Chapter 18
Noah walked slowly toward her, glad that Grace was smiling. They really did seem to have put their rocky start behind them, and he was grateful. The wind lifted her golden hair from her shoulders, brought color into her pale cheeks.
“Is the chess lesson over already?” she asked, and he nodded.
“Yes, although I think Jacob could have gone for another hour or more. He’s playing Isaiah now, but he’s borderline obsessed.”
She laughed lightly. “I know, he has been ever since he learned about a year ago. He seems so young to like such a difficult game. I can’t even get my head around the rules.”
“You could if you wanted to,” Noah told her. He’d met many, many people who insisted they couldn’t possibly understand chess, only to be surprised when they realized the rules weren’t that hard. The strategy, of course, was another matter entirely.
“Maybe,” she allowed, sounding unconvinced, but still smiling. They held each other’s gazes for a moment, and again, as before, Noah felt an unspooling between them, almost as if there was an invisible thread between them and it had just been pulled taut.
“This was my mother’s rose garden,” he remarked as he looked around at the neatly tended bushes.
“She loved it out here. I didn’t realize Isaiah was taking such good care of it.
The weather isn’t great for roses, but my mother insisted on keeping it up.
” He smiled faintly. “I think she’d be glad to know it was still being cared for. ”
“Where is your mother now?” Grace asked.
The smile faded from Noah’s mouth and eyes. “She lives in Arizona. My dad died when I was in my twenties, and my mom and I… we… we don’t speak.”
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
He shrugged. “It is what it is.” Which gave away nothing, but he didn’t want to go into all the details of why his mother had stopped speaking to him now, or frankly, ever.
“I thought maybe…” he began haltingly, “if you wanted… you could stay for dinner? It won’t be much, but I can whip up some pasta and sauce if I’m forced to.
And there’s a few nice bottles of wine in the cellar.
” Did that, he wondered with a lurch of something like panic, sound too much like a date? Like he wanted it to be a date?
Because that wasn’t the case. At all.
In fact, when he’d come outside to find Grace, he’d been debating with himself whether he even wanted to invite her to dinner. Coffee or tea was one thing, but dinner meant commitment. Hours of socializing. Honesty, at least of a sort.
And he was really pretty rusty at that kind of thing. More importantly, he didn’t trust himself to do it properly. And he wasn’t even sure he wanted Grace to get to know him, because then she might not like him anymore. She probably didn’t like him now, but still. Why make things worse?
And yet somehow the words had come out of his mouth. And he found he meant them. He wanted her and Jacob to stay. He didn’t, he realized with a frisson of shocked awareness, want to be alone.
“Dinner would be nice,” Grace said quietly, her gaze scanning his face like she suspected some of his thought process. “Thank you.”
“Okay, great.” A wave of relief broke over Noah, so his knees felt weak, which was kind of pathetic, but whatever.
She was staying. “Great,” he said, and the sun sank lower in the sky, dipping behind a bank of clouds so it felt as if the temperature had just dropped at least ten degrees.
Maybe twenty. That was Maine for you, especially on the coast. “Isaiah and Jacob might be finished by now. Shall we go back inside?” he suggested, and wrapping her arms around herself with a shiver, she nodded.
Noah had the urge to put his arm around her, which he did not act on even though she was clearly cold.
Back inside, they headed upstairs, where Isaiah and Jacob were still deep into their game.
“He’s winning,” Isaiah said ruefully, his cheeks pink with delight, no doubt at seeing Noah and Grace together. The old man was, unfortunately, obvious.
“How are you, bud?” Grace asked gently. She slid her fingers through Jacob’s hair in a way Noah had seen before, like she was anchoring him to her. He glanced up at her fleetingly, a smile barely touching his lips, before he turned back to the game.
“I think he’s concentrating,” Noah said, and then he did touch her, just a brush of her shoulder, barely more than a glancing fingertip, because he couldn’t resist any longer.
But even that seemed too much, because she startled at the touch of his fingers, her body tensing, her eyes widening as she turned to give him a sharp look.
It was an overreaction considering how lightly he’d touched her, and she recovered quickly, giving him a swift smile, color coming into her cheeks that made Noah think she realized she’d overreacted, too.
All of it made him wonder… as well as decide to tread carefully, because God knew he needed people to tread carefully around him. They’d both be walking on broken glass, at this rate, barely able to say boo.
