Reno put Cinnabun on the floor under the window where he belonged. The night-light came on. They eased the door most of the way shut.
“Porch,” Grace said. Not a question.
The lake was as smooth as glass and the moon laid a long pale road across it toward the dock. The frogs were going strong, and Marshmallow materialized from wherever cats spent their evenings. She arranged herself on the back of the couch tonight.
Reno had been a careful man his whole life. He’d built cases one fact at a time. He’d spent three years not letting himself want anything, and recent weeks wanting one thing so much he’d had to hold perfectly still to keep from frightening it off.
She’d made her move at the bakery and told him the next one was his. He’d been carrying that, too, all this time, waiting until he was sure she meant it.
She’d baked him his grandmother’s pie in front of his whole family.
She meant it.
“Grace.”
She turned her head. In the spill of light from the kitchen window her face was open and unhurried and entirely unafraid. She was the bravest person he’d ever met, and the fact that everyone in her life believed she was fragile only meant none of them had watched her square her shoulders the way he had.
He reached over and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, giving her every chance to lean away.
She leaned in.
He kissed her. Not the way she’d kissed him in the bakery, where she’d run the whole show and he’d held still and let her. This time he was the one moving, gentle and certain, one hand at the side of her jaw the way she’d put hers.
She made a small soft sound against his mouth and turned toward him, and her hand fisted lightly in the front of his shirt right over the spot where the flour handprint had been weeks ago. His heart did the thing again where it completely rearranged itself around a new feeling, then settled and found its shape.
When they broke apart she kept her forehead against his for a moment, breathing fast and shallow.
“That was the move?” she murmured.
“The beginning of it.”
“Took you long enough.”
He smiled at her and she rolled her eyes back at him. He said, “I wanted to be sure I had all the facts, first.”
She laughed, the silvery one that sounded like heavenly bells chiming, but quietly so she wouldn’t wake Lily. It was, hands down, the best sound he’d ever heard.
They sat a long while after that, her tucked against his side and the cat radiating disapproval behind their heads. The moon working its slow way across the water.
He didn’t tell her what he suspected was coming Monday.
In the first place, he wasn’t sure. In the second place, she’d earned a weekend to just be happy. Monday would come soon enough, and Cooper would tell them whatever it was that made a careful man drive to another state and come back unwilling to say what he’d learned.
Reno knew that whatever it was, it had the power to hurt her in ways that no kiss and no pie could armor her against.
He’d give her the weekend. He’d give her this.
The storm could keep till Monday.
18
The weekend had been good, and Grace had let it be good, the way a person lets themselves eat a full breakfast the morning of a surgery.
They went swimming with Lily off the dock on Sunday—the one Liam built the summer before Lily was born. Grace showed Lily how to do a cannonball, running and jumping off the end of the dock, hugging her knees, and hitting the water with a mighty splash. She hadn’t done that since she was a kid, and she’d surfaced laughing like she was eight years old again.
The swim had tired out Reno’s bad leg, but in a good way. The muscles around his knee were sore, but the knee itself felt fine. He thanked her for suggesting a swim and told her he’d be doing it every day for a while. Lily demanded that he wait until she was home from school to go swimming so she could go with him.
He’d had a very sweet, but serious, talk with Lily about how dangerous it was to swim alone and promised he would wait every day to swim with her, but she had to promise him she would never swim alone in return.
