The word lands heavy. She turns, leans her back against the counter, crosses her arms. The posture is relaxed but her eyes are sharp. Watchful. She has this way of holding herself that looks easy until you notice the tension in her shoulders, the slight tilt of her chin. Ready. Braced for impact.
"Okay."
"You can stay in the spare room. Long as you need to figure out your next step." Scrubbing a hand over my jaw, I pushforward. "But I'm not looking for a wife. I'm not looking for anything. My grandmother meant well, but she didn't ask me, and I'm not in a place to be what she promised you I'd be."
Naomi nods. No flinch. No argument. Just that steady brown gaze, studying me.
"I wasn't expecting a husband," she says. "I was expecting a roof."
Something about the honesty of it lands square in my sternum. A roof. That's what she came all this way for. Not romance, not a partner. Shelter. Because wherever she was before this, she didn't have one.
"You've got one."
"Then we're on the same page."
We are. Clear terms. Roommates. Temporary. She stays until she's got a plan, then she goes wherever that plan takes her. Simple.
So I don't know why, an hour later, when she's washing the lunch dishes with her back to me, I'm still standing in the living room staring at the doorway she walked through. Or why the sound of water running in a sink that's been silent for three weeks makes the cabin feel less like a mausoleum.
The rest of the day passes in a pattern I didn't expect. She's quiet, but present. Moves through the cabin like she's learning its shape, touching the backs of chairs, pausing at the bookshelf Gran filled with westerns and crossword collections. She doesn't ask about the photographs on the mantel. Doesn't push. Just exists in the space with a kind of careful attention that reminds me of how you move around a new horse. Slow. Deliberate. No sudden gestures.
By evening, she's curled on the far end of Gran's couch with the Bible open in her lap, reading glasses perched on her nose. Glasses she didn't wear at the bus stop. They make her look softer. More real. Less like the polished woman who stepped offthe bus with her practiced smile, more like someone who reads until her eyes go blurry because the alternative is thinking too hard about the morning.
And God help me, my eyes keep drifting.
Because Naomi Jacobs is beautiful. That's a fact I noticed at the bus stop, filed under irrelevant, and have been unsuccessfully ignoring ever since. The curve of her mouth when she's concentrating. The length of her neck above that blouse she hasn't changed out of because she only has three. Full hips pressing against the cushion as she shifts position. Brown skin catching the lamplight until it glows warm. My grandmother would call her striking. My grandmother would also smack me for looking.
Stop.
Grabbing Gran's old jacket off the hook by the door, I step onto the porch. The night air bites. Stars are thick overhead, the way they only get this far from a city. One of the Herefords coughs in the pasture. Normal sounds. Familiar. Mine.
My mother left when I was six. Drove down this mountain and didn't come back. Dad stuck around until I was twelve, then a heart attack took him while he was mending fence in the north pasture. Gran raised me after that. Twenty-eight years of her voice, her cooking, her crosswords, her belief that every problem in life could be solved by a good stew, a stiff drink, and a willingness to show up.
Now she's gone. My parents are gone. The property is mine, the cattle are mine, the silence is mine. And for the first time in my adult life, I understand why Gran worried. Because this mountain is beautiful, but it's also a cage if you let it become one. You wake up alone, work alone, eat alone, go to bed alone, and one morning you realize the only voices you've heard in a week belong to cattle.
Gran saw it happening. Saw me calcifying. And in her final months, while I was busy pretending everything was fine, she sat at that desk and wrote forty pages to a stranger about why her grandson deserved company.
Not love. She was smarter than that. She knew you can't order love from a catalogue.
Company.
The screen door creaks behind me. Naomi steps out, Gran's afghan wrapped around her shoulders. Must have found it on the back of the rocking chair.
"Thought you might want this." She holds out a mug. "Made you coffee. Used the machine on the counter. Hope that's okay."
Taking the mug, I sip. Then stop. Look at the coffee. Look at her.
"This is good."
"You were using the wrong ratio. Too much grounds, not enough water. Your grandmother mentioned it in one of her letters." A small smile. "She said you brew coffee like a man trying to punish himself."
That startles a laugh out of me. Short, rough, almost rusty from disuse. It surprises both of us.
Naomi's smile widens just enough that her dimple appears. One dimple, left side. And the sight of it creates a problem I am wholly unprepared for, because my entire body responds. Low pull in my gut. Heat that has no business existing between a man who isn't looking for anything and a woman who came here for a roof.
"Your grandmother was a smart woman," she says.
"Too smart for her own good." The laugh fades but the warmth stays. Dangerous warmth. "She'd have liked you."
