Page 125 of Cruel Lies

"Do you need to get that?" I ask.

"No."

But it vibrates again half an hour later. He excuses himself and steps out onto the porch. I can see him through the window, one hand on the railing, talking in a low stream. When he comes back in, he's smiling like nothing happened.

"Work?" I say.

"Always. It can wait." He picks up a dish towel and starts drying the pan. "This weekend, it can all wait."

I decide to believe him. It's easy to do that here. The city feels a thousand miles away, and the man drying dishes in our—I mean, inhis—kitchen is a man I'm falling in love with. I don't want to spend this weekend looking for cracks in the fairy tale.

That night, I read to Isabella. She falls asleep before I even finish. Hayden isn't far behind her, worn out as he is from the boat and the sun. I carefully extricate myself from between the two beds in the guest room, where the kids insisted on sleeping together because it's an adventure.

But just before I can tiptoe out of the door, I hear Isabella's voice pipe up in the darkness.

"Mommy?"

"Yeah, baby?"

She's quiet for a second. "I like it here."

"Me, too."

"Can we live here?"

I laugh softly. "We live in the city, remember?"

"But we could live here sometimes."

I bite my lip as my heart swells. Could we? I don't know. All I know is that I want it as bad as she does.

"Maybe sometimes," I say at last.

She's asleep before I finish saying it.

The next day is the same, only better. We swim off the dock in the afternoon, the water cold and clean, and Ronan does a running dive off the end that makes Hayden shriek with delight and immediately try to copy. He carries Isabella on his shoulders in the shallow part while she plants her hands over his eyes and steers him like a horse. He crashes them into the water on purpose, both of them coming up laughing.

I sit on the dock with my feet in the water and watch, and I think about how, not so long ago, I was standing in front of a mirror in a Phoenix hotel room, taking inventory of everything wrong with me.

There are no mirrors up here. I don't need one. I know exactly what I look like right now, sunburnt and wet-haired and grinning like an idiot.

It doesn't scare me.

Ronan's phone rings again in the afternoon, and again in the evening. Twice, he steps away to answer it, and twice, he comes back and folds himself back into the day as if it's the only thing in the world. I do notice. I'd be lying if I said I didn't. But I've decided this is the one place where I let it go.

After all, he always comes back.

We grill on the porch that evening—burgers, because Hayden requested burgers and Ronan said he'd make whatever the boy wants—and eat outside as the sun goes down over the water.

After dinner, the kids are wiped again. Two days of sun and water will do that. I run a bath in the deep old tub upstairs, wash the lake out of their hair, and get them into pajamas. Ronan does the dishes downstairs. I can hear the clink and run of water, him humming under his breath. It's such an ordinary sound that it makes my chest ache.

Hayden is once again out cold before I even get the light snuffed out. But tonight, Isabella is being fussy. She demands that Ronan come in to say goodnight to the caterpillar.

I stick my head into the hall. "Ronan. You're being summoned."

He comes up the stairs, dish towel still over his shoulder, and leans into the room. He crouches by the nightstand and looks at the shoebox with the utmost seriousness.

"Goodnight, Doctor Fuzz," he says. "Thank you for coming to the lake."