Chapter 7
Kari
He was awake.
I know this the way I know the sticky drawer doesn't stick anymore and the porch step doesn't catch and the screen door latch sits flush.
His breathing was too even. Too measured.
The kind of breathing a man manufactures when he wants you to believe he's unconscious — and the kind a woman recognizes when she's spent enough nights next to the wrong men to know what honesty sounds like in the dark.
He was awake when the pillow wall collapsed. He was awake when his arm settled around my waist like his body had been waiting for the barrier to fall so it could do what it wanted.
And I pretended to believe him.
That's the part that keeps catching in my ribs this morning. Not that he held me, but that I let him. We built a mutual fiction in the dark, and the not-saying fills the kitchen like smoke.
The oven is preheating. My hands are in flour. Apple cinnamon something — I haven't decided what yet, just that my fingers need to be busy and the alternative is thinking about the weight of his arm.
Liam comes downstairs in the same dark henley. His hair is damp. His jaw is set. He pours coffee from the pot he made before I came down — always the right strength, always with my mug waiting, handle facing the direction I reach from.
"Morning," he says.
"Morning."
He takes his coffee to the porch. The screen door catches cleanly — the latch he fixed — and I press my flour-dusted knuckles against the counter and exhale.
The pillows are back in place upstairs. I rebuilt the wall before I came down, shoving the bolster into position like a barricade against a siege I've already lost.
"You're being ridiculous," I tell the oven. The oven's preheat light blinks in a way that suggests judgment.
Nina's coffee shop smells like cardamom and roasted hazelnuts and small-town surveillance disguised as hospitality.
We walk in together because that's what fake boyfriends and their fake girlfriends do. Liam holds the door. His hand lands on the small of my back for exactly two seconds, and those two seconds burn through my shirt like a brand.
Nina sets down two mugs without being asked. She's known our orders since the second visit, because her former career in corporate marketing apparently trained her to build customer profiles with military precision.
A woman at the next table leans over. Mid-fifties, silver earrings, open face. "You two are at the Foxglove, right?"
"That's us. I'm Kari. This is Liam."
"Britt Lindahl. I'm over on Alder, behind the dry cleaner." Her mouth tightens, then recovers. "How did you two meet?"
The question lands between us like a grenade.
Liam's coffee mug stops halfway to his mouth. His gray eyes cut to me — we didn't rehearse this — and then he sets the mug down.
"We met through a mutual professional connection," he says.
Oh no.
"I was contracted to provide — " He pauses. Recalibrates. "I was working in the area, and Kari was establishing a hospitality operation at the property, and our paths intersected through a shared associate who identified a compatible — "
"He means a friend introduced us," I say.
Britt's eyebrows are climbing. Nina has stopped pretending to wipe glasses.
"Right," Liam says. "A friend. Del. She's in the food service industry. She made a referral based on — "
"Based on the fact that she thought we'd hit it off." My hand finds his forearm. A rescue mission disguised as affection. His muscle tenses, then releases. "Del's my best friend. She finally wore me down."
"And? Love at first sight?" Britt asks.
"It was a disaster," I say, and something loosens in my chest because this part is almost true. "He showed up looking like he hadn't slept in three days, didn't smile for the first hour, and the first thing he said was that my locks were insufficient."
Britt laughs. Nina snorts.
"The locks were insufficient," he says.
"He fixed them that night. And the porch step. And a drawer in the kitchen." My thumb traces a circle on his forearm. "He's not great with words. But he's very good with his hands."
The sentence lands before I hear it.
Heat crawls up my neck. Nina's eyebrows hit her hairline. Britt makes a sound that's half laugh, half delighted gasp.
"I mean — tools. He repairs things."
"Mm-hm," Nina says.
Liam is staring at the counter with the fixed intensity of a man who will not acknowledge what just happened.
But the tips of his ears are red. This man who scans rooms like a threat map, blushing at the ears because I accidentally made a dirty joke in a coffee shop — something about that does something dangerous to my sternum.
"You moved in together pretty fast?" Britt asks.
"She needed help with the renovation." Liam's voice is level again. "I had availability."
"He had availability. You make it sound like I booked a contractor."
"You did ask me to fix the locks."
