Page 44 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“—who wakes you up?” Toby was saying.

And Garrick didn’t answer.

She heard the silence stretch. She saw it, too. The way his jaw set, the way his grey eyes fixed on some point past the boy’s shoulder and his big shoulders stiffened. A male holding a weight he wouldn’t name. Her throat closed on nothing. Who wakes you up. She thought of finding him in the garden that day, grey and still and cold, and the lurch of fear she’d felt before he’d opened his eyes. She thought of all the dark windows in that great house. She opened her mouth, though she didn’t know what she meant to say, some rescue, some redirection⁠—

Garrick got there first.

“That gate,” he said. His voice had shifted back up to its usual low register, economical, decided. The voice of a male closing one door and opening another because he’d rather build than dwell. He rose out of the crouch in one smooth movement, all that height unfolding, and looked towards the far wall where the old iron gate hung under its curtain of vines. “The one in the wall. We should open it. There’s no need to go all the way around the block with a loaded wheelbarrow.”

She pushed her hair back with her wrist. “I like the walk.”

“You don’t.”

She didn’t, particularly. The block was long and the wheelbarrow was heavy and by the second trip her shoulders were singing. “It’s not that far.”

“It’s a hundred and forty yards each way that you don’t need to walk.” He said it in a calm, reasonable voice, laying out the loads and the stresses. And she recognized it now for what it was. Garrick solving a problem. Garrick offering her something dressed up as practical, because practical was the only language he knew how to use. “I’ll clear the gate and rehang it so it swings properly. Your nursery is directly behind that wall. You’d step through and be in the roses.” A pause. “It makes more sense than the alternative.”

She turned it over, looking for the catch, the way she always looked for the catch. Looking for the moment his generosity would tip over into what her in-laws used to do, throwing money and fixes at her to remind her, gently and endlessly, that she couldn’t manage on her own. She didn’t find it. He wasn’t offering to build her a gate. He was offering to open one. To take something that already existed and had fallen into ruin and make it work again, which was the single most Garrick thing he could possibly do.

“Fine,” she said, and heard how briskly it came out, and tried to soften it. “It is practical. I’ll grant you that.” She pointed the trowel at him. “But I’m not letting you replace the whole gate with some grand wrought-iron thing. The old one’s good. It just needs⁠—”

“It needs cleaning, oiling, and one new hinge pin.” The half-smile threatened to appear. “I know how you feel about replacing things, little thorn. I wasn’t going to touch it.”

The nickname landed low in her stomach the way it always did. She looked back down at her plants so he wouldn’t see her face do whatever it was doing.

“Can I help?”

Both of them looked down. Toby had come to the edge of the bed, and his careful reserve had cracked wide open around the edges. His eyes went up to Garrick’s face, then over at the gate, then back. He wanted it so badly he could barely hold still, and he was concentrating with all his small might on holding still anyway, both hands fisted in the hem of his shirt, chin up.

“Yes,” Garrick said immediately, without any hesitation at all.

Then—and this was what broke her—he caught himself. His gaze lifted to hers, and he added, “If your mother says it’s all right.”

He’d asked her. He hadn’t decided for Toby and he hadn’t decided for her. She thought of all the times her father-in-law had made plans for Toby over her head, checkbooks and schools and what’s best for the boy, Maris. And this enormous stone male with claws that could open a car door like a tin can had just, without any apparent effort, done the exact opposite.

And now they were both looking at her with two sets of hopeful eyes. Toby’s wide and pleading and up on tiptoe, and Garrick’s, which he’d never in a thousand years admit were hopeful, gone that warm gold at the edges, waiting.

She didn’t stand a chance and she knew it.

“He has to do exactly what you tell him,” she said to Garrick. “And he has to stay out of the way of anything heavy.”

“He will.”

“I will, Mama.”

“Then all right.” She waved the trowel at the pair of them. “Go on. Fix the gate.”

Toby made a small delighted sound, quickly stifled. Garrick looked down at him, and something passed over the big angular face that she was fairly sure counted as a smile. “Come on,” he said. “You’ll need a hard hat.”

“I don’t have a hard hat.”

“I do.”

He led the boy off towards the former carriage house he used for his tools. He matched his long stride to Toby’s short quick one without seeming to think about it. She knelt in the roses and watched them go and bit her lip to keep from making a noise that would have embarrassed everyone.

They came back a few minutes later, and she had to press her dirty glove against her mouth. Garrick had found Toby a hard hat, a real one in bright safety yellow, sized for a grown man’s head. It sat so far down over Toby’s ears and eyebrows that her son had to tip his whole head back to see out from under the brim. He looked ridiculous. He looked, from the set of his small shoulders, like the most important and consequential man alive. He’d put his hands behind his back, in the posture of a foreman surveying a site rather than a child minding his manners. He trotted along beside Garrick’s thigh with the hat wobbling and his chin held high.

“Mama, look.” He pointed at the hat with both hands, as if she might have missed it.