Chapter 40
Saturday came in clear and bright, like the weather hadn’t gotten the message about the rest of their lives.
Luke had already run back to his house near Charlottesville to grab some clothes and toiletries for him and the children.
He was back by eight, and he was at the cottages by eight-thirty with a pry bar, a box of shims, and the need to fix at least one thing in his world.
His crew didn’t work weekends, which suited him fine.
He wanted the plain, repetitive work of setting a door frame right—something he could measure, something that would be square when he finished.
A distraction.
He pulled the splintered casing off the second cottage and started fitting the new one.
Behind him, the property woke up. Eventually, the screen door banged. Cora’s voice carried across the yard, narrating something to anyone who’d listen and several who wouldn’t. The chickens started up, and Hamilton started in on the chickens, and Caleb told Hamilton to leave the chickens alone.
By every appearance, it was an ordinary morning.
That was the strangest part—how ordinary it looked. The danger was real and close, and the morning had the nerve to look like peace anyway.
He decided, for the length of one Saturday morning, to let it.
He set a shim, checked the level, tapped it home.
When he straightened for another, he caught sight of Jenna.
She sat on the back porch steps with Cora between her knees, working a French braid into their daughter’s dark hair.
Cora held unnaturally still—a small miracle—while Jenna’s fingers moved through the strands with the same unhurried patience she’d always had.
Jonah crouched on the step below, holding something cupped in his hands for her to admire, and Jenna studied it with complete seriousness.
Two of his three. Luke’s eyes moved over the yard for the third and didn’t find Liam. He was probably inside.
A few feet from the steps, at the edge of things where she always kept herself, lay Freya.
The dog hadn’t let any of them close. Luke had tried more than once—crouched, offered his hand, gotten nothing but those pale, measuring eyes. Yet there she was, stretched out an arm’s length from Jenna with her head on her paws.
The canine watched the children with something that wasn’t trust yet. But it was closer than she’d ever come for him.
Luke stood there with the pry bar in his hand and looked at the woman and the wary dog and two of his children, all of them gold in the morning light. Something turned over in his chest that he’d spent months and months refusing to feel.
Hope.
He made himself go back to the door frame before the emotion could grow any larger.
“You need help?”
He looked up. Liam stood at the corner of the cottage, his hands in his pockets as he watched Luke work.
His heart softened. “Always. Grab that box of screws.”
Liam fetched the box and crouched beside him.
For a while they worked in the easy quiet. Liam held the casing steady while Luke drove the screws. The boy had been doing jobs like this since he was four. His patience made him a natural.
“Dad.” Liam kept his eyes on the screw Luke was setting. “Is Mom staying?”
Luke’s hands went still for half a second before he made them keep moving.
He’d been waiting for the question all week. He still didn’t have a clean answer.
“I don’t know yet, Bud,” he said honestly. “There’s a lot we’re still figuring out.”
Liam nodded as if turning that answer over. “Cora thinks she’s staying forever. She told Jonah.”
“Cora thinks a lot of things.”
“Yeah.” Liam adjusted his grip on the casing. “I hope she’s right.”
Luke stopped.
His son wasn’t looking at him. He’d said the words to the doorframe, not to his father.
But he’d said them.
Luke looked at the top of his boy’s head, and his throat went tight. “So do I.”
He hadn’t meant to say the words. He’d meant something careful and parental, something that didn’t promise what he couldn’t deliver. Instead the truth came out plain and unguarded, the same way it had in the kitchen the other night when he’d called Jenna his wife.
Liam glanced up.
For a second, something passed between them—an understanding, father to son, that neither of them had words for and neither of them needed.
Then Liam looked back at the casing. “This one’s crooked.”
They went back to being two people fixing a door again.
Luke checked it. The boy was right. It was crooked.
He loosened the screw and set it true.
It was a good morning. Maybe the best one he’d had in two years.
He just couldn’t make himself believe it would last—and he hated that he couldn’t.
Luke kept working anyway.
A little after noon, a county truck stopped at the gate.
Jenna caught sight of it from the porch, where she’d been watching Cora and Jonah build something indistinguishable out of clothespins at her feet.
Freya had taken to lying near her now. Not against her. Not yet. Just near—an arm’s length off, wherever Jenna settled, like a sentry who’d assigned herself the post.
Cora claimed full credit for the dog coming around, and Jenna let her have it.
But she’d caught the dog watching her in the quiet hours too, those amber eyes steady on her face. She understood the look better than she wanted to. She knew what it was to keep your distance from a thing you wanted. To circle it for weeks before you let yourself believe it might be safe.
She didn’t push. She just left the door open, the way someone had once left it open for her.
A white pickup, county seal on the door, idled at the closed gate at the foot of the drive.
Ruby stepped outside, drying her hands on a towel, and went still.
“That’s the building inspector.” The ease left her voice. “He was just here Wednesday. Signed off and everything. He’s not due back till Monday.”
Ruby muttered a few more things before stepping back inside.
Caleb sent Liam back to the house before walking to meet the truck. The inspector said something through his window, and Caleb’s shoulders squared. After a long moment, he swung the gate open and let the truck through.
Jenna read it the way she couldn’t stop reading things now. Official vehicle, off schedule, on a Saturday. A driver she couldn’t make out. An open gate.
None of it had to mean anything. She just couldn’t assume it didn’t either.
She kept her voice light. “Cora, take Jonah and find something to do inside. Tell Grandma I’ll be there in a minute.”
Cora groaned but went, towing Jonah by the hand. The screen door clapped shut behind them. Freya rose from the edge of the porch and paced closer, ears forward, reading the drive the same as Jenna was.
She didn’t go in after the children. She stepped back into the shade of the doorway, where she could watch everything.
As the truck started up the drive, Jenna didn’t take her eyes off it.
She couldn’t shake the feeling more trouble had just arrived.