Page 135 of Key West Homecoming

That answer told Leah more than anything else could have.

Tess wiped her face with the dish towel and left a streak of basil across one cheek.

“When are you doing it?”

“I’m not telling you.”

“Will.”

“I’m not telling either of you.”

“Please?” Tess said. “I can keep a secret.”

Will and Leah looked at each other.

“No,” they said together.

“I can keep one for a day.”

“That’s about my read on it,” Will said. “The answer is still no.”

He climbed the first step. “I need to talk to Connie about the room. That’s all you’re getting.”

Tess stopped crying. “The room at Max’s?”

Will closed his eyes.

“You’re doing it at Max’s.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

Leah picked up her coffee. “Go home, Will. Take a shower. You look like a man who drove across Florida twice in three days.”

“I am that man.”

He hugged them both again and started toward the truck. Halfway there, he turned around.

“She thinks something’s wrong. She’s been looking at me that way for two weeks, and I’ve had to let her.”

“Then fix it as soon as you can,” Leah said.

“That’s the plan.”

They watched the truck disappear down the lane. Ernest came out of the herb bed with a piece of basil in his beak and returned to the porch rail.

Tess slipped an arm around Leah.

“This is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”

Leah looked at the basil on her sister’s cheek and smiled. “If you cry one more time, we’ll never get to work. And wipe your face.”

Jake had given Emma a rejected piece of cedar from the pergola and shown her how to sand with the grain. She spent two hours beneath the lignum vitae working one-eighty grit over a board that wasn’t going to become anything at all.

By the time she finished, the wood felt smooth beneath her palm.

Jake ran his hand over it once and nodded. “Not bad.”