10. What We Keep
What We Keep
By the time the first truck rumbled up the drive, the house was already awake. The air felt cleaner today, though a slight trace of dust still clung to the corners, proof of everything yesterday had torn open. Outside, voices carried across the yard, low, contented, confident.
Jenna stood in the doorway between the kitchen and Grace’s old room, arms folded, coffee in hand, watching the light stretch across the floorboards. The room looked stripped bare now, the bookshelves half-empty, the walls quieter somehow.
She started with the smallest things: folding Grace’s sweater, smoothing the quilt, straightening the books stacked by the lamp. Each motion felt like asking permission.
Grace’s scent lingered even after the fresh sheets, the familiar trace of this room’s former occupant. Jenna sat on the edge of the bed and set her planner on the nightstand.
She murmured to the empty space, “I’m just . . . making room.”
Biscuit padded in from the hall, hopped onto the bed, and circled once before settling against her leg.
“Guess we’re doing this,” she whispered, brushing his fur. “You, me, and all the ghosts.”
* * *
By late morning, every room was buzzing with motion. The sound of footsteps and clinking boxes replaced the hush of memory, and the movement finally felt like progress.
Now, Jenna and Emmie stood shoulder to shoulder, sorting. They’d made three boxes: KEEP, DONATE, and CAN’T.
The CAN’T box filled first.
“Are we supposed to decide today?” Emmie asked, holding up a faded dish towel with strawberries on it.
“No. We don’t have to decide anything today. But if we don’t at least get started, we never will.”
Emmie folded the towel carefully and dropped it in KEEP.
From the porch came the muffled sound of hammering. Cole had promised to fix the loose step by the side door, and true to his word, he was there before they’d even opened the curtains.
She walked over to the window and looked through the screen. She could see his forearm flex as he held the board in place, the muscles shifting with every measured strike. He must’ve felt her watching, because the hammering stopped and he glanced up, flashing that disarming smile.
“Morning.”
“Morning,” she managed, hoping her voice didn’t betray the fact that she was suddenly very aware there was a tall, devastatingly handsome man just outside her window.
Emmie’s voice came from behind her. “Are you staring?”
Jenna nearly jumped. “What? No—”
Emmie grinned, peeking out the doorway to see what Jenna was looking at, already knowing who would be there after his cheerful good morning.
“I was just—”
“Admiring the craftsmanship?” Emmie’s smile turned wicked. “He’s not too terrible looking for an old guy.”
“Emmie.” Jenna hissed her name, waving a hand toward the window. “He can hear you.”
“Can he?”
Jenna risked a glance back and saw Cole pretending to check the boards, but the smile tugging at his mouth said he’d heard every word.
“Yup,” Emmie said, leaning over her shoulder, trying not to laugh. “Definitely heard that.”
Jenna groaned, burying her face in her hands. “I’m moving back to Georgia.”
“Too late,” Emmie said, heading toward the kitchen. “He already knows you think he’s hot.”
Jenna pressed her palms against her face, then dared one last look out the window. Cole flashed that award-winning smile, shook his head once, and went back to work.
Heat rushed into her cheeks before she could stop it. She turned away from the window too quickly and wandered into the kitchen like movement alone might settle her nerves.
She opened another drawer: old check stubs, a grocery list, a handful of paperclips. Grace’s handwriting curved across the top of a notepad: Order more flour. Check cooler temp. Pray oven holds another month.
Emmie peeked over her shoulder. “She really wrote that?”
“She worried about everything,” Jenna said softly. “That oven was older than me.”
“Contractor Guy is replacing it, right?”
Jenna hesitated. “You want new ovens now?”
Emmie’s eyes softened, the edge of defiance gone. “Mom did.”
Jenna said nothing, just nodded. It was enough.
Emmie pulled another box toward her and peeled back the tape. Inside was a jumble of receipts, bakery notes, and yellowing recipe cards, all stacked in Grace’s familiar looping handwriting. She sifted through them quietly, the edges soft from years of flour-dusted fingers.
