Chapter 20
The kitchen smelled like browning butter and the last of the season’s rhubarb, and under that, faintly, like the lake because the windows had been open since dawn and in late June the whole valley came indoors whether you invited it in or not.
Grace crimped the edge of the second pie and set it beside the first. Through the window over the sink the water lay flat and bright all the way to the far shore, where the mountains had finally traded their gray for green and stood there looking pleased with themselves about it.
Down at the dock Lily’s laugh went up high and delighted followed by the particular heavy splash of a grown man who was, against all medical advice and his older brother’s explicit instructions, teaching a four-year-old to cannonball.
She made the third pie.
She’d be feeding nine tonight, maybe ten if Cooper got off shift in time.
The supper had started as a small thing .
. . a thank-you to Hank, mostly, and an excuse .
. . and then Tessa had offered to bring her brisket, and Dillon had offered to bring Makayla, and Hank had asked, with the studied casualness of a man who’d forgotten how to ask for anything, whether Madison could come too.
So now it was the kind of gathering that took three pies and a leaf in the table.
Two weeks. That was all it had been since a gray sedan with out-of-state plates had driven slowly up the drive and a woman named Sunny had walked into this house and set Reno free of a thing Grace had watched him carry since the first morning he limped into her bakery for a cinnamon roll he didn’t need.
Two weeks, and the shape of her whole life had quietly rearranged itself around the new facts of it, the way water finds the level it’s going to keep.
Cooper held the meeting for the families the Tuesday after Sunny visited the cottage.
He’d done it the way he did everything, carefully and without flinching in the fellowship room of the church with its bad coffee and folding chairs.
He’d laid out everything Lex Jansick said and didn’t say.
The fire was set. The report was bought. He didn’t yet know by whom.
Grace had sat in the front row with Reno’s hand wrapped around hers and watched her friends learn that what most of them already suspected was true.
Charlotte had gone white and very still.
Bonnie had asked three sharp questions in a row because Bonnie ran at problems the way other people ran from them.
And Rose had cried. Rose, who’d spent four years secretly certain her husband made the mistake that killed all the others.
Grace watched and set down the guilt for good and picked up in its place the harder, cleaner grief of knowing someone else was to blame.
Afterward the WoWS made more coffee, cut the pies Grace had brought, and sat together for a good cry. A lot of hugs were passed around, and by the time the pies were gone, they’d all collected themselves enough to go home to their kids and carry on with life.
Lucas Shoemacher was still alive. Still dying, slowly, behind the drawn blinds of the big house on the hill, attended by nurses and, lately, by lawyers.
Cooper had asked the widows for patience and Grace had discovered, to her own surprise, that she could give it to him.
Not because the urgency had faded. But because the truth had a direction now, and Cooper’s entire nature was to get all the way to the bottom of a case no matter how long it took to get there.
She’d waited almost five years already. She could wait a little longer.
Her phone buzzed against the counter. A photo: a small girl with chocolate ice cream from chin to eyebrows, and beneath it, in Sunny’s typing, “This is the tyrant. She says hi.” Grace smiled and thumbed back a row of hearts and set the phone down.
Sunny had stayed on in Apple Pie Creek for now, in a short-term rental house, “figuring some things out,” which Grace recognized.
She’d done her own figuring once, alone, with a baby on her hip and a hole the size of a man in her life.
She’d told Sunny there was a chair at the WoWS get-togethers any time she wanted it.
Sunny hadn’t come yet. But she’d asked what time the next one started.
Lily came pounding up the porch steps wrapped in a towel printed with cartoon sharks, leaving a dark trail of water across the boards, with Reno behind her carrying her water wings and what was left of his dignity.
“Mommy! Mr. Reno did a cannonball and the water went ALL THE WAY UP and a fish jumped out!”
Reno rolled his eyes. “Total coincidence.”
“Nuh uhh!” Lily declared. She dripped her way to the bathroom to dry off and put on clothes, narrating her plans for the evening to no one.
Reno set the water wings on the porch to dry and came to stand behind Grace at the counter, close enough that she could smell the soap from the outdoor shower on his skin. He looked at the three pies the way a man looks at evidence.
