Chapter Three
“I love, love, love pizza night!”
Wes smiled at Brielle, her face covered in flour and a little drip of tomato sauce on her nose. She wore an apron that matched the black one he wore on the rare occasions he cooked. Those occasions mostly consisted of Friday nights, when Brielle came over for her weekend visitation. Their tradition had become centered around pizza night, where they would spend an hour or so making their own pizzas and then would watch a show of her choosing.
The few days he had the chance to spend with Brielle were the highlight of his week. Even when they didn’t do anything more exciting than hanging out at his apartment and playing board games, Wes found himself happier than he believed possible three months earlier.
This moment—in his warm kitchen with rain pattering down outside and his daughter giggling at the kitchen table as she made a face on her pizza with pepperoni—seemed worlds away from his life the past three years.
Rich and sweet and filled with joy.
He had been given a second chance and didn’t want to waste a minute of it.
“Only one more week of school. Can you believe it?”
Brielle shook her head. “No. And I also can’t believe I’m going to be in fifth grade next year. I hope I get Mrs. Baker. She’s super funny.”
He had met the woman the day before when he had returned Jenna’s key to her classroom, he remembered.
While he was thinking about things that seemed far away from prison life, Jenna Haynes was the epitome.
She was lovely as a spring morning, her life worlds away from the darkness and ugliness he had been forced to wallow through in prison.
As lovely as he found her, he would be wise to remember they likely had nothing in common. He was darkness to her light, hard and jaded and cynical in contrast to her sweet innocence.
And she was terrified of him. He couldn’t forget that part.
“Looks like we made too much dough. What are we going to do with it?”
“We can make another pizza!” Brielle said with a grin.
“We can do that, but that means we’re going to have a lot of leftovers to eat the rest of the weekend.”
“We could invite someone over,” she suggested. “What about Mrs. Haynes and Addison? I can’t believe they lived downstairs all this time and I never knew until today.”
He hadn’t exactly been holding out on Brielle. He simply hadn’t thought to tell her before now about his neighbors.
He had only been in Brambleberry House for two weeks, after spending his first several weeks in the area paying a ridiculous amount for a tiny studio with a short-term lease, until he had found this place available. This was only his daughter’s second weekend staying here with him. She had been delighted when he mentioned the other building tenants.
“Mrs. Haynes is super nice. I don’t have her but my friend Reina does, and she really likes her,” Brie had said when he told her.
“What about her daughter? Do you know her?”
“She’s only in third grade, but we have the same recess so we play soccer sometimes. She’s super fast. And she’s funny!”
A good sense of humor seemed to be the barometer by which Brielle judged everyone. He couldn’t disagree.
“So can we take them our extra pizza?” she asked now.
He was trying to come up with a good excuse to refuse when his doorbell rang.
Wes frowned, instantly on alert. Prison had given him a strong dislike of surprises. He wasn’t expecting anybody, but maybe Lacey had forgotten to send something with Brielle for her overnight stay. Vitamins or extra socks or something.
“I’ll get it,” Brie sang out, rushing toward the door.
Wes hated that his life experience made him constantly brace for trouble.
He followed Brie, ready to yank her back to safety if necessary as she opened the door.
It wasn’t trouble. At least not the sort he had become used to. His neighbor and her daughter stood on the landing to his apartment.
“Hi, Mrs. Haynes. Hi, Addie,” Brielle said.
“Hi, Brielle.” Addie beamed at his daughter.
The two girls looked very different. Addie had blue eyes and blond curls while Brie had long straight dark hair, which she usually wore in a ponytail or braid.
“It smells delicious in here,” Addie exclaimed, giving a dramatic, exaggerated sniff. “What are you making?”
“Pizza.” Brie grinned. “We make the dough and everything. My dad is the best pizza maker. He learned from my grandpa, who died when my dad was a kid. Isn’t that sad?”
“My dad died when I was a kid, too. I was only four.”
“I’m sorry.” Brielle hugged the other girl, which seemed to touch Jenna.
So Addison’s father had died. He had wondered if the man was still in the picture somewhere.
He gave Jenna a look of sympathy, which she met with a strained smile.