"After you told me they were insufficient. That's not romance, that's a compliance issue."
His mouth twitches. Visible. "The compliance issue was romantic."
Britt presses her hand against her chest. "You two are adorable."
We are not adorable. We are two people lying to a stranger in a coffee shop, and his forearm is warm under my hand, and I just called him my boyfriend without flinching, and he heard me say it, and his jaw went soft — not the tactical clench but something unguarded — and I didn't flinch.
Neither of us flinched.
I find him on the back porch at dusk.
He's in the Adirondack chair — the one with the cracked slat that I suspect will be mysteriously fixed by morning — and there's a paperback in his hands.
He sees me through the screen door and does that thing.
The fast motion. The book disappears — behind his back, under his thigh — like a teenager caught with contraband.
Too late. I saw the cover. Some kind of thriller.
"Was that a book?"
"No."
"It was absolutely a book."
"It was a field manual."
"Field manuals don't have embossed titles and a quote from Publishers Weekly."
His jaw ticks. His hand drifts toward the street — his tell. The jaw ticks, and he gets very interested in checking a perimeter that doesn't need checking.
I sit in the chair next to his. The evening air is warm. Somewhere down the block, someone is grilling.
The paperback reappears. Slowly. Like a truce. He opens it to a dog-eared page, and his other hand rests on the chair arm, and I can see the scar.
Thin. Pale against the tan of his skin. It runs along his left forearm from wrist to just past the elbow — not surgical, not clean enough. The quality of something that happened fast and healed slow.
My eyes trace it before I can stop them. He catches me looking. His hand doesn't move. He doesn't pull his sleeve down, doesn't angle his arm away. He holds still and lets me see it, and that stillness says more than any explanation would.
I don't ask. There are questions that belong to a real girlfriend, and I'm not that.
He reads faster than I expected — a hungry efficiency, like a man who doesn't get to do it often enough. Every few pages, his thumb smooths the corner before turning. Careful. Like the book is borrowed and he wants to return it in good condition.
"Good book?" I ask.
"Decent."
"High praise."
"The protagonist makes tactically unsound decisions."
"Shocking. A thriller character making bad choices."
"He keeps trusting the wrong people."
"Maybe he knows they're the wrong people and trusts them anyway."
His thumb stills. The muscle in his jaw shifts. He doesn't look at me, but his attention thickens, narrows, focuses — like I said something that landed closer than I meant it to.
"Maybe," he says. Low and rough and stripped of everything except honesty.
We sit until the light goes amber, then blue, then dark.
The pillow wall has gone back up. We both know it's meaningless. We build it anyway.
I lie on my side and think about hands. His hands — the way they moved on the paperback, the way they move on everything. Deliberate. Purposeful. He touches things like every point of contact matters.
The sticky drawer. The porch step. The screen door latch. The coffee made before I wake up. Nobody asked him to do any of it.
He fixes things in the dark. Quiet repairs while the house sleeps. He doesn't leave a list. Doesn't mention it. And from a man whose vocabulary for emotion is a jaw tick and a perimeter check and manufactured breathing — those silent fixes are the loudest thing I've ever heard.
The problem isn't that I'm catching feelings for Liam Cade. The problem is that I caught them a while ago and I'm only now admitting it, here in the dark, with the pillow wall between us.
The problem is that he's temporary.
His job will end. The threat will resolve, and he'll pack his duffel bag of identical dark henleys and drive away, and I'll be here with the drawer that slides open smoothly and the porch step that doesn't catch and the coffee maker that sits on the counter like a monument to a man who was here and isn't anymore.
I've rearranged my life around men who leave before. I won't do that again.
Except I called him my boyfriend today and didn't flinch. And he looked at me — jaw soft, ears red, gray eyes holding something he'll never name — and I thought, oh.
Just oh. The smallest, most dangerous word in the language.
His breathing evens out. The pillow wall holds. The ceiling fan clicks.
He fixed the drawer without telling me. He fixed the step without telling me. He held me in the dark without telling me.
And I don't know what to do with a man who says everything without speaking — except want him. Quietly. Desperately. With the full and terrible knowledge that quiet, desperate wanting is exactly how you get wrecked by someone who was never yours to keep.