“Look at this,” Jenna said, holding one up. It wasn’t a recipe at all, just a note written in black ink across the back of an old order form.
If love runs out, just make more.
Jenna exhaled through a laugh that came out more like a sigh. “That sounds like her.”
Emmie smiled softly, tracing the words with her thumb. “Yeah. She really believed that, didn’t she? That you could just keep making love like a batch of muffins.”
“She did,” Jenna said softly. “And somehow, she was usually right.”
Emmie stared at the note a moment longer, the smile fading but not quite disappearing.
“She made so much of it, though,” she said finally. “Love. Like she didn’t know how to stop. But some people . . .” Her voice thinned to a whisper. “Some people are just intolerant of it. The way some folks can’t handle milk or sugar. Doesn’t mean the recipe’s bad. Just means they can’t digest it.”
Jenna didn’t ask who Emmie meant; she didn’t need to.
Emmie folded the note carefully and set it in the KEEP box. “That one stays.”
Jenna nodded, blinking hard. “Definitely.”
They worked in silence for a while after that, the kind of silence that wasn’t empty but simply full of everything they didn’t have to say.
* * *
As the day stretched on, the boxes were lined along the wall. KEEP looked like an attic’s worth of memory. DONATE held almost nothing.
Emmie sat cross-legged on the floor, sifting through recipe cards. “She always wrote herself these notes. Like, ‘add more lemon if life feels heavy’? What does that even mean?”
Jenna laughed quietly. “I think she wanted to remind herself to live like she baked: add more of what makes it bright.”
Cole appeared in the doorway, wiping his hands. “That’s solid advice.”
They both turned. He leaned one shoulder against the frame, sunlight cutting across the rolled sleeve of his shirt. Sweat clung to the front, the fabric darkened and stretched across the hard lines of his chest. When he moved, it carried a clean, earthy scent of salt, pine, and sun.
“I can’t throw anything away,” Emmie said abruptly.
He nodded once. “Then don’t.”
She frowned. “But we can’t keep it all either.”
“No,” he said. “But you’ll know what matters when you touch it.”
Jenna met his eyes for a second too long. She got the sense that he wasn’t talking about baking supplies anymore. There was something practiced in the way he said it, like the words had belonged to him long before they belonged to this room.
* * *
Later that day, Jenna moved to the office.
She adjusted the desk toward the window, wiped the surface clean, and set her laptop in its corner.
The hum when it powered on felt almost foreign here.
The soft glow of the screen touched the curtains, the bookshelves, the bed she’d made up against the opposite wall.
It wasn’t perfect, but it looked like a room that could hold both of them, Grace’s memory and Jenna’s work.
Emmie appeared in the doorway, hair pulled back. “Wow. This looks . . . normal again.”
“That was the goal.”
Emmie smiled gently. “Mom would’ve liked that. You keeping her chair?”
“For now. It’s too low, but I can live with it.”
“Good.” Emmie hesitated, glancing around. “You know, it doesn’t smell sad anymore.”
Jenna laughed under her breath. “That’s the nicest compliment I’ve heard all week.”
Emmie rolled her eyes. “Well, don’t ruin it.” She backed out, leaving the door open behind her.
Jenna turned back to the desk, staring at the obscure reflection of herself in the laptop screen. For the first time, this office didn’t feel like a museum. It felt like work waiting to be done.
By the time the light shifted toward evening, she felt the easy pace of progress: boxes labeled, drawers organized, the satisfying snap of lids sealing things that finally had somewhere to belong.
Emmie had gone to her friend Casey’s house in Dunedin, leaving Jenna alone in the house for the first time all day.
The quiet was different now, less heavy, almost companionable.
Jenna closed her laptop and stretched, muscles stiff from the too-low office chair.
Through the open window, she could hear low voices outside, the murmur of Cole’s crew wrapping up for the day.
Hammers fell silent one by one. A truck door slammed. Then another.
She told herself not to look. But she did.
He was crossing the yard, clipboard in hand, ball cap pulled backward, shirt damp with sweat and clinging to his shoulders.