“Who’s the third pie for?”
“Hank eats half a pie before he even takes a breath.”
He laughed and set his chin lightly on top of her head, and they stood like that looking out at the lake. She leaned back into the solid, warm wall of his chest and let herself, the way she was getting better at, simply be held up.
Reno’s razor lived by the bathroom sink now.
His good boots stood by the back door beside her gardening clogs.
He cut Lily’s eggs into hearts and helped with the chores, and had finished most of the small repairs the house needed.
Yesterday, Grace had caught herself buying his favorite brand of coffee at the market, the way she’d once bought Liam’s.
She’d stood in the aisle holding the can and waited to feel as if she was doing something wrong. The feeling never came.
“Babe,” Reno said into her hair.
“Mm.”
“You’re going to want to rescue the third pie before it goes past done to Steele-family kindling.”
She jumped away from the counter fast enough to make him grab the edge of it for balance and got the pie out at the last instant before disaster.
Reno’s phone rang on the kitchen counter where he’d left it before he and Lily went swimming. He picked it up and scowled. “Hello. What now?”
He listened for a long time in silence. His frown eased, and then very slowly he began to smile. Finally he said, “I’ll run that past my client and let you know.”
He put the phone back down.
“Tara Marchand’s lawyer again?” she asked.
“Yep.”
Grace sighed. “What’s she offering now for me to drop my lawsuits against her?”
Reno paused long enough that she turned around to face him. He looked strange.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Tara’s going to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit arson, criminal mischief, stalking, and harassment.
Her lawyer’s struck a deal with the court that she has to do a thousand hours of community service and pay the maximum fines allowed by law in return for not going to jail.
That means you’re going to get about a hundred thousand dollars in penalties from her. ”
Her mouth fell open.
“There’s more,” he said.
“Do tell,” she managed to choke out.
“In return for you dropping the libel and slander charges, Tara would like to give you her bakery in Apple Pie Creek. She wants out of the pastry business and is willing to sign over the deed to the building and everything in it to you. You’d own an entire second bakery.
Tara’s lawyer has spoken to the head baker and Mary’s sister, and they’re both willing to stay on and continue to work for you if you become the new owner. ”
She stared at him in disbelief. “That’s got to be worth over a million dollars.”
“Speaking as your lawyer, we could probably hold out for cash instead of property.”
“I’ll take the bakery,” she blurted.
“Before you just say yes, I’m going to ask for the bakery and a letter of apology from Tara Marchand with a written promise never to say anything negative about you again in public or private.
I’m also going to ask for a permanent restraining order that prohibits her from speaking to you or approaching you or either of your bakeries in person. ”
“Will she agree to do all that?” Grace asked doubtfully.
Reno grinned his shark-like lawyer grin. “She wants out of this whole mess bad enough to give you well over a million dollars’ worth of real estate, equipment, and a growing business. She’ll take the deal.”
“Okay then.”
“Congratulations, Ms. O’Donnell. You’re the proud new owner of a French pastry shop.”
She was still standing there in shock when the front door opened without a knock.
Dillon’s voice called, “We brought a donkey,” and the celebration began in earnest.
Tessa, Dillon, and Makayla had not, in the end, brought the donkey, which disappointed Lily so thoroughly that Tessa had to promise her a private audience with Loretta tomorrow by way of reparations. But they had brought the brisket, and Makayla brought her fiddle.
Hank showed up with a salad and Madison, who barely made it through the door before being towed by Lily toward her bedroom to inspect the current arrangement of stuffed animals.
Supper was loud and joyful. Grace sat at the head of the table in her own small home with more people in it than it had held in five years.
Somewhere between the brisket and the second pie she stopped keeping track of who needed what and just let the noise and happiness wash over her like warm water.
Reno fetched the third pie from the kitchen and set it down in front of Grace, as far away from Hank as the table could let him.
While everyone else razzed Hank about his endless appetite for pie, Reno leaned down over Grace’s shoulder and murmured, “What can I do to make this evening better for you?”
She looked up at him, her eyes shining. “Nothing. This is perfect. Everything and everyone is perfect.”