Chapter 3
By her fourth morning at the big oak desk, Sunny had the insurance correspondence sorted into folders that actually said what was inside them, and she’d demoted the infamous shoebox to a labeled tray that no longer bled receipts onto the floor.
It was, she thought, the most satisfying work she’d done in three years. She found peace in taking an honest mess that wasn’t hiding anything nefarious and coaxing it back into shape. No one was lying to her here. The numbers were straightforward and nothing else.
She could put her whole mind to this problem and trust that solving it would actually result in clear answers and balanced books, which was more than she’d been able to say about most of her adult life.
Hank was out somewhere on a call. He’d left her a note in surprisingly neat block capitals—GONE TO THE HENDERSON PLACE, BACK BY NOON, COFFEE’S FRESH—and the old house had settled into the deep quiet of solid walls gracefully aged.
Sunny had learned to work fast inside the hours she was given.
Presley was looking after the little ones at the new house until eleven.
All the children loved having an actual house and a yard of their own, but Presley was especially ecstatic.
She’d never had her own room and was already deep into decorating its walls with her drawings.
It had been an emotional moment for both of them when Sunny quietly told her daughter the little bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall was all hers.
Presley had torn down the hall and disappeared into the room while she followed more slowly.
When Sunny stopped in the doorway, Presley had come over and thrown her arms around her mother, declaring it the best room ever.
Surreptitiously, Sunny had wiped away a few tears over Presley’s head.
She couldn’t have given her daughter this without the help of the WoWS, and she made a mental note to write thank you notes to Rose and Natalie for making her daughter so happy.
It still unsettled her some mornings to have gone from the anonymous charity of one Steele brother to the open payroll of another.
She still couldn’t decide whether that was a coincidence or not.
In truth, Hank was nothing like his brother.
Reno had jumped in and done something dramatic, a grand gesture, to try to fix the mess he perceived himself having made of her life.
When she started working here, she’d braced for Hank to attempt to fix her life as well. Instead, he left fresh coffee in the pot, tidy notes that told her where he was and how to get in touch with him if she had any questions and otherwise stayed out of her way.
She didn’t trust it yet. After all, the man was a doctor. He fixed people for a living. He would eventually turn his attention to fixing her. The other shoe would drop eventually. It always did.
In the meantime, she had a giant tray of bills to sort into paid, unpaid but billed, and unbilled piles.
This morning, she hoped to get them all sorted and entered into the spreadsheet she’d built yesterday.
She was reaching for her coffee mug and girding herself to jump into the task when she realized she was being watched.
A girl stood in the doorway between the office and the hall, so still that Sunny couldn’t have said how long she’d been there.
Early teens, dark hair twisted into a knot with not one strand escaping.
Her face gave away precisely nothing as she stood there composed and careful.
She held a glass of water in both hands and studied Sunny the way Sunny would examine a set of books she didn’t trust.
This must be the owner of the gray cardigan.
“You’re the accountant,” the girl said. Not a question. There was no rudeness in it and no warmth, either. Just a flat level appraisal, a customs officer deciding whether to wave a traveler through.
“That’s right. My name’s Sunny Carter.” Sunny kept her voice easy. “You must be Madison.”
“Are you going to be here a lot?”
Not where are you from or do you like being an accountant. Sunny understood at once what the real question was, lurking beneath the ordinary one. The girl wasn’t asking about Sunny’s work hours. She was asking what Sunny intended to become around here. To the house. To her father.
“I’ll be here every morning for a few weeks,” Sunny said.
“Until I dig out this poor desk and get control of the runaway paperwork burying it. After that, I should be here less. A few mornings each week.” She added plainly for Madison’s sake, “I’m setting up the office books and sorting out the insurance and billing problems. That’s the whole of why I’m here. ”
Something across the back of the girl’s neck unclenched a bit. Sunny wouldn’t call it trust, nothing so generous as that, but the small relief of getting a straight answer when she’d braced for a performance.
Sunny had seen that exact look on her own face when stood alone in front of a mirror.