The late sun caught his skin, tracing a warm sheen across his neck and jaw.
He paused to speak to one of the guys, that easy, low laugh carrying just enough to reach her through the window.
Jenna turned back to her desk, pretending to check an email that wasn’t there.
It didn’t matter, though, the image had already lodged somewhere in her ribcage, too warm, too alive.
She’d seen plenty of men like him. Construction sites were full of strong arms and work-worn hands.
But something about him made her pulse misbehave.
A soft knock broke her focus. Two knuckles. Polite. Familiar.
She stood, starting to smooth her shirt before realizing how ridiculous that was, then opened the back door.
Cole stood on the step, clipboard tucked under one arm, eyes bright from the sun. His voice was roughened by the day, low and easy. “Didn’t mean to bother you. Just finished up next door. Thought I’d check in before I take off.”
Jenna leaned against the doorframe, grateful for the wood between them. “Everything good?”
“Better than good. Soffit’s reinforced, subfloor’s secured, and the rot wasn’t half as bad as I thought. It’s solid now.”
“Well, look at you, making my evening a little better.”
He grinned. “I like to exceed expectations.”
It was a throwaway line, one he’d probably used a hundred times, but something about the way he said it made her throat go dry. He must’ve seen the flicker in her expression because his grin tilted just a little.
“Or maybe,” he added lightly, “I just don’t like leaving things halfway done.”
She blinked, unsure whether he meant the project or something else entirely. “Good to know,” she said carefully, keeping her voice even. “Noted.”
He chuckled, glancing past her shoulder into the office. “Looks different in here. You’ve been busy.”
“Trying to make sense of the chaos.”
“That’s your thing.”
She arched a brow. “Chaos?”
He smiled again, slow and sure. “Fixing it.”
The space between them seemed to shift, dense with a quiet energy that made her pulse trip. Cole shifted the clipboard to his other hand, thumb brushing against the edge like he needed something to do.
“Well,” he said finally, stepping back, “I’ll stop hovering. Just wanted to say the house looks good.” There was a brief pause where she reflected on the changes to the rooms behind her when she heard his deep, low voice come again, “You too.”
She felt like her heartbeat stuttered. “What?”
He gave a small, crooked smile. “The house. It looks good.”
Before she could decide whether she’d imagined the pause between words, he tipped his head with a small salute and started down the steps, boots crunching against the gravel.
She watched him cross the yard until he disappeared behind his truck. Then she exhaled: loud, shaky, half laugh, half surrender.
“God help me,” she muttered.
* * *
That night, the house felt different. Lighter somehow.
The rhythm of hammers and saws had been replaced by the imperceptible tick of cooling wood and the low, familiar drone of the vents.
She’d spent the day checking things off lists: repairs made, rooms reclaimed, boxes sealed and labeled.
Progress, she could see. Progress, she could measure.
But none of it settled her.
She couldn’t stop hearing his voice. You too.
Just two words, tossed over his shoulder like nothing, but they’d settled into her like a warm hand on her spine.
Did he mean anything by it? Probably not.
He was just . . . Cole. Steady. Kind. The sort of man who made people feel seen without trying.
Still, the words stuck. Maybe it wasn’t what he’d said so much as how it made her feel when he said it. She wasn’t proud of how her pulse behaved around him, or how she kept finding herself looking for him in every window, every shadow, every shift of noise next door.
Okay, so maybe she was spiraling a little.
Outside, the last light faded across the yard. She brushed her teeth, straightened the comforter on Grace’s bed, then sat on the edge of it for a long moment, thumb rubbing a loose thread on the quilt.
Biscuit hopped up beside her, kneading twice before curling into a warm ball at her hip.
Cole probably hadn’t meant anything by it at all. He wasn’t being forward. He wasn’t even flirting.
He was just being kind.
Okay, she was definitely spiraling.
“You too,” she whispered into the dim room, the echo of the words strange in her own voice. Biscuit blinked at her. “Yeah,” she sighed. “I know.”