Page 113 of Key West Homecoming

She understood why Jake liked this, but she was beginning to understand something else too. Being beside him had taken on a meaning that had little to do with the cottage, Arthur, the garden, or even the porch swing he’d saved. It was in the way he smiled when she got something wrong, how comfortable he seemed with silence, and how carefully he listened without trying to fill in the things she left unsaid. Those small things had begun to matter more than she wanted to admit. The truth was becoming harder to avoid. She liked him.

Emma set the level on the tarp and picked up a scrap of cedar, turning it over in her hand.

The admission made her nervous, but not enough to make her leave.

Jake told her he probably had another day of work before the pergola was finished. He wanted to take his time with the top slats, then add two chairs, a small table and maybe a lantern in the corner.

“Whatever you want,” he said.

Emma looked toward the unfinished structure.

The first time she’d seen the cottage, she had been thinking about it as property she needed to protect. Since then, she had found her father’s initials beneath the porch railing and read Gloria’s letter at the kitchen table. The house had stopped being an inheritance and become something much harder to define.

Now Jake was building a place for her to sit in the garden.

“Thank you.”

He glanced at her. “Emma, I’m going to keep doing things around here. You can stop thanking me every time.”

“I’m going to keep thanking you. You can stop telling me not to.”

“We’ve had this fight.”

“We have, and I’m winning.”

Jake smiled, and Emma thought how easy it had become to make him do that.

He showed her how to hold the framing square and then made the mistake of letting her use the drill. Emma drove one screw too far and stripped the head.

She stared at it.

“I broke it.”

“You stripped it.”

“Is that better?”

“No.”

Emma laughed and handed the drill back to him.

By the time Jake suggested iced tea, she was warm and dusty and happier than she had any reason to be.

The porch swing hung at the north end of the cottage beneath a small overhang Jake had added during his second summer. The cedar had weathered soft with age, and two faded blue cushions sat against the back.

Emma lowered herself onto it and ran one hand along the arm.

She remembered sitting there with Gloria when she was a child, although the swing had looked different then. In her memory it had been painted white, with a cushion Gloria complained was impossible to keep clean. Emma had spent whole afternoons curled beside her grandmother while Gloria read or shelled peas into a bowl balanced on her lap.

Jake came outside carrying two glasses of iced tea. He handed one to Emma and sat beside her, and the swing shifted beneath their weight.

The space between them wasn’t large.

Emma noticed that immediately.

The night before, she had sat beside him while he told her about Nora, and every instinct she had possessed had been focused on giving him whatever he needed. Tonight there was no terrible story between them and nothing she needed to protect him from.

That changed things.