Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
EMMY
By Thursday, Harmony Ridge has apparently appointed itself the official historical society of my unfinished dreams.
It starts at Rayburn Hardware, where Mr. Rayburn pauses with my receipt still in his hand. "Lot of lumber going up on Mill Creek."
I blink at him over the furnace filters June asked me to grab. "That so?"
"Fine framing work." He folds the receipt slowly, like suspense is part of the sale. "Porch wraps around two sides."
My stomach tightens. I take the receipt. "Everybody needs a hobby."
He has the decency to look mildly ashamed. Not enough to stop, of course. Harmony Ridge runs on coffee, church bulletins, and people saying things they know they shouldn't say.
"Just thought you might've heard," he says.
"I hear a lot of things."
At the diner, Mabel Tandy mentions she took Mill Creek because of road work on Sycamore and "wouldn't you know, they're building something pretty out there.
" At the post office, Cal Jenkins says, "That Tyler boy sure does keep a crew busy.
" At the gas station, a woman I went to high school with leans across the cooler case. "Is it true he's building your house?"
"My house?" I ask.
Her face goes pink. "I mean, you know. The one you drew."
June finds me in the back office of the diner twenty minutes later, staring at a stack of invoices I have no right to pretend I understand. "You alphabetized my vendor receipts," she says.
"You're welcome."
"Emmy."
I hate making her worried. Lately, it feels like one more thing my marriage has handed her.
"What?" I ask.
"You've got the face."
"I have a face. Most people do."
"The one where you look a little constipated."
I push the invoices away. "Everybody keeps talking about the house."
"I'd be lying if I said I hadn't heard things."
"Did you see it?"
"No."
Too fast.
"June."
She sighs and closes the office door. The diner noise softens to plates clinking and voices droning. "I drove by," she says.
Something hot and foolish flashes through me. "When?"
"Yesterday."
"And you didn't tell me?"
"I didn't know how."
That's the first honest thing anyone has said to me all day, and I'm not ready for it. I sit back. "Is it really..."
June looks down at the pencil in her hand, rolling it once between her fingers. "Yeah," she says softly. "It is."
My throat goes tight.
June steps closer. "You don't have to go look."
"I have the show tonight," I say.
June studies me. "That's not an answer."
"It is if you respect evasive language."
"I don't."
Her gaze drops to my stomach before she catches herself. "You feeling okay?"
My hand moves low, pressing over the small curve beneath my sweater. There's not much there, not enough for anyone else to notice unless they're June. "I'm fine," I say.
"You don't have to prove anything by making yourself hurt."
I stand carefully. "I'm not going because I owe him. I'm going because if this town is going to keep putting a ghost in front of me, I'd rather see whether it has walls."
I wait until dusk. Dusk is kinder and half-hidden, the hour when people are home eating dinner or pretending they remembered to thaw chicken.
Mill Creek Road curls away from town, past the old feed store and the church with the signs that make sense every other week.
Then the trees open, and there it is.
For a second, I can't make sense of it. The house is bones. Framing, subfloor, temporary stairs, and skeletal walls rise against a lavender sky. There's no siding yet, no paint, no windows, and no life tucked into the corners. It's just wood and nails.
And still, I know it.
My foot eases off the gas, and the truck rolls slower. The porch line wraps around two sides, exactly wide enough for rocking chairs and muddy boots.
My breath stops. Not similar, not inspired by, and not some expensive interpretation by a designer who took a sweet story and sanded it smooth. It's exact.
The eastern wall opens where the kitchen will be. Above it, under the pitch of the roof, a square of framed space waits where the reading nook window should go. I know that angle. I drew that angle with a Number 2 pencil when I was nineteen years old.
And the dogwood stands off the porch steps, off-center and older than the house by decades. It isn't blooming now, just green and patient.
I pull the truck off the road behind a stand of brush and cut the engine. The quiet rings.
I should leave. Instead, I get out.
Red clay sticks to the edges of my shoes. Sawdust lifts in the mild air, sharp and clean, mixed with fresh lumber and turned dirt. Somewhere nearby, creek water moves over rocks. There are no crew trucks, no voices, and no hammering. No one is here to catch me being stupid.
I duck under a length of caution tape and climb the temporary steps.
