Daddy Next Door Stays Past Sunrise

Chapter One

Ivy Whitfield locked the front door of Whitfield & Bloom at six-fifteen, the same way she had every weekday for three years, and stood for a second on the sidewalk deciding whether her porch light was a decision she wanted to make tonight.

It was a small thing. A single bulb over a single door, two blocks from the shop, in a house she’d bought at twenty-three with money she hadn’t expected to inherit from an aunt she hadn’t expected to lose, and had lived in alone for the two years since, twenty-five now and still getting used to the quiet of owning a place outright.

Most nights the light meant nothing. She flipped it on at dusk because the walk from the driveway was dark and she liked to see her keys in her hand before she reached the porch steps. Most nights, that was the whole story.

Some nights it meant something else, and both of them knew the difference without a word passing between the two houses.

She drove home with the windows down, the last of the June heat rolling in off Cypress Street, and pulled into her driveway at six-forty to find Sawyer Reyes’s truck already parked in his, tailgate down, a stack of cedar fence boards half-unloaded and forgotten in the bed.

He was standing at the far end of his yard in a gray T-shirt gone dark at the collar, talking on his phone with one hand braced on his hip, and he lifted two fingers off it when she got out of her car.

Not a wave. Just an acknowledgment, the kind neighbors gave each other, nothing in it that a person watching from the street could have read as anything.

He ended the call a minute later and crossed the strip of grass between their driveways, not far, just close enough for the kind of exchange any two neighbors might have.

“Cedar holding up okay?” she asked, tipping her chin at the half-unloaded truck bed.

“Two boards warped in the heat. I’ll swap them before I start the run.” He glanced past her at the shop’s delivery van still in her driveway from the morning. “Cooler give you trouble again?”

“Compressor’s dying by inches. I’ve got a repair guy coming Thursday. Allegedly.”

“Third time’s the charm.”

“I stopped counting the times a while ago.”

He almost smiled, the kind of almost that hadn’t made it as far as his mouth in months. “Let me know if you want a hand moving stock before he shows up.”

“I might take you up on that.”

He nodded toward the bucket of wilted stems by her back step, the ones she hadn’t gotten around to composting. “Rough one?”

“Every June is a rough one. I keep telling myself I’ll hire better before wedding season hits, and then June happens anyway.”

“You could ask for help. I’m not doing anything Saturday.”

“You say that every year.”

“And every year I mean it.” He glanced toward his own porch, the bulb still dark in the daylight. “Marcus is coming through again in a few weeks, by the way. Said he’d call first this time.”

“Good. Tell him I still owe him a rematch on the chicken.”

“He hasn’t forgotten. He brings it up more than you’d think.”

It was, on its face, nothing. Two neighbors talking about a dying compressor and warped lumber, the kind of exchange either of them could have had with anyone on the street and forgotten by dinner.

That was the whole point of how they’d built it. Nothing to read.

Inside the shop she’d left behind for the day, the walk-in cooler was running warm again, the second time that month, and she’d spent forty-five minutes on the phone with a repair company that kept putting her on hold before she’d given up and moved half the standing arrangements into the front case where the air conditioning could reach them.

It was that kind of business: five years of learning that flowers didn’t care about her plans, only about temperature and time, both of which ran out on their own schedule regardless of how carefully she budgeted for them.

Some days she thought that was the whole reason she’d fallen into loving it: a trade that demanded she pay attention to things dying in real time, easier to practice on peonies than on people.

She let herself in, dropped her bag on the bench inside the door, and stood in her own front hall a moment longer than the errand required, listening to her house settle into evening around her: the ice maker cycling in the kitchen, a car passing slow on the street outside, her own pulse, which had picked up exactly one degree the second she’d seen his truck.

It had been eleven days.

She knew the number the way she knew her own address: her body kept a private ledger regardless of what she told it to do. Eleven days since the last time. Long enough that the wanting had stopped being a background hum and turned into something with edges.

She went upstairs, showered, put on the soft gray sleep shirt that meant nothing to anyone who didn’t know to look for it, and stood at her bedroom window with a towel still wound around her hair, looking down at the porch light switch on the wall by her closet.

It was the second one, installed eighteen months ago by an electrician she’d told some pretext about “better control of the exterior lighting,” who’d nodded and written up an invoice and never once suspected the truth: that Ivy Whitfield had paid four hundred dollars to give herself a single, private, deniable choice.

On. Or off.

She rested her thumb against the switch and thought, the way she always thought in the half-second before she committed, about the Sunday two years ago when this whole arrangement had still been a sentence she hadn’t finished saying out loud.

Then she flipped it on, and went to find something to read while she waited to fall asleep first, the way she almost always did, which was itself part of the design.

Across the yard, Sawyer Reyes finished his call, dropped the phone in his back pocket, and looked up out of habit at the second-floor window where a light he’d learned to watch for the way other men watched a texted address.

It was on.

He didn’t move toward it. That wasn’t how it worked, and the not-moving-toward-it-yet was a discipline he’d built the same careful way he built everything else in his life: load-bearing first, finish work last. He picked up two more fence boards, carried them to the stack by the shed, and let himself feel, for exactly the length of time it took to walk that distance, how much he’d missed this.

Not the sex. Or not only that. He’d buried a wife nine years his junior four years ago to a cancer that had taken fourteen months to do its work properly, and in the two years after that he had not wanted anyone, had in fact developed a low, functional contempt for the idea of wanting anyone, right up until the spring his new neighbor had hired him to rebuild her back porch and he’d caught himself standing in her kitchen at the end of a long day, talking to her about nothing in particular, paint colors, a leak in the shed roof, whether the oak out front was diseased or just old, for forty-five minutes past when the job required it.

He set the last board down and went inside to shower off the day. He didn’t look at the window again. The light would stay lit, watched or not.