Chapter 1 #2
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Yeah. Woodworking’s kind of a hobby. It’s what I do between jobs to decompress.”
“You decompress by building things?”
“It’s better than tearing them down.” He said it lightly, but there seemed to be meaning behind the words.
He left, footsteps fading up the back stairs to the second-floor apartment. Shannon grabbed Carrie’s arm hard enough to leave a handprint.
“That’s Tanner Blake,” she hissed.
“I know.”
“The Tanner Blake. In our shop. Offering to fix our shelf.”
“I know.”
“And you just agreed to call him Tom!”
“He’s hiding from something. I’m not going to make it worse.” Carrie pulled her arm free and started straightening books. “The last thing he needs is my making a big deal about who he is.”
“You basically told him you’re in love with his voice.”
Carrie’s jaw dropped in protest. “I did not!”
“‘Nice to meet you?’”
“What’s wrong with that? It’s what polite people say.”
Shannon raised an eyebrow. “It wasn’t the words. It was your face.”
“My face was being polite.”
“Your face was doing things—things that said I love you, and let’s name our children. Please don’t name them Pip and Estella.” Shannon studied her. “Do you even know why he’s hiding?”
“Does it matter? He asked for privacy. I’m giving it to him.”
Tanner returned with a toolbox that looked like it had seen actual use—worn handle, scratched metal, and battle scars earned in the field, not just purchased for a manly appearance. He set it down and got to work with focused intensity.
Carrie tried not to watch him work, but she failed miserably.
He moved with precision, testing the shelf’s stability, examining the brackets, making minor adjustments that suggested he actually knew what he was doing. His hands were competent in a way that made her envy the shelving.
“Oliver!” A grandmother’s voice called from the children’s section. “Stop smelling the books and choose one.”
“But they all smell different!” A small boy with wide eyes appeared around the corner, dragging his patient grandmother behind him.
Carrie blinked. The boy was holding a book she recognized. “Is that from the window display?”
“Great Expectations, Easy Classics Edition,” the grandmother said apologetically. “He liked the cover.”
“His hat’s cool,” Oliver announced, pointing at Pip on the cover.
“Solid reasoning,” Tanner said without looking up from the shelf. He paused until Oliver was gone, then he reached for the full Penguin Classics edition on a nearby shelf and flipped through the pages like he was looking for a specific passage.
He ran his finger down the page and found it.
Then, as if compelled by something beyond his control, he read aloud, “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”
The shop went silent. Even the ancient heating system stopped its wheezing to listen.
He’d just read Carrie’s chapter twenty-nine line, the one that made her forget how to breathe. And he’d read it like it was nothing, like her entire nervous system hadn’t erupted in volcanic desire, spreading like a molten puddle all over the floor.
Tanner looked up, seemed to realize what he’d done, and cleared his throat. “Good line,” he said. “I doubt it’s in Oliver’s version, though. So he’ll grow up thinking that he knows the story without ever knowing the language and writing that made it a classic in the first place.”
Carrie was still processing not only the thought but that it came from him—from The Voice, the voice that had just read The Line—when he turned back to his work.
“You okay?” Shannon whispered, appearing at Carrie’s elbow.
“I’m totally fine. Completely normal.”
“You just alphabetized the sugar packets.”
Carrie looked down. She had, in fact, arranged the coffee station’s sugar and creamer packets alphabetically by brand name. “It’s more efficient.”
“Than color? It’s just yellow, pink, brown, and white.” Shannon studied her face. “Do you need to sit down?”
“I need to work.”
But working was difficult when Tanner Blake was fifteen feet away, fixing her shelf with those massively capable hands while her brain played chapter twenty-nine on a loop.
He finished half an hour later, testing the shelf’s stability with his full weight. “That’ll hold. But the footer’s a temporary fix. You should have the whole unit re-anchored to the wall. I can do it tomorrow if you want.”
“I can’t afford you.” The words were out before Carrie could stop them.
He started packing his tools. “There’s no charge.
It’s no problem. I’m your upstairs neighbor fixing a safety hazard.
” He closed the toolbox and headed for the back stairs, then paused.
“For what it’s worth—I appreciate you not making a big deal out of who I am.
Most people either pretend they don’t know or they can’t stop knowing, if that makes sense. ”
“It makes sense.”
He nodded and left, footsteps fading upstairs.
Shannon waited exactly three seconds. “Oh, my gosh!”
“I know.”
“He’s gorgeous, talented, and he fixes things.”
“So I noticed.”
Shannon was still staring at the stairs. “You’re going to fall for him so hard.”
“I’m not going to fall for anyone. I’m going to save this shop, prove Dennis wrong, and learn to run a business that doesn’t hemorrhage money.” Carrie grabbed her marker and fresh index cards. “Now help me hang the Secret Santa letters. It’s tradition.”
She wrote on the first card in her neatest print:
Tell us your Christmas wish.
Your friends at Lamplight Books
They’d done Secret Santa letters for three years now—anonymous wishes clipped to twine in the window, little gifts appearing like magic when someone in town could grant them. Those who didn’t take part still came to read the letters, their faces soft with remembered wonder.