The porch boards aren't all in yet, but enough of them hold my weight. I step onto them and feel the past come up so hard I have to grip a post. Nineteen-year-old me wanted a porch because porches meant family and happiness.
I stand on the porch he promised me when all he owned was a guitar, a duffel, and enough arrogance to make poverty look temporary. Back then, someday felt like a country we were walking toward together. Now someday has wall studs and a foundation.
I step inside.
The rooms are only outlines, but my body knows them.
Kitchen to the left, a living room opening wide without being cavernous, and a hallway tucked back toward the bedrooms. Windows are placed for morning light, not photographs.
There's a spot where a sofa could sit without looking like a photo prop.
I walk through the future kitchen, my fingers trailing over raw wood. There's a pencil mark on one stud with measurements and a note in someone else's handwriting. Then, below it, another mark reads: Nook shelf height - match E's sketch.
I stare at the letters until they blur. E. Not Emmy Sutton Tyler. Not Mrs. Tyler. Not the wife. Just E, written on wood no camera will ever see.
My throat burns.
I gaze up past the temporary stairs. They lead to the framed alcove above the kitchen, not finished enough to be safe but coming together.
At the top, the reading nook waits. There's no window yet, just an opening full of sky and tree branches.
The dogwood sits below and to the right, exactly where I put it on paper thirteen years ago.
From there, when it blooms, you'll be able to see white petals against the porch roof.
In spring rain, they'll cling to the branches and go heavy with water.
I know because I imagined it so many times it became a room in my head.
Cade remembered. Or he kept the drawings and followed them because he didn't trust memory. I don't know which hurts more.
I settle my hand over the small curve low beneath my sweater.
"Well," I whisper to the baby, because there's no one else here. "Your father always did have a dramatic sense of timing."
For one reckless moment, I let myself have it.
Not forgiveness, not trust, just the house.
Built-in shelves filled with books whose spines are cracked from use.
Rain tapping the roof close overhead. A baby sleeping against my chest while the dogwood blooms outside the window Cade built in exactly the right place.
And Cade. Because my mind is cruel and honest, it puts him there before I can stop it.
Cade in the kitchen below, barefoot and making coffee too strong.
Cade looking up toward the nook because he always found me when I went quiet.
Cade carrying a laundry basket full of freshly laundered towels.
Cade's voice low in the morning, saying, Emmy Lou, you up there?
I press my hand harder to my stomach. "That isn't real," I say.
Then headlights sweep across the studs below. I freeze.
For one suspended second, I think my body invented them because it's already invented too much tonight. But the light moves again, cutting through the open frame, sliding over fresh lumber and stacked boards. A truck door shuts, and my heart knocks once, hard.
I move before thought arrives, crouching back from the window opening.
Through the studs, I see him. Cade's truck sits in the drive with mud on the tires and a dent near the rear fender I don't remember.
He gets out alone. No crew, no Melody, and no camera.
No one is holding a phone up to catch the famous man doing penance in flattering light.
Just Cade.
He stands beside the truck for a moment with one hand on the door, his shoulders lowered like the day has put weight on them.
He wears jeans, work boots, and a dark T-shirt that sticks damply between his shoulder blades.
His hair is shoved back from his forehead, and even from here, I can see the fatigue in the way he moves.
He reaches into the truck bed and pulls out a toolbox.
He climbs the porch steps and disappears to the right of me. A minute later, light flares. It isn't bright construction lamps, just a small battery lantern. It's the kind of light a person uses when he expects to be alone.
A hammer strikes once, then again.
I press myself back against a stud and close my eyes. Leave. I should leave right now. I shouldn't stand in the house he's building from a promise he broke and watch him work in the dark.
The hammer sounds again, and I open my eyes.
Through the gaps in the framing, I can see pieces of him as he moves. A shoulder. His hand. The bowed angle of his head. He kneels near the edge of the porch frame, sets something into place, then pauses and flexes his fingers.
That's when I see the bandage wrapped around his palm. It isn't a neat white strip applied for effect, but work bandages, dirty at the edges. His knuckles are scraped, and the skin at the base of his thumb looks raw.
Blistered hands. Cade Tyler, who used to have people steam his shirts and guard his guitar picks like holy relics, is kneeling on an unfinished porch at dusk with torn-up hands, lining up boards on a house no one asked him to build.