Chapter 15 Jack
FIFTEEN
JACK
By Tuesday, I’ve accepted that this is my life now.
There’s a shallow indentation in the legal pad stack at the far left corner where Isla’s elbow keeps landing. A faint crescent of plum wine stains the wood, and neither of us is willing to claim it.
I set my toolbox down by the back door and head over to scope out the damage.
“You’re tracking mud,” she calls without looking up.
“Hell if I am.” I glance down at the floor and realize I am, in fact, tracking mud. “Shit, sorry.”
She snorts and slides a dishtowel off the counter.
I wipe the floor because I’m learning how to follow her lead. I’m learning a lot this week, actually.
Namely, Isla keeps three pens within reach at all times and somehow can tell when one has been moved half an inch. If I put the coffee scooper back in the wrong place, she won’t mention it, but she will glare at the cabinet, and I will feel it in my bones.
Being married to her has not, contrary to the way half the town has insinuated since Friday, turned my life into a charming montage. We aren’t having wine-drunk nights and cozy dinners together.
She’s not holding my hand while I make love to her each night.
Rather, our marriage has turned my life into an administrative sprint where the finish line keeps moving and my wife keeps insisting on redundancy, documentation, and backup plans for the backup plans.
But it’s hard to argue with her when this strategy is the only thing standing between Mirabelle and financial disaster.
“You’re hovering,” she says.
“I’m married to you. I think that gives me some hovering rights.”
“It gives you exactly zero.”
“Cold.”
“Efficient,” she corrects.
On the table, there are printed grant applications spread out in overlapping layers and sticky notes blooming out of the margins of three different binders. Isla’s laptop is perched on a stack of old orchard invoices.
She’s wearing one of my sweatshirts.
It’s too big on her, the shorts underneath barely there, which means her thighs are on full display in a way that feels unfair in a shared workspace. Usually, I’d be focused on that and only that.
Instead, I can’t stop thinking about the fact that she was wearing this exact outfit Friday night, after we got home from the Harbor Light and stared each other down in the kitchen before retreating to separate rooms.
Me, on the twin guest mattress. Her, in her own room with the door shut.
That was the wedding night.
There were no candles or roses. I didn’t get to unzip her dress and kiss her slowly before showing her just how good a husband I can be. Still, that didn’t stop brain from trying to conjure the scene.
“How’s it going?”
She huffs. “If you ask me that again, I’m going to hand you a pen and make you personally responsible for all of these.”
“Wouldn’t mind a little delegating.”
“Don’t start with me.”
“I’m just asking what you need.”
“What I need,” she says, “is for the state of Connecticut to stop requiring twelve attachments and a signed letter from God himself.”
I’m careful as I navigate around the chair legs and the precarious stacks of paper.
I glance at the top page. “Agricultural resiliency, that sounds promising.”
“That one is hell,” she says.
“Okay. And this one?”
“Historic preservation. Also hell.”
I make a beeline for the empty carafe, hoping to pull her out of the weeds for a second. Grants are a hellscape, that’s for sure, but this level of pessimism is immense even for Isla.
“Do you want more coffee?”
“I already made some.”
I follow her pointed finger to the counter, where there is, in fact, another full carafe under a clean dish towel. I pour us both a healthy mug.
“I don’t need any more caffeine.”
“Mmm, I can see your soul leaving your body.”
“That’s funny,” she mutters. “I’m pretty sure my soul left me back in 2019.”
I sit in the chair across from her, then immediately regret it because now I’m close enough to read everything, which means I’m close enough to want to fix everything.
“Okay,” I say. “Could you at least walk me through where you’re stuck?”
Her eyes narrow. “Is this a hostile takeover?”
Isla wanted my help with the grant applications, but now she’s being dodgy about it. It’s hard for her to give up control, I guess. I want to help where I can, though I also know pressuring her only does good if the end result is worth it.
“Just let me help with the pieces that don’t require you,” I say. “I’m really good at pulling together useful information.”
“What information do you think you have that I don’t?”
I pat my own chest. “I’m a business owner, baby. We’re talking tax returns, permits, licenses. I have a whole folder called ‘Things the government has made me prove I’m allowed to do.’”
That earns me the smallest smile. “You can do the business documentation attachments, then. If you mess it up, I have a stapler, and I’m not afraid to use it.”
“I accept these terms.”
She slides a stack of papers toward me. “And,” she says begrudgingly, “you can do the narrative section for the emergency repair. The one about structural risk. I think you’d be able to explain the stakes better than I can.”
My eyebrows lift. “You want me to write it down myself?”
Isla is precise with language in a way I’ve never been. My ADHD brain likes motion and outcomes, not sitting still with sentences until they behave. She knows that. I know that. It’s one of those unspoken truths we orbit.
“You build things for a living. You know how to explain what breaks and what happens if it stays broken. And I’ll proofread if you want.”
I pick up the application and read the header, then the purpose statement.
“Jesus,” I say slowly.
“What? Are you stuck already?”
“No, it’s just that this grant is built for exactly what you’ve been trying to do. Orchard infrastructure. Historic agricultural property. Emergency stabilization. And there’s even an accessibility component for public-facing farms.”