“Why don’t we see what’s going on in the kitchen?” Noah suggested, like this was a game of Clue and there might be activity elsewhere, rather than just looming emptiness.
Grace nodded, giving Jacob a quick, reassuring smile. “Okay.”
She followed him down the hall and then the back stairs, which had once been only for servants, emerging in the kitchen which spanned nearly the whole length of the back of the house, a yawning space that no amount of furniture or crockery could make cozy, not that anyone had really tried.
“Wow,” Grace murmured as she took in the twenty-foot-long worktable of scarred oak, the huge range that looked like it was from the nineteenth century with a modern oven from the 1970s, in avocado green, crammed next to it.
“You might have noticed,” Noah remarked as he headed for the fridge—also in avocado green—“that Grayhaven hasn’t been updated in about fifty years.”
She braced one hip against the worktable, her arms folded, her eyes glinting. “Why is that?”
Noah shrugged as he scanned the contents of the fridge, which were definitely on the depressing side. “Why change perfection?” he quipped.
Grace laughed softly. “I suppose different people have different definitions of that word.”
“True… but the Lawrence family has history here, and no one wanted to change so much as a tablecloth. It became its own thing.” He took out a wilting head of lettuce and a few slightly desiccated mushrooms. Isaiah hadn’t been to the mainland in nearly a week.
Grace glanced at the offerings and a bubble of laughter escaped her. “I think my fridge is better stocked than yours,” she remarked, and Noah sighed.
“It’s official, then. Isaiah likes you better than me.”
“He does your shopping?”
“I haven’t been off the island in six months.” He spoke matter-of-factly, but he was all too aware of how much that revealed.
Grace, however, didn’t remark on it. “It was strange,” she mused, “being in Eastport after just a week here. I felt like I’d gone to the booming metropolis.”
“I can’t imagine how I’ll feel,” Noah replied. “Better not risk it.” He turned to the pantry to root around for some pasta, but he could feel that his comment had not gone unnoticed.
“But you will eventually?” Grace asked, a note of uncertainty in her voice. “Go off island, I mean?”
“Why should I,” he quipped, “when Isaiah does everything for me?”
He felt her disappointment like a burn. This was why he didn’t socialize, he reflected. He was terrified of taking anything seriously. Of being seen.
“I mean, I suppose I’ll have to go eventually,” he acknowledged as he liberated a packet of spaghetti and a can of chopped tomatoes from the cobwebby depths of the pantry. “For my biannual teeth cleaning, at the very least.”
If anything, the disappointment he felt from her scalded him all the more. He really wasn’t winning when it came to banter.
“Seriously,” Grace said quietly, and it cut across his attempts to lighten the situation like a hot knife through butter. Leaving him a melted pool of nothing.
“Seriously,” he repeated, simply to stall for time. He placed the spaghetti, can of tomatoes, mushrooms, and lettuce on the worktable. These four things did not a meal make.
“Seriously,” Grace repeated, and she sounded just as quiet as she had before. Just as sincere.
It was hard to make another lame joke when she’d used that tone twice.
Noah sighed. He felt the evening and all of its nebulous, barely-there possibilities slipping away from him, and it hurt. Stupidly. “Seriously, no,” he stated flatly. “I don’t think so.”
“Ever?” She sounded incredulous as well as disappointed.
“I mean, yes, I’ll go off island for some things, obviously,” Noah clarified.
“The aforementioned teeth cleanings and, dare I say it, I’ll need a colonoscopy when I hit forty, although that’s not for a few years.
” Another joke that fell utterly flat. “But that’s not what you’re really asking, is it?
” he continued. “You’re asking if I’m going to rejoin civilization, move back to New York or wherever, join the land of the living again and act like a normal person, and the answer to that is a pretty hard no. ”
She stared at him for a moment, her gaze clear and wide and far too perceptive. “How old are you?” she asked abruptly.
“Thirty-six.”
“The same age as Becca.”
He stared at her in a moment’s bafflement—who was Becca?—and Grace’s fair brows snapped together.
“Becca Babcock?” she said, sounding slightly censorious. More than slightly, actually. “You do know her, don’t you? She’s lived her whole life on this island.” She shook her head, a gesture of seeming condemnation even though he hadn’t said anything. “How do you not know her and I do?”