I stand there, back pressed to the wood, the dark entryway swallowing me up, and my heart is doing something they’d probably put me in a study for. My fingers fly to my mouth, pressing hard like maybe I can undo the thing I just did, or at least confirm I still have a mouth attached to my face.
“Oh no,” I whisper.
But it doesn’t land like it should. It should feel like dread, like I ruined something, like every mortifying decision I’ve ever made. This morning, it would have. Jaw tight, hands twitchy, the acid sting of regret coiling up under my ribs.
But that’s not what’s here.
Here, there’s hope, bright and irrational and alive, flickering in my chest like a candle. And hope is so much worse than regret, because I know how to sit with regret. Regret is familiar, old, something that moves into your bones and settles in at 4:45 a.m. when the world is too quiet and you have nothing to do but remember everything you wish you hadn’t done.
Hope is new. Hope is dangerous. Hope is the thing I’ve spent three years building levees against, because the minute you start hoping, you’re admitting you want something, and if you want something, it can get taken away from you. I have already lost enough.
The house is just as I left it. Drew’s mug in the rack, Drew’s handwriting on the key hook, Drew’s garden out the kitchen window, midsummer wild and uncaring if anyone notices as long as someone waters it now and then.
I rest my palm on the door. Wait. Listen. Maybe there will be a knock, footsteps, some sign that I didn’t just hallucinate that whole moment.
Nothing.
Just the hush of the house, my own heartbeat, and that relentlessly hopeful little flame, like it’s been hiding in me waiting for permission. Like it belongs here.
One month, Jordan said. One month to prove this place is really mine.
And already, after one day, one market, one almost-kiss on a porch in the amber light, I am standing here with my hand on a door I closed too fast, wondering what would have happened if I’d stayed.
“Oh no,” I say again, to the empty house, to Drew’s ghost, to whoever might be listening.
But I can tell the words aren’t what they used to be.
Not even close.
Chapter 4
The comedic tragedy of Maddie’s “Goodnight” in that chipmunk voice is that I’ve replayed it in my head—I kid you not, at least forty-seven times in the past day. Every single time, it gets more ridiculous, and also somehow more humiliating, which is a unique-and-unsettling emotional cocktail to be choking down before 10 AM on a Thursday when I’ve already tackled two chimneys and am now wobbling my way back to my truck with a paint can thumping away at my left knee.
Sixteen hours. That’s the tally since the porch, since the almost-kiss, since I walked away with my hands jammed in my pockets and my brain cartwheeling in twelve directions, qualifying me for Olympic-level mental self-flagellation. Sixteen hours of not texting, not calling, not even letting myself look in the general direction of Maddie if I could help it. Because, let me be clear, I almost kissed my dead best friend’s widow and she responded by making a noise usually reserved for animated rodents before slamming the door in my face.
So. I’m at work. Which is code for: elbow-deep in soot, loving every second of the kind of job that doesn’t look at you with blue eyes that can ruin your ability to spell your own name. My flannel’s acquired a new streak of creosote across the shoulder, like someone just Sharpie’d me in passing. My jeans would probably stand up and walk out the door if I left them unattended. Mrs. Pelletier’s damper left a mean streak of soot on my knuckles that hasn’t scrubbed off, and I’m hauling around a half-gallon of Benjamin Moore “Honey Glow” because Chuckasked for a bathroom update and I am, obviously, powerless to say no when I own a truck.
First stop: The Brew House. Sleighbell Springs’ one-and-only non-chain coffee shop, universally agreed upon as the only worthwhile caffeine source for ten miles. I push in, bell jingling, and get maybe three steps inside before Noelle emerges from thin air and latches onto my arm with an iron grip that makes it clear she probably bench-presses espresso machines in her spare time.
“There you are,” she says, like I’ve missed my own birthday party, and yanks me straight to the back wall, paint can still swinging from my hand.
“Good to see you too,” I mutter. “Pretty sure I have errands. Maybe even a life. Hard to remember.”
“Shut up. Just look.”
She parks me in front of a set of display shelves I’ve walked past so many times I could draw them from memory, except now it’s like they’ve been swapped out for a set from a nicer universe. The wood’s been sanded smooth, old varnish replaced by a warm walnut stain that doesn’t match the rest of the place but somehow feels just right, like it’s the secret backbone of the entire shop.
Noelle grins, watching my reaction the way a magician waits for applause. “She came in one Saturday. Sandpaper, stain brush, the works. Didn’t want help. Refused payment. Told me the shelves deserved better.”
“She…” My brain blanks, temporarily deleting all proper nouns.
“Maddie. Your Maddie. The one you’ve been making Disney-animal eyes at since the dawn of time.”
“She’s not my—”
Noelle raises a hand. “Save your denials for someone who didn’t witness the drawer pull fiasco of 2022.” Folds her arms,satisfied. “The point is, Maddie did this. Because she saw something that needed some light and just… fixed it. That’s her. Brightening everything around here without waiting to be asked, because she’s basically the human embodiment of sunshine.”
I let my thumb drift along the shelf edge. The wood’s warm, almost alive under my touch, and something in my chest cracks in a way that feels dangerous to investigate in a public place. I keep my mouth shut, because anything I say will sound like I just lost a bar fight to a piece of furniture.
