Chapter 3
Kayla
The hammering started while I was on my second sip of coffee.
I was at the kitchen table with my mug and the Barley sketches spread out in front of me, the house still quiet, William still asleep.
Saturday mornings were mine. An hour, sometimes two, before the day started making demands.
I’d learned to guard that time like other people guarded their savings accounts—carefully, and with the understanding that it could disappear without warning.
I stared down at Barley the golden retriever again.
Still the same problem as a couple of days ago.
I knew what I was after. I just couldn’t get it on to the page.
Every attempt landed somewhere close but not right, like trying to hum a song I could hear perfectly in my head but couldn’t quite reproduce.
I picked up my pencil. Started reworking the left eye again, softening the lid, adjusting the angle of the gaze—
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Steady, deliberate hammering. Coming from the direction of the back fence.
I set down the pencil. Picked up my coffee. Took a sip and waited. Maybe it was a one-time thing. A quick repair. A nail that needed setting.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Not a one-time thing. And not stopping anytime soon from the sound of it.
I tried to focus through it but couldn’t.
Sighing, I set down my pencil again, abandoned my coffee, and went out the back door in my pajama pants and an old university sweatshirt, barefoot on the cold deck boards because I hadn’t planned on going outside this early and my slippers were somewhere in the bedroom closet.
The morning air hit me immediately. Sharp, thin, carrying that particular Colorado mountain clarity that still caught me off guard six months after moving here.
The sky was enormous overhead—pale blue, barely started with the day.
I knew the cold and snow would be coming…
even in September, Colorado was known to get snow, but for right now, it was just beautiful.
The sound led me straight to the shared fence. My new neighbor—the one who’d moved in about a week ago. I’d only caught glimpses until now. A tall shape carrying boxes from a moving truck. A light on late in a window. I’d been meaning to introduce myself but hadn’t found the time.
I could hear him working just on the other side, each hammer strike sharp and close, now that I was standing a few feet from it. The fence was solid between us. I was talking to six feet of cedar.
I stopped a few feet from the fence. “Good morning.”
The hammering paused.
“Morning.”
One word, and then the hammering resumed.
I waited for more. A name. A follow-up. Something. The silence stretched—or what passed for silence between hammer strikes.
“I’m Kayla Cafferty. I live on this side.”
Another pause. “Ben.” A nail driven home. “I figured.”
“Right. Because of the fence. And the…being on this side of it.” I was rambling.
I could hear myself rambling. This was what happened when someone gave you nothing to work with—you started filling the space yourself, piling words into the gap like sandbags against a flood. “So, Ben, you just moved in?”
“Yep.”
“How are you liking it?”
“It’s fine.”
Two words that time. Felt like progress.
“The neighborhood’s great. Quiet, mostly.
The Jacobses two houses down have a rooster, which takes some getting used to, but after a while, you stop hearing it.
” I stood a few feet back from the fence, arms crossed, having a conversation with cedar planks while a stranger on the other side decided how few syllables he could get away with. “Where’d you move from?”
The hammering stopped. A beat of silence, and then a face rose above the fence line. After all those minutes of talking to wood, I found it a little jarring to suddenly have someone looking back at me—and looking down at me. I was getting a view of his chin.
Ben could see right over the top. Not by much—a few inches—but enough that he was looking down at me without any effort at all. I, on the other hand, was talking to the wood grain somewhere around his sternum.
“Around,” he said.
The sun was behind him, putting his face partially in shadow, and I was tilted back at a ridiculous angle trying to see more than a chin and a jawline.
For a woman who’d spent the better part of a year being made to feel small by someone who did it on purpose, having a conversation from below wasn’t something I was willing to do by accident.
“Hold on,” I said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
I went back inside, scanned the mudroom, and found what I was looking for—the plastic milk crate that had been there when we’d moved in. Perfect. I dragged it outside.
By the time I got it positioned near the fence, I was slightly out of breath. I stepped up onto it, tested my balance, and stood.
Now I could see him.
Mid-thirties, maybe. Deep-set eyes that were some indeterminate color between brown and green.
A face that had been outdoors a lot—not weathered exactly, but lived-in.