“Pizza is a great skill,” she said. “We brought you dessert, then. Sugar cookies.”
Brielle’s features lit up. “Wow. Thanks! I love cookies.”
“Here you go,” Addie said, handing over a plate covered in pastel-frosted flower cutout cookies that looked like spring.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Wes said.
She had already paid him for the battery, a check in an envelope she had left tucked in the door frame of his apartment. He was more than a little embarrassed that he had noticed the envelope smelled of strawberries and cream, like Jenna.
“It’s the least I can do to thank you for all your help with my car yesterday. I know cookies are poor recompense for giving up part of your lunch hour, but I didn’t know what else you might enjoy.”
“Home-baked cookies are always a treat. I don’t get them very often.”
“Well, I hope you enjoy them.”
“How is the car running?”
“Great. Everything has been perfect.”
“I’m glad.”
They stood awkwardly for a moment as he fought the urge to brush the pad of his thumb over that slight tinge of pink rising on her cheekbone.
Brielle saved him from doing something so foolish. “Hey, Dad. Can Addie and her mom stay for dinner? You said we had too much pizza to eat ourselves.”
The awkward level had now ratcheted up to a ten.
“I’m sure they have other dinner plans,” he said quickly.
“We don’t,” Addie said. “Pizza would be great!”
“We were going to heat up some soup from the freezer, remember?” Jenna said, not meeting Wes’s gaze. “We were just saying how soup is just the thing for a stormy night.”
As if on cue, lightning arced through the sky, followed by a sharp crack of thunder that made both girls shriek in surprise, then giggle at each other for their shared reaction.
“I like soup, Mom, but I would rather have pizza,” Addie said. “It smells soooo good, doesn’t it?”
“We really do have more than enough dough and toppings,” Wes said. “We were just trying to figure out what we were going to do with it when you knocked on the door. It was perfect timing.”
Another bolt of lightning flashed outside and rain began to pelt the window.
It was beyond comforting to be here inside this warm apartment in the big, rambling house by the sea.
“It does smell good,” she admitted.
“And tastes even better,” he said, not bothering with false modesty. He had very few skills in the kitchen and was justifiably proud of his pizza dough, a recipe his father had perfected over the years before he died.
“All right,” she finally said. “If you’re sure we won’t be imposing on your time with your daughter.”
“Not at all,” he assured her. “We were just about to put the toppings on, if you want to come and choose what you want.”
She followed him to the kitchen of his apartment, which Wes had considered a decent size. He wasn’t sure exactly how it seemed to shrink with the addition of another child and a small woman.
“How can I help?” Jenna asked.
How long had it been since he had shared a meal with a woman besides his daughter? He honestly couldn’t remember.
“You could throw together the salad, if you don’t mind. I’ve already rinsed the lettuce and it just needs to be tossed.”
“I can do that.”
She crossed to the sink and washed her hands then went to work ripping leaves from the romaine and green lettuce heads he had purchased earlier that day before picking up Brielle from her mother’s.
“What do you like on your pizza?”
“I’m not picky. What do you usually have?”
“Brie is a big fan of plain cheese and pepperoni. I typically go for margherita, with crushed San Marzano tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, basil and a splash of olive oil.”
Her eyes had widened during his geek-out about pizza and she gave a surprised laugh. “That sounds really delicious. Addie will probably be happy with the pepperoni as well.”
“Perfect. So two margherita and two pepperoni. I can only cook two at a time on my pizza steel so let’s do the girls’ first. They don’t take long.”
“Okay.”
While he formed another ball of dough into pizza crust for Addie, then enlisted the girls’ help to add the sauce, mozzarella and pepperoni, Jenna began slicing cucumbers and tomatoes to add to the salad.
This was nice, he thought as the girls went to work setting the table. He had bought a kitchen-in-a-box set of plates and silverware and serving utensils that supposedly contained everything a person needed to set up a basic kitchen. Now he wished he had sprung for something nicer.
Once the girls’ pizzas were in the oven, he went to work with the other two balls of dough, expertly shaping them and adding the toppings. Jenna watched him work, her expression interested.
