Page 35 of The Story Between Us

This is going to be fun.

Nate reached for the light switch.

“No,” he said. “It really won’t.”

He turned off the light. Walked away. Left her there in the dark with the closed laptop and the ending he still couldn’t write.

But even as he reheated his soup, then took it upstairs to his bedroom to eat in front of the television, and listened to the dogs settle on the floor beside him, he could sense it.

Something shifting.

Something cracking open, letting in light—or air, or hope, or whatever contagion Livvie Fox carried around with her.

Outside, the evening deepened over the lake, over the dock, over the two empty chairs that had been waiting for someone to fill them.

Heaven help him. Livvie was back.

Eight

The mist rose off Maple Lake in slow curls, catching the early light and turning everything soft at the edges. Livvie dipped her paddle into the water, matching her aunt’s rhythm, and watched the shoreline slide past—gold and bronze and deep rust red accents among green, the trees beginning to put on their autumn show.

“So let me get this straight,” Aunt Lila said from the bow of the canoe, her voice carrying easily across the still water. “You showed up at his door with stolen soup.”

“Liberated soup. There’s a difference.”

“And he let you in?”

“Eventually.”

“Livvie Fox, you’re a menace.” Lila’s paddle cut through the water. “I’m so proud.”

The morning bordered on painfully beautiful—the kind of September morning that made you understand why people wrote poems about New England, even though this sat squarely in Minnesota. They had the water almost to themselves, just them and the mist and the slow drift of leaves falling from the maples along the shore.

“So what’s your plan for today?” Aunt Lila asked. “More soup theft?”

“I’m thinking bribery.” Livvie steered them around a fallen log, half submerged in the shallows. “Edie’s cinnamon rolls. I’m going to stop by Maple Sweets this morning.”

“Smart. Edie’s cinnamon rolls could convince a monk to break his vows.”

“That’s what I’m counting on.” She adjusted her grip on the paddle. “Also, I’m going to clean his kitchen. You should see it, Aunt Lila. A complete disaster. Dishes everywhere, take-out containers⁠—”

“Some people create better in chaos.”

“Not this one. This one needs an intervention.”

She glanced toward the shore—toward the green Craftsman house visible through the trees—and stopped paddling.

A figure emerged from the dock at the Rivers property. He carried a kayak, bringing it to the water.

Nate.

Even from this distance, she could see the breadth of his shoulders, the way his arms moved beneath his shirt. The morning light caught his profile as he turned, and something fluttered low in her stomach. He looked different out here. Less haunted. More alive. Like the lake offered the one place he could still breathe.

“He kayaks every morning,” Lila said. “Only time he leaves the house voluntarily.”

“I remember.” The words came out before she could stop them.

Lila’s paddle stilled. “Do you now?”