wall, rolling up damp drop cloths we didn’t get to use. My hands still automatically at the suggestion, not from surprise but because I know what’s underneath it.
“I’m not helpless.”
“No one said you were.”
The answer is calm. Too calm. Nolan, at his most careful, always sounds like he’s building a case he expects to win eventually.
I stand and shake the cloth out once before folding it tighter. “Then don’t say things like I need an escort.”
His expression shifts slightly, some edge in it sharpening.
“That’s not what I said.”
“No,” I reply, “it’s what you meant.”
He doesn’t deny it, and that tells me enough.
I set the folded cloth on the windowsill and turn fully toward him. The late-day light has flattened outside, pressing a muted gold over the wet road and dripping trees. The whole town feels caught in that held-breath hour before evening, where everything slows just enough to feel more fragile than it is.
“You don’t have to keep trying to fix me through logistics,” I say.
His jaw tightens once. “This isn’t about fixing you.”
“Then what is it about?”
For a second, he says nothing. Then he pushes off the wall and walks toward the center of the room, stopping short of crowding me.
“It’s about the fact that someone is escalating,” he says, voice lower now. “And every time something shifts around you, your first instinct is to push harder instead of step back.”
I should be angry at that. Instead, I’m annoyed by how close it lands.
“My first instinct is to keep going,” I say.
“Same thing.”
“No,” I reply. “It’s not.”
He exhales slowly, eyes moving past me for one second to the scarred wall, the stripped trim, the shell of the inn trying to become itself again. “This place matters to you,” he says.
