Chapter 20
20
Zach stood on the porch of the log cabin, his coffee mug cradled between his hands as he watched the mist rise from the river in ghostly, gossamer strands and dawn sunlight filter through the haze of clouds. Although the air possessed a chill at this time of day, he knew it would be warm by mid-morning as the sun rose in the sky. It was mid-April, and spring had finally come to this corner of northwestern Connecticut, so the landscape was a glory of blossom and birdsong, damp earth and new leaf. Zach loved this time of year, after the frigid, deadening months of winter, when the whole world woke up again. Every breath felt like a fresh start, which was how he was feeling, now that he’d finally made some changes to his life.
None of it had been easy, mainly because changing so much as the color of your shirt in Starr’s Fall could make the front page of its newspaper and feed the town’s gossip mill for weeks. Moving out of his parents’ house, more or less quitting his job, and no longer taking any crap about his personal life had been cataclysmic not just for him, but for everyone he knew, simply because none of them knew how to let people change.
Zach was going to make them do it, even if it involved a lot of kicking and screaming.
He took a sip of coffee, narrowing his eyes as he watched a heron land gracefully on the water, slate-blue wings outstretched. For some reason, the bird’s inherent elegance made him think of Maggie. He missed her, missed what they’d almost had together, but at the same time he knew he’d made the right decision… for that time. He needed to figure himself out before he tried yet another relationship that would likely be doomed to fail. He cared too much about Maggie for that, and yet at the same time he recognized he very well might have missed his chance… something he was going to have to accept.
The memory of the look of hurt on her face when he’d given her that hackneyed it’s-me-not-you line still had the power to make him wince. The trouble was, he’d meant every word. He just didn’t know if Maggie believed him.
Over the last month, he’d made sure to drop by Your Turn Next every few days, checking in on both Maggie and Ben, keeping the conversation light, wanting to maintain their friendship. Although he always enjoyed seeing her, he didn’t know if it was working or not. He felt a distance from Maggie that he didn’t like, even though he knew he’d been the one to move away first. Whether they could move back toward each other one day remained to be seen…
Sighing, Zach turned away from the dawn beauty of the morning, swallowing the last of the coffee before he put the mug in the sink. This morning, he was enacting the next stage of his life plan, and he was determined to make Jenna agree to it.
He grabbed his jacket and keys and then headed out to his truck for the ten-minute drive into Starr’s Fall. When he’d first told her he was doing it, Jenna had thought he was being “a little much”—leaving home and renting this log cabin out in the middle of nowhere—but the space had been good for him, better even than he’d expected. He’d enjoyed not being so close to Starr’s Fall, where sometimes it felt as if life were being played out on a stage. He’d also been glad to take a step back from the store and reconsider what he really wanted to do with his life.
And now that he had a plan, he just needed to sell it—or really, state it—to his sister. Because this time Zach wasn’t taking no for an answer.
He pulled into the parking lot of the store, the gravel crunching under the wheels. Usually he walked around to the back where their living quarters were, but this time he unlocked the front door and went through the store, feeling like it was a reckoning as well as a goodbye. He strolled down the aisles, running his fingers along the shelves of hardware supplies and grocery staples, including the argued-over soup. How many afternoons had he spent stocking these shelves? How many days stacking boxes or manning the cash register? All through high school, he’d done shifts whenever his parents had asked him, and then that year of his mom’s cancer treatment, when he’d often been alone in here, wondering where on earth his life was going. The years since his parents had decided to retire, working with Jenna, hoping for something better.
None of it, Zach acknowledged, had been a waste, but he knew now he wanted more for his life than waiting and wishing. Today he was going to start going after it.
“Zach?” Jenna’s voice seemed disembodied as it floated from the back of the store, where a door connected it to their living quarters. She came forward, pulling her cardigan more closely around her. “What are you doing here so early?” She pressed her lips together. “I thought you were taking a break .”
“It wasn’t a break,” Zach replied evenly. Even though he’d stepped back from managing the store—or really, attempting to—he’d pulled his weight with shifts and grunt work, the same as he always did. “But I want to talk to you.”
“Oh?” Jenna’s eyebrows rose as she nodded. “Okay, well, this sounds serious.”
“I’m serious, if that’s what you mean. Let’s go into the barn.”