I watch the shift happen in real time. The way her brain seizes on the possibility, turns it over, and immediately starts searching for the catch. Isla has never known how to trust a good thing without first looking for the blade hidden inside it.
“I know all that already,” she says at once. “But it’s highly competitive.”
“Everything is. But I just read the criteria myself, and I know you more than qualify.”
She snatches the page from me so fast I almost laugh, except she is very obviously not in a laughing mood.
She bends over it, eyes moving quickly, mouth set tight. She found these grant applications, printed them off, and is painstakingly filling them in one by one. Still, that doesn’t mean she memorized the requirements.
I wait for her to catch up, smiling as her shoulders finally loosen by half an inch.
“That’s just . . . This is actually . . .”
“It’s perfect,” I say.
“It’s not perfect.”
“Okay. It’s suspiciously well aimed.”
She shoots me a look. “I hate when you sound right this early in the day.”
I lean back in my chair. “We’ll still apply to everything we can. We should. But I think we should prioritize this one. It fits what we actually need.”
Her gaze drops back to the page. “There’s an up-front requirement to pay for the engineering assessment and site documentation.”
“I saw it.”
She worries her lower lip between her teeth. “That means we have to prove we can cover it.”
“I saw that, too.”
“I can scrape by with more shifts at the club, but I’m not sure it will be enough to pay for all the preliminary work they’re requiring.”
The answer rises in me immediately—I could cover it. I know I could. I also know the second I say that, she’s going to hear ten things I don’t mean. Charity. Pity. Obligation. Some kind of masculine savior complex I’d rather chew through drywall than be accused of.
Still, I say, “Do you think you could let me bridge the gap?”
“Don’t throw money at my mess because you think that proves something. It’s thousands of dollars, Jack. I wouldn’t be able to pay you back for a long time, so no. You already married me. You made your point.”
“I don’t think my money proves something,” I say, rougher now. “I think it keeps your lights on while a committee takes its sweet time deciding whether this place deserves funding.”
Her jaw tightens. “I can hold the fort.”
“You’ve been holding the fort,” I say. “You’ve been holding the whole damn continent.”
She points her pen at me. “I’m not taking some extravagant gift from you. That was the whole point of this . . . union between us.”
“It’s not a gift,” I argue. “It’s a short-term investment to cover the gaps. In a farm that makes money. In a business that matters. In a place that’s kept half this town fed, employed, and proud.”
“And in your wife.” She leans back, pen still in hand, and there’s a sharper note in her voice when she says, “You’re not slick, Rhodes.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you want to cover the gaps because you hate watching me struggle, and because I’m sure you’d love for me to stop dancing at Luxe.”
I frown. “That’s not why.”
She can do whatever the hell she wants. She can dance naked under stage lights in front of a room full of strangers and still be more self-possessed than anyone I know. If she wants to do that work, that’s her business.
The only part of it that twists at me is knowing I’m not there, knowing there are men in that room who might leer at her, might judge her, and still walk away with all their teeth.
She gives me the flattest, most disbelieving look I’ve ever seen.
I drag a hand through my hair, hit the uneven disaster still growing out, and try to come up with words that won’t make this worse.
“I don’t care if you dance, Isla. I mean, I care. But not in a controlling way. God knows you don’t belong to me, or to anyone. If you want to dance, then fuckin’ dance.”
Her brows lift. “That was almost coherent.”
“I just . . .” I exhale. “I hate that you have to do it to keep the orchard alive.”
“I made that choice.”
“It’s your body, your work, your call. I’m just saying . . . you work too damn hard.”
Her eyes flicker, and I can tell she’s weighing whether to let me off the hook or keep pushing. She chooses violence. “If we do a bridge amount, it needs to be rigidly structured. It comes straight back to you when this is all over.”
“Fine,” I say immediately. “I’ll make it as unsexy as you want.”
“That won’t be hard for you,” she mutters, and I bark out a laugh because she’s a menace, too, only in cleaner packaging.
“Okay,” she says, brisk again, already slipping back into task mode. She slides a fresh sheet toward me. “Narrative section. Start with the roof, the irrigation line, and the ADA ramp requirements for public events.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She pauses. “Don’t call me ma’am.”
“Sorry, wife.”
Her eyes cut to mine. “Don’t call me that, either.”
“Mmm. Hard ask.”
We work for hours.
I write about the roofline and the rot, the way water gets in and never really leaves, the way one bad season turns into five if no one gets ahead of it. I describe the irrigation line, the pump replacement, the hazard by the shed I noticed while fixing the latch.
I keep it clean. I keep it factual. No pity or sob story. Isla would rather set herself on fire than be reduced to one.
Across from me, she fills in budgets, cross-references invoices, and mutters about attachment numbers under her breath like she’s trying to curse the entire grant system into cooperation.
At some point, she pushes a glass of plum wine toward me without looking up.
I take a sip. Then another.
By the time we wrap for the night, I’m pleasantly unsteady, and she’s razor-sharp and exhausted. Together, we make a mighty fine team.