“You really do know what you’re doing.”
He gave a rueful smile. “I’m kind of a pizza geek. My dad spent a year working in Italy at a pizza place during a gap year of college and he taught me a few secrets.”
“Brie said you were only a child when he died.”
He didn’t like remembering the pain of that time. “Ten. He moved from making pizza to opening his own restaurant in the little town outside Denver where he grew up. One night after closing, a couple of drifters broke in, thinking the place was empty. They shot my dad and took off with what was left in the cash register after he’d already made the deposit for the night. Thirty bucks in change.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry.”
The soft sympathy in her voice, in her expression, seemed to seep through him and he wanted to bask in it.
Embarrassed, he quickly changed the subject as he ripped a couple of basil leaves off the plant he bought at the supermarket.
“I can’t get enough of smelling fresh basil,” he said as he sprinkled the herb atop the two margherita pizzas. “Sometimes I want to just bury my face in it. Amazing, the things you never realize you missed.”
Oh wow. He was just full of brilliant conversation. First he dropped his father’s long-ago murder into the conversation, then he started gushing about herbs. He wouldn’t be surprised if she scooped up her daughter and went rushing back downstairs, away from the weirdo with a basil fetish.
Instead, she was looking at him again with that same soft compassion. “How long were you...in prison?”
“Three years, two months and five days.”
He didn’t look at her as he turned on the oven light to check the girls’ pizzas.
It didn’t matter that he had been cleared of any wrongdoing. The damage was done. He would never get that time back and his reputation would never fully recover.
Guilty or not, he had spent more than a thousand days in prison. Had seen things he couldn’t unsee. Cruelty between inmates, intimidation and abuse by guards, people treated more like cattle than human beings until they gradually began to lose their humanity altogether.
He was a different person than he’d been the day he had been arrested.
“I’m not sure what should be the appropriate response to that,” she admitted after a moment. “ I’m sorry doesn’t feel at all adequate.”
He shrugged. “It happened. It’s done. I’m still trying to figure out what comes next.”
He wasn’t sorry to change the subject again. “Looks like these are ready to come out.”
He pulled out the two pizzas, happy to see the crust bubbly with air pockets, then slid the other two into the oven.
“These other pizzas will only take a few minutes. Since the girls’ pizzas have to cool down first before they can eat them without burning their tongues, why don’t we start with the salad and vegetables?”
He had already prepared a relish plate as it was the only way he could persuade his daughter to eat a few vegetables.
The next few moments were busy finding beverages for everyone and taking the girls’ pizzas to the table.
Soon, his timer went off to remove the other pizzas from the oven. He was delighted by the surprise and pleasure on Jenna’s expression.
“That looks absolutely delicious.”
“I hope it tastes even better.”
The girls chattered away about school around mouthfuls of pizza, while he and Jenna worked on their salads. Finally, she picked up her first piece of pizza. He felt silly, but couldn’t help holding his breath until she took a bite. The sound of delight she made was gratifying.
“Wow,” she exclaimed. “That is really delicious. The flavors come together so perfectly. I’m afraid I might never be happy with pizza delivery again.”
“That’s the problem with making your own pizza. If you do it right, it kind of ruins you for anything else.”
He couldn’t help staring at her mouth as it lifted into a slight smile. What would it be like to have her give him a full-fledged smile? Even better, a laugh?
He shouldn’t be wondering about that, Wes chided himself. He and Jenna Haynes were simply neighbors, though he wanted to think maybe after the past few days, she would no longer watch him out of those nervous eyes, like he was a mountain lion crouched to pounce on her at any moment.
Her life felt so surreal sometimes, the reality often more bizarre than anything her imagination could conjure up.
A few weeks ago, Jenna would never have believed she would find herself having dinner with her intimidating new neighbor and his daughter.
Or that she would enjoy it so much.
The pizza was delicious, probably the best she’d ever had. And though Wes Calhoun seemed to be going out of his way to be friendly, she still sensed a wary reserve in him.
He seemed to measure each word as carefully as he probably did the flour in his father’s pizza dough recipe.
Did he ever completely let down his guard? She doubted it.