“The barn?” Jenna, Zach knew, hardly ever went into the barn, where they stored their inventory; she usually stayed in the store while Zach dealt with stock.
“Not the store’s stock barn,” he replied. “The other one.”
“Okay…” Shaking her head, Jenna followed him out of the store, to the barns behind. While the first one was used for inventory, the one behind was crammed full of furniture his parents had collected over the years. They’d never done much with it, and a lot of it was junk, but antiquing had been one of their hobbies. Zach had lost count of the number of weekends they’d gone trawling through the countryside looking for treasures while he and Jenna held down the store.
Now he unlocked the door and slid it open. Sunlight streamed into the dim space, catching the dust motes dancing through the air.
“I haven’t been in here since Laurie went through it months ago,” she remarked. “And I think it must have been years before that. I half wonder if we should set fire to the whole thing.”
“We definitely shouldn’t do that,” Zach replied. “Because I want it.”
Jenna swung around to look at him in surprise. “What?”
“I want it,” Zach repeated firmly. “All of it. This furniture has just been sitting here getting wood rot for decades. Mom and Dad don’t want it—I already asked them.”
Now her mouth dropped open. “You what?—”
“I called them last night. They were fine with it.” He met her gaze levelly. “And there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be, too.”
Jenna gaped at him for a moment. “You talked with Mom and Dad?”
“Yes, on this thing called a phone?” He gentled his voice to keep from sounding too snarky because that wasn’t how he felt at all. The conversation had been both good and healing, and he thought Jenna could probably benefit from the same. “They were actually really glad to talk to me,” he told her, “and they invited me to come down to Florida for Memorial Day. You too. Said we should see each other more, even.”
“What…” Jenna looked completely flummoxed, which was fair, because Zach had been pretty surprised by the suggestion himself, as well as gratified.
“People can change, Jenna,” he said quietly. “They can have regrets as well as learn and grow. Even Mom and Dad.”
“And you?” she asked him after a moment, sounding thoughtful. “Is that what this is about?”
“I’ve changed,” Zach agreed. “But yeah. This is me moving on. Because the way things have been? Let’s be honest. They haven’t been working for a while, for either of us.”
Jenna was silent for a long moment, her gaze downcast, face drawn in pensive lines. Then, to his shock, it started to crumple.
“Jenna—” He flung one hand out toward her. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his sister cry. She was always so strong, so indomitable.
“I’m sorry,” she sniffed, gulping as she wiped her eyes. “I just feel like I’ve been a… a bad person. A bad sister , to you. Have I forced you out of the business? Our home ?” She dropped her hands from her face as she looked at him bleakly. “Be honest.”
“Maybe it felt that way at first,” Zach answered slowly, “at least with the store. But this is a good thing for both of us, Jenna. This doesn’t have to be some big split. You need to have full control of the store without feeling like you’re cutting me out. And I need to do my own thing. Both of those are okay.”
She was silent for a moment, absorbing what he’d said. “Hence, the furniture,” she said at last.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
She glanced around at the stacked furniture—sofas and armchairs, bureaus and desks, all piled haphazardly on top of one another. “So what are you planning to do with all this stuff?”
Zach sucked in a breath and then let it out slowly. “Well, it might sound a little crazy,” he began cautiously, “but I want to start a furniture restoration business. Working on the bookshelves for the boardgame café made me realize how much I actually like that kind of stuff. And obviously, I’m not super experienced, so I’ll have to start slow and work my way up, as it were, but… that’s what I want to do.” He nodded toward the furniture. “Start by refinishing this stuff, and then moving on to better-quality items, custom pieces. I’ve enrolled in a class on woodworking in Bristol. They have a whole series on making and restoring furniture.” He let out a shaky laugh; it felt both invigorating and scary to tell his sister his fledgling dreams, ones that were only just starting to become reality. “So that’s my plan,” he finished.
Jenna was quiet for a long moment. Zach had no idea what she was thinking, but if his sister was true to form, she’d soon tell him. She stayed silent, though, and that made him nervous. Was his plan that outlandish, that ridiculous, that she couldn’t bring herself to burst his bubble?