And she’d seen it in her own daughter’s face.
She was even starting to glimpse it in the twin’s expressions now and then.
They were getting old enough to be cautious of every new adult that came into their life, to wait for proof that adults weren’t going to quiz them about their father or say things the boys sensed were mean, but couldn’t quite see how, yet.
She didn’t know this particular girl’s story and didn’t need to. The shape of it was plain enough. An important adult in her life had betrayed her trust. Badly.
Madison’s gaze slid past her to the desk, to the labeled trays, the folders squared to the edge of the blotter, the shoebox dethroned and gone.
A brief flash of grudging approval crossed Madison’s face.
Whatever else Sunny might be, she’d walked into chaos and made it behave.
That clearly counted for something in this girl’s mind.
Choosing something ordinary to talk about, Sunny said, “Your dad mentioned that a few months ago when he couldn’t find the desk anymore, he boxed up some of the practice’s files and old receipts. Do you happen to know where they ended up?”
“They’re upstairs.” She turned and headed for the stairs. She paused with her foot hovering over the first step and looked back at Sunny expectantly.
She got up from the desk and followed Madison.
The staircase was the best thing in the house. Quarter-sawn oak, a newel post some long-dead craftsman had turned by hand until it was perfect, and an intricate perfectly joined checkerboard of oak cover paneling covering the walls.
At the top of the stairs, a door stood open to a bedroom, and Sunny stopped in front of it automatically.
The far corner of the room was perfect. A single bed was made hospital-tight, the gray cardigan was folded over the back of a wooden chair with a lamp set beside it at the precise angle to light a book held by anyone sitting in the chair, and a bookcase shelf held rows of books arranged by height.
It was an island of absolute order. The rest of the room, all around that one corner, was cardboard boxes, some unopened, others with clothes overflowing them.
A double mattress and box springs leaned against the wall with no headboard or frame.
A set of cheap curtains still in their plastic lay on the floor beside a boxed curtain rod.
Sunny had seen that exact arrangement everywhere she’d lived after Winston. She’d created one small square of her world that was flawless because she couldn’t get her hands around the rest of it.
“It’s not finished.” Madison’s was sharp and defensive. “It’s not finished.”
Every instinct Sunny had: the designer’s, the mother’s, the manager’s, lined up to say, here’s what you do. She felt the words rise. Paint first, then the bed against that wall, you’ll want a desk under the window . . .
She’d walked a hundred clients through exactly this, back when her opinion had been worth a great deal of money.
She closed her mouth on all of it.
“What do you want it to feel like?” she asked instead.
Madison blinked. It was, Sunny could see, not a question anyone had ever put to her before.
“Old,” Madison said warily, as if she expected to be argued out of it.
“Like it’s been here a long time. With stuff somebody used and loved.
“ A small grimace. “Not new stuff that comes in a box and looks like everybody else’s stuff. Dad keeps offering to buy me a matching bedroom set. But I don’t want matching. ”
And just like that, Sunny felt the old clean joy she hadn’t felt in years. When a client understood a space and was willing to honor it, and she was going to get to do her job correctly.
“Patina,” she said, hearing the pleasure in her own voice and not bothering to hide it.
“You want patina. Things with a history already in them so the room feels rooted instead of bought. That’s .
. .” she caught herself before saying that’s exactly right could land like a judgment and said,“. . . that’s a good way to want a room to feel. ”
Madison had visibly been braced for her to try to take over, to redecorate the child along with the room, the way Sunny gathered someone had before. Madison looked startled now that she was getting instead an adult lighting up over her idea.
“I could help you find them,” Sunny said.
“Old things. It used to be my job. But you’ll have to make all the decisions.
This is your room, not mine, so you need to choose what goes in it.
I just know where to look and can tell you what’s worth the money.
” She shrugged and said lightly, “I’d be your shopping assistant. ”
The girl was quiet a long moment.
“There’s a place just outside town with used furniture,” she said at last. “Dad said it looked like junk.” A flicker of a smile crossed her face. “It looked like junk to him. But not to me.”