Chapter 35
Luke
She opens the door with a smile that’s working overtime.
Her eyes are wrong. Tight. The skin around them held in place by force. Her mascara is fresh—recently applied, which means recently needed. There’s a faint smudge below her left eye she missed.
I notice the smudge. I also notice the line of her throat, the way her shirt sits on her collarbone, the small shift in her weight when she sees me. I notice everything about this woman and I wish I’d stop.
“Hey,” she says. “Thanks for coming. I know it’s last minute.”
“Railing sounded serious,” I say. It didn’t. We both know it didn’t. But I watch the relief move through her when I say it—the tiny exhale, the shoulders dropping half an inch—and something in my chest tightens that has no business tightening.
Her eyes drop to my hands. The swollen knuckles. The cut on my forearm.
“What happened?”
“Job site.”
“That’s not a job site injury, Luke.”
“You should see the job site.”
She holds my eyes for a beat. Decides not to push.
“Coffee’s on the counter,” she says, already turning back to the kitchen table. Her laptop is open. Phone beside it. Legal pad covered in handwriting I can’t read from here. She’s got a pen behind her ear and when the phone rings she picks it up and her voice changes—brighter, sharper.
“David, hi. It’s Marin Wells. I know it’s been—yes. I know. But I’ve got a pitch I think you’ll want to hear.”
I stand in the kitchen and watch her pace. Watch her hands move. Watch her mouth shape words meant for someone else in a voice that fills this kitchen—my kitchen, Emily’s kitchen—and fits in a way that I can’t think about right now.
She waves me toward the porch without looking up. I nod. Grab the toolbox.
I go outside. Check the railing. It’s loose—not urgent, not dangerous, but real. I tighten it. Takes four minutes. The whole time I can hear her through the window. Laughing at something David said. The laugh is performance but it’s a good one and I tighten the bolt harder than I need to.
I go back inside. She’s still on the phone. Pacing. Her back to the stairs.
I take them two at a time.
The bedroom door is closed. I open it.
He’s propped against the headboard. Wrists in the cuffs. And still, somehow, he manages to look at me with the lazy contempt of a man who’s been winning all day and expects to keep winning. His eyes drop to my knuckles. My forearm. Back to my face.
“The handyman,” he says. “Back again.”
I stand in the doorway. Fill it.
He looks me over. Takes his time with it. The way men like him do— measuring what I’m worth based on what I’m wearing, what I’m carrying, where I fall in the hierarchy he’s built inside his head.
“You know she’s crazy, right?” he says. Conversational.
Like we’re two guys at a bar and Marin’s not downstairs rebuilding her life with a phone and a legal pad and a voice that could sell sand to a desert.
“Genuinely, clinically unwell. This whole thing—” He lifts his wrists.
“This isn’t love. This is a woman who got fired and lost her mind and decided I was the thing she could still control. ”
I don’t say anything. I’m looking at his face and thinking about how easy it would be.
Not to hit him. That’s simple. Any man can hit another man.
I’m thinking about how easy it would be to unstrap him.
Walk him downstairs. Out the front door.
No cuffs. No bed. Just us and the yard and the kind of conversation I’m good at.
She’s downstairs. Mascara she had to reapply because of him. A smile she had to rebuild because of him. On the phone clawing her way back to a life he helped destroy. And she’s still bringing him toast. Still checking his wrists. Still fluffing his goddamn pillow.
And he’s lying here calling her crazy.
I could end this right now. Not for her. Because men like him make me sick. Because I’ve spent my whole life fixing what men like him break and I’m tired of cleaning up the mess.
Or I could do something worse. I could unstrap him. Walk him to the front door. Let him go. Let him stumble into town. Find a phone. Call whoever he wants.
And then she’d need me. Not for railings. Not for faucets. For real.
I kill that thought. Bury it under the floorboards with everything else I’m not going to look at today.