“I think that’s great, Zach,” she said finally, sounding so quietly sincere that he was rendered speechless. “But why not use the barn as your workshop? I mean, if you want to, at least at the beginning. There’s space here and it will cut down on costs, and…” She paused before smiling almost shyly. “And actually, it would be nice to work near each other, even if we weren’t actually together, I mean, if you didn’t want to be. I… I don’t think I valued your input as much as I should have, I know I didn’t, and I didn’t realize that until you were gone.”
Zach couldn’t keep a huff of laughter from escaping him. “You didn’t value my opinion at all really, Jenna, but that’s okay. People can change, after all.” He grinned at her. “Even you.”
* * *
By late that afternoon, Zach had made a good start on organizing the furniture in the barn into stuff he could salvage and stuff he just needed to get rid of. He’d also tinkered with the start of a website and opened a few social media accounts. Miller’s Woodworking and Furniture Restoration was now in its nascent form, and when Jenna had stopped by the barn to see how it was all going, she’d been quietly approving in a way she never had when they’d been working on the store together.
As he drove down Main Street back toward his cabin, Zach felt good about everything that had happened—his conversation with his parents last night as well as the one with Jenna this morning. The start of his own business, the steps he’d taken toward following his dreams.
Inevitably, his gaze swung toward Your Turn Next as he drove past. It looked empty save for a lone figure curled up on one end of the big sofa, her dark head bent. Maggie. Impulsively he pulled into a parking space on the side of the street and got out of the truck. He had no idea what he was going to say to her, only that it felt important to see her now, after he’d made so many strides. He realized he wanted to tell her about them all.
Bells jingled as he opened the door of the café, and Penny, curled up in Maggie’s lap, looked up, her ears twitching. Maggie’s ears didn’t twitch but she looked almost as wary as the cat, even as she smiled. This was how it had been between them for the last month, Zach knew. Friendly but not the way it had been. The way he knew he still wanted it to be.
“Zach…” His name sounded like a question on her lips.
“I thought I’d stop by.” He glanced around the café and saw it was indeed empty, save for Maggie sitting on the sofa. “Where’s Ben?”
“Out with friends.” She said this with a wry sort of pride. “Two boys from Torrington High School are into RainQuest, it seems. They came into the café today and they got to chatting to Ben… It was all about stats and combat strategies and I don’t even know what.” She let out a shaky laugh. “You’d probably have known what they were talking about, but I felt like they were speaking a foreign language.”
“It kind of is,” Zach agreed, smiling.
“Anyway… they invited Ben out to The Latest Scoop for ice cream, and amazingly, he agreed.” She sounded both thrilled and fearful. “They’re there now, but I’m practically counting the minutes, worried something might go wrong.”
“That’s understandable,” he replied quietly, “after all you’ve both been through.”
She nodded, looking down at the cat in her lap. “I know I should have told you about all that before. I’m sorry I didn’t. It wasn’t fair to you… or Ben. Starting over doesn’t mean forgetting everything that went before.”
“No.” He thought of his own life. Maggie was right, change didn’t mean forgetting. It meant remembering and then being different. “Maggie,” he said sincerely, wanting to reach out and touch her hand but deciding not to, “that’s great to hear, about Ben.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Her voice sounded shaky, and she let out a self-deprecating laugh. “I know it doesn’t sound like that big a deal, but it feels huge.”
“It is huge,” Zach replied quietly. He sat on the opposite end of the sofa. “When did he last go out with kids his own age?”
“Honestly? Never. I mean, not since middle school, anyway, although I will say, Bella’s been coming by a fair bit.”
Zach’s mouth twitched in a smile. “Has she indeed?”
“I am definitely not making a big deal of it.” She sank her fingers into Penny’s fur as a gusty sigh escaped her. “But… he never found his tribe in Greenwich, you know? I’m really hoping and praying he finds it here.”
“It sounds like he might be beginning to.”
“Maybe.” She glanced up at him, her eyes dark and luminous. “You’ve been such a good friend to him, Zach. I hope you know that.”
“I think I do,” he told her with a small smile.
She let out another laugh, this one even shakier. “Hope feels so hard sometimes. To do it in the first place, and then also to risk the disappointment. I tell myself to be realistic about everything but sometimes I just want to believe .”
She glanced at him again and then looked away quickly, and Zach wondered if they were talking about Ben—or something else, maybe even their own relationship… or lack of it. Did she miss him the way he missed her?