She was fine with that. She had to be, since she had her own protective barriers firmly in place.
“Thank you,” she finally said, after she had eaten every single bite of her personal-sized pizza. “That was truly delicious.”
“It was super good,” Addison agreed. “Mom, you should take lessons from Brie’s dad on how to make pizza.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Should I?”
“You make good pizza,” her daughter quickly said. “But Mr. Calhoun makes really good pizza.”
“He truly does.”
“I’m happy to teach you all I know. Which should take maybe five minutes. It’s all about not skimping on the quality of your ingredients and putting a little advance thought into it.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you again for sharing your pizza night with us.”
“You’re welcome to come back again the next time we make it,” Wes said. “Every Friday night is pizza night. We might even have to do it more than once a week. Brielle is going to be with me full-time for the first few weeks after school gets out, and I don’t have that many other specialties. I expect we will have the chance to enjoy a lot of pizza.”
“My mom is going to Costa Rica,” Brie said. “I think she should take me, but she says she can’t because I don’t have a passport.”
“You’ll get another chance to go on a trip with your mom and stepdad,” Wes assured his daughter. “Meantime, you get to hang out with me and do all kinds of fun things.”
“We can definitely plan some times for you two to hang out while you’re staying at Brambleberry House with your dad. It will be great for Addie to have someone her age here.”
“My friend Logan used to live downstairs on the first floor, but he moved away with his dad forever ago.”
“I know Logan. He’s nice.”
“He is,” Addie agreed. Suddenly her eyes widened with excitement. “And guess what? As soon as school is out, we’re getting a dog! I’ve been begging and begging for one, and Mom finally said we can go to the shelter next week to find a rescue.”
“Lucky!” Brielle exclaimed. “I always wanted a dog. We just have a cat. What kind are you getting?”
Addie shrugged. “I don’t know. We haven’t picked it yet. Whichever one needs a home most, I guess.”
Jenna did her best to ignore the misgivings she still felt about taking on a pet. She knew full well how much responsibility it would be, adding a dog to their family. But now that she knew for certain they wouldn’t have to pack up and disappear again, as she had feared for so long that they would have to do when Aaron Barker was released from prison, she could no longer think of any more excuses.
Addie had been through so much in her short life. Losing her dad. Having to uproot her life and escape here to Cannon Beach. Living for more than two years with a jumpy, scared-of-her-own-shadow mother.
Agreeing to her daughter’s relentless pleas to add a dog into their lives felt like the least Jenna could do for her.
“You’re so lucky!” Brielle exclaimed. “Can I play with him or her?”
“Anytime you want,” Addie said. “You could even help me take him for a walk, if you want. Dogs need a lot of exercise. That’s what my mom says.”
“Your mom is right,” Wes said. “The happiest, healthiest dogs get exercise at least a few times a day.”
He sounded like an expert. She really hoped so, since she had no idea what she was doing. Maybe he could give her advice.
While the girls chattered more about what kind of dog was best, Jenna turned again to Wes.
“Thank you again for the pizza, though I just realized that I owe you even more now.”
“How’s that?”
“First you kindly go out of your way to change my car battery, then you make us the best pizza ever. All I’ve done in return is bake you a batch of cookies.”
“They were delicious cookies, though. I’m sure between Brie and me, they will be gone by morning.”
“Cookies hardly compare. You make it tough for a woman to clear her debt to you.”
He gazed down at her, something in his expression suddenly that made her cheeks feel hot.
He blinked it away and returned to a polite smile. “You don’t owe me anything in return. Cookies are more than enough.”
She did not necessarily agree, but couldn’t immediately think of anything she could do to repay him for his kindness. She would have to give it some thought.
“Come on, Addie. It’s almost bedtime.”
Her daughter predictably groaned but headed for the stairs. “See you later,” she called to Brielle.
“Good night.” Jenna gave one last smile as she followed her daughter down the stairs.
On the positive side, she suddenly realized, the evening together had gone a long way toward reducing her fear of Wes. It was tough to be nervous around a man who obviously adored his daughter and who found such simple pleasure in the smell of fresh basil.