Strong features, the kind that were more interesting than handsome, and a stillness to his expression that felt deliberate, like he was used to pressure.
Something shifted in his face when I appeared at eye level thanks to my crate. Barely there—the slightest movement at the corners of his eyes that could have been surprise or could have been amusement. I couldn’t tell. The man’s face was a locked room.
“That’s better,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment.
“So,” I continued, because apparently it was my job to keep this conversation alive through sheer force of will. “You said you moved from around.”
“I travel for work. This is temporary.”
Seven whole words—a personal best.
“What kind of—”
A sound from inside his house cut me off. Sharp, sudden, explosive—barking. Not the lazy woof of a dog who’d heard a squirrel, but full-throated, urgent barking that escalated fast. Then scratching. Something on the other side of his back door was trying very hard to get through it.
I hadn’t known he had a dog. In the entire week since he’d moved in, I’d never heard a single bark.
“You have a dog?”
He was already moving toward the house. “Excuse me for a second.”
Through the back door—which had a window in its upper half—I could see the dog before Ben reached it.
Big. Dark fur, lighter markings around the face.
Ears up, body rigid, focused on the fence with an intensity that bordered on frantic.
The animal was pressed against the glass, and every line of its body was aimed in my direction.
Ben opened the door, and the dog surged toward him. Not aggressively—it wasn’t lunging or snapping. It was more like a current of energy that couldn’t be contained, all forward motion and urgency.
But the moment Ben put his hand on the dog’s head, something passed between them. His shoulders dropped slightly. His other hand came to the dog’s side. He said something I couldn’t hear, low and easy, and the dog’s body language shifted—still alert, still intense, but no longer frantic.
It was the first warmth I’d seen from him.
In the entire stilted exchange we’d just shared, Ben had given me nothing—no smile, no friendliness, no sign that he was a person who experienced normal human emotions.
But the way he touched that dog, the way his whole bearing changed in the dog’s presence, was something else entirely.
There was tenderness in his hands. I could see it from thirty feet away.
He moved the dog farther inside, out of view of the fence. The barking continued, muffled now, coming from somewhere deeper in the house. Then Ben came back outside, picked up his hammer, and returned to the fence as if nothing had happened.
“Sorry about that.”
“That’s okay. What’s his name?”
“Jolly. He’s a K9. Trained working dog.”
I waited, but that was apparently the complete explanation. “A K9. Like…police?”
“I’m a K9 handler. I’m here temporarily, helping the local police department set up their program.”
He said it like someone might say they were in town for a plumbing conference. No elaboration. No details. Just the facts, stripped to their essentials and delivered without decoration.
“Should I be worried? Having a K9 living next door?”
He looked at me then—actually looked, his eyes settling on my face for the first time with something that might have been the ghost of engagement.
“Only if you or your son are criminals.”
I stared at him. Was that a joke? From him? His expression hadn’t changed. Not a single muscle in his face had moved toward anything resembling humor. But there was something around his eyes—a faint shift, barely there—that suggested he knew exactly what he’d just done.
“We’re clean,” I said. “Mostly.”
He went back to testing the new slat. The almost-moment passed.
“So, the fence,” I said. “Was it in that bad a shape?”
“Mostly just weathered. But one slat was broken clean through. Snapped at the base.” He pressed against something below my line of sight, checking the fit. “That’s a different kind of damage.”
“Different how?”
“Weathered wood dries out, warps, cracks along the grain. This one was snapped at the base. Something pushed through it.” He straightened and looked at me directly. “You do any yard work yesterday? Mowing, edging, anything that might have hit the fence?”
I tried to imagine what kind of mowing catastrophe would take out a fence slat. “No. I haven’t mowed in over a week.”
He nodded, like he was crossing something off a list. “What about your son?”
I raised an eyebrow. “He’s a little young to mow the yard.”
“No, I mean playing. Maybe getting a little rough. If he’s leaning on the slats or pulling at them, that could do it. And if it happens again and Jolly gets through, that’s a real problem. He’s trained, but he’s still a dog, and I can’t have him loose in an unfamiliar neighborhood.”
I could feel everything inside me tighten. “William didn’t break your fence.”