“Anyway,” Maggie said into the silence, before he could think how to approach that topic, or decide if now was really the right time. “How are things with you?”
“They’re… good.” She raised her eyebrows, waiting for more, and haltingly Zach began to explain about his hoped-for woodworking business, the log cabin he had decided to rent long-term, the life he wanted to build. He could hear the excitement in his voice, and he wasn’t embarrassed by it. This felt too important, too good , not to be unabashedly glad of what he was finally doing. “It feels like I’m getting my life on track,” he confessed as he finished. “About time.”
“Well, you’re still so young,” Maggie replied after a moment, and Zach just blinked, because she sounded like she was his grandmother and he’d just left high school or something. Was she trying to put some distance between them? He felt like there was plenty already. He didn’t want more, and he hadn’t thought she did, either, but maybe he’d got it wrong.
“Youngish, maybe,” he finally replied lightly. Maggie didn’t reply, just lifted Penny off her lap and took her empty coffee cup to the back of the kitchen.
“I’m really glad for you, Zach,” she called back as she started tidying up, her movements brisk and decisive.
Slowly, Zach rose from the sofa and followed her back to the kitchen. He propped one shoulder against the doorframe as he watched her bustle about. What was going on here? He felt like the temperature in the room had gone down by about twenty degrees, and he wasn’t sure why.
“Thanks,” he said after a moment, unsure what else to say. “Seems like we’re all having a new start.”
“Yes.” She took a deep breath, laid her hands flat on the counter. “In all kinds of ways.” She paused before continuing, “Actually… I’m going out on a date this weekend.” She lifted her gaze to meet his with a resolute defiance.
Zach went completely still, saying nothing. He felt like he’d been sucker-punched; he was breathless from the pain of it. So that was where this had all been going. Stupid him, for hoping otherwise. For thinking Maggie might feel about him the way he still felt about her. Maggie stared at him for another second, her expression still defiant, and then she turned away.
“Wow,” he finally said, and his voice was toneless. He was amazed at how hurt he felt—not just because she was going out on a date, but also because she’d told him this way, like she was flinging it in his face, like she’d moved on a long time ago, and maybe she had. “Did you sign up to Tinder, after all?” he asked, his lips curving into a small, cool smile. “Good for you.”
“Not Tinder,” she replied stiffly as she turned back to face him. “He’s a friend of a friend.”
“Even better.”
They stared at each other for a moment, and Zach had the urge to grab her by the shoulders, shake her and then kiss her. Or maybe just beg her to reconsider, the way he was, because he really didn’t like the thought of her dating someone else at all, even as he recognized he had no right to object. A month ago he’d more or less told her he wasn’t interested. Did he really want her pining for him now?
And yet… a date ?
He opened his mouth to say—what? Don’t go? But no. She had every right to find happiness—and he was done with trying to make people like him. He wasn’t about to convince Maggie how she should take a chance on him. On them . If she wanted to go out on a date, fine. He wouldn’t stop her. He dug his hands into the pockets of his coat, and his fingers closed around a small wooden figure he’d been keeping in there for months now. He’d never found the right time to give it to her, but maybe now he never would.
“Here,” he said abruptly as he thrust it at her. “A memento.”
“What…” She took the figurine, stared down at it in surprise.
“A shadar-kai,” he said tonelessly. “In case you didn’t know.”
“I know,” she said softly. She ran her thumb over the burnished wood of the tiny figurine—elven ears poked out of her long flowing hair, her slender body swathed in a robe, the expression on her face a mixture of defiance and fear. She looked up at him, her eyes luminous. “You said I was like a shadar-kai.”
“Yeah.” He felt exposed, then, for having made the figurine and then given it to her, especially since she was going on a date. “I should probably go,” he said abruptly, and for a millisecond, her face crumpled. It was so quick Zach wondered if he’d imagined it, hoped for it, even. Then she nodded.
“All right. And—thank you.” She nodded toward the figurine. “I’ll… I’ll treasure it, Zach.”
He found he had to swallow past the lump in his throat. For a second, they simply stared at each other.
“Well…” Maggie cleared her throat. “I guess I’ll see you around.”
What a vague non-promise that was, he thought. Zach nodded back. “See you around,” he echoed, and then he walked out of the café, feeling like he was walking out of her life. As the door slammed behind him, Zach thought that maybe he was.