Chapter 12 #3
Nathan smiled faintly. “You loved that apartment.”
“I loved us there,” Annie said.
His smile faded.
She looked at the fire. “We were broke. You were exhausted. I was working too much. Everything smelled like takeout and dust. But no one else had keys.”
Nathan’s hand closed around his mug. “I miss that too.”
“I don’t want to go backward.”
“No.”
“But I want to know there was something real before all of this.”
“There was,” he said. “There is.”
Annie looked at him then. “You don’t get to say there is like it’s settled.”
“You’re right.” He set the mug down and leaned forward, forearms on his knees. “There was something real. There is something I want to make real again, if you let me work for it.”
That was better.
Annie stood and crossed to the sofa. Nathan went very still as she sat at the opposite end. The distance between them was small enough to feel deliberate. She tucked her feet beneath her and looked at the fire.
“I don’t know when I’ll want you to touch me,” she said.
“I’ll wait.”
“I don’t know when I’ll stop wondering.”
“I’ll answer when you ask.”
“I may ask the same things more than once.”
“I’ll answer more than once.”
“I may hate you some days.”
Nathan’s voice was quiet. “I’ll still love you those days.”
Annie closed her eyes. That one hurt. She let it.
The fire shifted, sending sparks upward behind the screen. Nathan did not speak again. He had finally learned silence could be something other than withdrawal.
After a while, Annie reached across the cushion between them and held out her hand.
Nathan stared at it for one stunned second. Then he placed his hand in hers, carefully, as if she had handed him something breakable and alive. His wedding ring was warm now from his skin. Annie felt it against her fingers and did not pull away.
They sat like that until the fire burned low.
In the morning, Annie woke in the guest room to gray light and the smell of coffee. For the first time in days, she did not wake with her heart racing. She dressed slowly, brushed her teeth, and went downstairs.
Nathan was in the kitchen, reading something on his phone. When he heard her, he set it down screen-up on the counter.
“Ray?” Annie asked.
“Tricia. Brooke agreed to a civil no-contact settlement. No gag clause. Dr. Lane’s complaint continues. The criminal case continues. The fund review continues.” He hesitated. “Brooke’s attorney says she is leaving Boston for a while.”
Annie poured coffee. “Do we believe that?”
“We verify.”
She glanced at him.
He gave a faint shrug. “I’m learning.”
Annie took her coffee to the window. The rain had stopped.
The lake was dull silver beneath a clearing sky.
Down by the dock, the water slapped softly against the posts.
She imagined Brooke there in summer whites, laughing as if she owned the shoreline.
The image came easily. Then, for the first time, it faded easily too.
Nathan came to stand beside her, not touching. “What do you want to do with the house?”
“The lake house?”
“Yes.”
Annie looked around. The stripped shelves, the boxed files, the empty hooks where Brooke’s lanterns had hung. “Paint the living room.”
He blinked. “Paint it?”
“Yes. That gray Brooke chose makes everything look dead.”
Nathan looked at the walls as if seeing them for the first time. “What color?”
“I don’t know yet. Something warm.”
“Okay.”
“And the pantry gets restocked with food normal humans eat.”
“Agreed.”
“No artisnal fig jam.”
“Never again.”
She smiled into her coffee before she could stop herself.
Nathan saw it. He did not comment. Smart man.
They spent the morning making a list. Not Tricia’s kind of list, though some of it was practical.
Paint. Pantry. New linens. Change the guest room curtains.
Replace the porch lanterns. Ask Erin what tea she actually liked instead of accepting Brooke’s annual hand cream and tea basket as proof of taste.
Invite Maggie for a weekend when everything no longer felt haunted.
Buy peonies for the house in spring because Annie wanted them, not because they meant anything useful.
Nathan wrote each item in a notebook from the junk drawer. At the top, Annie had written Lake House — Ours.
The word looked presumptuous. It also looked right.
Near noon, Annie stood in the mudroom with her coat on and her overnight bag over one shoulder. Nathan walked her to the door. He still moved carefully, but not like a man asking permission to exist. More like a man learning the weight of his own choices.
“I’m going home,” Annie said.
“I’ll stay here tonight unless you want otherwise.”
“I want you to come home tomorrow for dinner.”
His face changed before he could stop it.
“Dinner,” Annie said. “Not moving back in. Not sleeping over. Dinner.”
“I understand.”
“You can bring the terrible diner pie.”
“Blueberry breakfast pie?”
“Obviously.”
He nodded, but his eyes had filled again. This time, Annie let herself touch his face. Only once. Her fingers against his cheek, brief and warm.
Nathan closed his eyes at the contact. He did not turn into her hand. He did not trap it beneath his. He let her choose the beginning and the end.
Annie lowered her hand. “Tomorrow at seven.”
“I’ll be there.”
She stepped onto the porch. The air smelled like wet leaves and lake water. At the bottom of the steps, she turned back. Nathan stood in the doorway with his ring on his hand and the house behind him, no longer looking like a man waiting to be rescued by the woman he had hurt.
He looked like a man waiting to do the work.
Annie drove home beneath a sky clearing by degrees. When she reached the Brookline house, the security app chimed. Front door opened. Annie Grisham.
She stood in the foyer, listening to the quiet.
Brooke was not gone from memory. Not from the damage.
Not from whatever legal mess still waited.
But Brooke was gone from the locks, the accounts, the rooms, the pantry, the lake house, and the space between Annie’s first instinct and her belief in herself.
Annie carried her bag upstairs, opened the bedroom curtains, and let the afternoon light in.