This year had to be different. This year had to save her.
Carrie clipped the card to the twine and tried to ignore the way her hands shook just a little as she twisted the pine garland around the doorframe.
Inside, the morning routine continued. She sold the Dickens to Oliver’s grandmother, recommended a cookbook to someone who “didn’t really cook but wanted to start,” and wrapped books in paper that made the packages look special.
The shop was charming and discouragingly quiet.
By noon, she’d made forty-seven dollars.
That afternoon, Carrie tried not to listen to chapter twenty-nine again. She tried not to think about the way Tanner’s thumb had brushed her palm or how his voice reading Dickens had made her knees forget what they were there for. And she remembered how his voice sounded saying her name.
Tanner closed the apartment door and leaned against it, toolbox still in hand.
Safe.
The word felt foreign. He’d been running for three weeks, and this was the first place that felt like a place he could rest instead of hiding.
He set the toolbox down and pulled out his phone.
Forty-seven unread messages, each one a small demand on the person he used to be.
His agent wanted a statement. His publicist had crafted apologies he needed to approve.
Journalists who’d been friendly last month were now asking if he had anger issues.
And buried among them were messages from people he’d thought were friends, asking if the rumors were true or suggesting he might need some “help.”
He’d watched his career dismantle itself in real time over the past several days. Not the dramatic explosion he’d feared, but a slow erosion. Recording sessions were “postponed.” Meetings were “rescheduled” with the polite distance of an industry deciding whether he was worth the risk.
The Google Alert notification sat at the top of his screen, the number climbing even as he watched. “Tanner Blake”—247 new results.
He set his phone on the counter without opening any of it.
He’d read enough versions to know what they would say.
The headline was always some variation of “Bad Santa,” the comments always the same mix of outrage and schadenfreude, and the think pieces always questioning his character, his professionalism, and his future.
What none of them mentioned was the hospital. The children who’d been counting on that fundraiser. The hundred thousand dollars in lost funding because of fifteen seconds of video that didn’t show the hours of psychological warfare that preceded it.
That was the only part that mattered.
But he had escaped, for the moment. The apartment was small and furnished, but barely. Mrs. Snyder had apologized for its condition when she’d shown it to him yesterday. “The last tenant left in a hurry,” she’d said. “But it’s quiet, and no one will bother you here.”
Quiet. That was what he needed.
He walked to the window and looked down at Main Street. Snow was falling and catching the light from the old-fashioned streetlamps. Hollydale looked like a postcard of the kind of town that still believed in things like community, kindness, and second chances.
The kind of town he’d inadvertently hurt.
He’d come to Hollydale deliberately, not to hide from what he’d done, but to face it. The hospital was six blocks away. He could see it from his bedroom window. Every morning, he would wake up and see the building where children were missing out on their much-needed funding because of him.
Some people might call that masochistic. He called it accountability.
The floorboards creaked beneath him. Below, he could hear voices. The woman with the green glasses—Shannon—was talking, her voice carrying through the old building’s floorboards. He couldn’t make out the words, just her tone—excitement, disbelief.
Then Carrie’s voice, quieter, steadier.
Carrie Watson. The woman who’d recognized him instantly and then, of all things, let him be invisible.
He’d been braced for the usual reaction—the squealing, the demands for photos, and the invasive questions about the scandal. Or worse, the cold shoulder, the judgment, and the assumption that he was exactly what the internet said he was.
Instead, she’d looked at him and seen someone who needed safe harbor. And she gave it to him.
He pulled off his beanie and ran his hand through his hair. The apartment was cold. He turned up the heat and, on the way to finish unpacking, caught sight of the small pile of recording equipment. At some point, he would need to do something about the wreckage of his career. Not today.
Instead, he stood at the window and watched the snow fall on a town that had every reason to hate him.
His phone buzzed. The screen lit up with his agent’s name, then his publicist’s, then a number he didn’t recognize—probably another journalist. He watched the notifications pile up, each one a reminder of the career that had defined him for five years—the careful statements, the strategic appearances, the version of himself that existed only for cameras and microphones.
For once, he let them all go unanswered.
Tomorrow, he would go back downstairs. He would offer to fix something else.
The reading chair had looked wobbly. The coffee station’s cart had a loose wheel.
Small things. Useful things. Things that had nothing to do with fame or scandal or the person the world thought he was.
Things that might, in some small way, distract him from what he’d cost this town.
He thought about Carrie’s face when she’d realized who he was. The flash of recognition, then something else. Not judgment. Understanding, maybe. She’d looked at him the way he imagined she looked at broken books that just needed the right kind of care.
Nice to meet you, Tom.
Tom, not Tanner Blake, the celebrity. Not Tanner Blake, the scandal. Just Tom, the guy upstairs with a toolbox.
He could be that person. He wanted to be that person.
The voices downstairs faded. A door closed. The shop went quiet.
Tanner turned away from the window and started unpacking.
Tomorrow, he would be Tom and fix something else while he tried to earn the second chance Carrie had given him without even knowing she had.
For tonight, he was grateful to be somewhere he could breathe.