Chapter 18
“Are you busy?” Jake asked.
Emma looked at Gloria’s notebook open beside her coffee. “I’m reading my grandmother’s notebook and drinking coffee that went cold twenty minutes ago, so no.”
“Would you come over? I’m working on the pergola and could use another set of hands.”
Emma smiled before she could stop herself. She’d spent most of the morning telling herself she wasn’t going to think about Jake, which had turned out to be a good way to think about almost nothing else.
“I should warn you that I have no construction skills. I can build a spreadsheet.”
“If you can do that, you’re overqualified.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
She was still smiling when she ended the call.
The night before, she’d gone to bed thinking about Jake’s hand holding hers at the gate and wondering what might have happened if neither of them had decided it was time for her to leave.
She had been glad they hadn’t kissed. After everything he’d shared about Nora, anything more would have felt wrong.
This morning was different.
Emma closed Gloria’s notebook and carried her cold coffee to the sink. She stood there looking through the window at the palms outside the bungalow.
She was going to see Jake because he needed help with the pergola.
That was true.
It was also becoming increasingly difficult to pretend it was the whole truth.
She wanted to see him. She wanted to know how he was after the night before, and she wanted to sit with him again without grief between them. More than that, she wanted to find out whether the feeling she’d had at the gate was still there in the light of another day.
Emma had spent years being careful about the things that could complicate her life. Jake was beginning to feel like exactly that kind of complication.
She went to change her clothes anyway.
When she reached Hibiscus Lane, the gate was open. She walked around the side of the cottage and found Jake in the back corner of the yard.
The pergola had changed since the day before.
Four cedar posts now stood beneath beams along two sides, and the clean new wood gave off a scent Emma could smell before she reached him.
A folded blue tarp lay nearby with a cordless drill, a framing square, two levels and a small metal cup filled with screws.
Jake stood on a low wooden stool with one end of a beam resting against the top of a post. He looked over when he heard her, and smiled.
“Good, you’re here.”
“Put me to work.”
Jake showed her where to hold the beam while he adjusted the other end and checked the level. Emma followed his directions, although his idea of lifting something “a hair” turned into a short argument over exactly how much a hair was.
Apparently, she lifted it too far.
“That was a hair,” she told him.
“That was at least two.”
Emma laughed. “I don’t have a lot of hair calibration in my job.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed that about you.”
She lowered the beam until he told her to stop.
Jake drove two screws through the wood and stepped back. When he told her she could let go, Emma did and looked up at the beam.
It stayed exactly where they’d put it.
She felt an unreasonable amount of satisfaction.
They worked together for the next half hour.
Emma held beams while Jake fastened them, and before long she could read the level without asking what he wanted.
She liked being useful, even in such a small way.
There was something satisfying about work that could be seen when it was finished.
A beam was either straight or it wasn’t.
A screw held or it didn’t. No conference calls, no revisions, no one changing the expectations after she’d already met them.
She understood why Jake liked this, but she was beginning to understand something else too.
Being beside him had taken on a meaning that had little to do with the cottage, Arthur, the garden, or even the porch swing he’d saved.
It was in the way he smiled when she got something wrong, how comfortable he seemed with silence, and how carefully he listened without trying to fill in the things she left unsaid.
Those small things had begun to matter more than she wanted to admit.
The truth was becoming harder to avoid. She liked him.
Emma set the level on the tarp and picked up a scrap of cedar, turning it over in her hand.
The admission made her nervous, but not enough to make her leave.
Jake told her he probably had another day of work before the pergola was finished. He wanted to take his time with the top slats, then add two chairs, a small table and maybe a lantern in the corner.
“Whatever you want,” he said.
Emma looked toward the unfinished structure.
The first time she’d seen the cottage, she had been thinking about it as property she needed to protect.
Since then, she had found her father’s initials beneath the porch railing and read Gloria’s letter at the kitchen table.
The house had stopped being an inheritance and become something much harder to define.
Now Jake was building a place for her to sit in the garden.
“Thank you.”
He glanced at her. “Emma, I’m going to keep doing things around here. You can stop thanking me every time.”
“I’m going to keep thanking you. You can stop telling me not to.”
“We’ve had this fight.”
“We have, and I’m winning.”
Jake smiled, and Emma thought how easy it had become to make him do that.
He showed her how to hold the framing square and then made the mistake of letting her use the drill. Emma drove one screw too far and stripped the head.
She stared at it.
“I broke it.”
“You stripped it.”
“Is that better?”
“No.”
Emma laughed and handed the drill back to him.
By the time Jake suggested iced tea, she was warm and dusty and happier than she had any reason to be.
The porch swing hung at the north end of the cottage beneath a small overhang Jake had added during his second summer. The cedar had weathered soft with age, and two faded blue cushions sat against the back.
Emma lowered herself onto it and ran one hand along the arm.
She remembered sitting there with Gloria when she was a child, although the swing had looked different then.
In her memory it had been painted white, with a cushion Gloria complained was impossible to keep clean.
Emma had spent whole afternoons curled beside her grandmother while Gloria read or shelled peas into a bowl balanced on her lap.
Jake came outside carrying two glasses of iced tea. He handed one to Emma and sat beside her, and the swing shifted beneath their weight.
The space between them wasn’t large.
Emma noticed that immediately.
The night before, she had sat beside him while he told her about Nora, and every instinct she had possessed had been focused on giving him whatever he needed. Tonight there was no terrible story between them and nothing she needed to protect him from.
That changed things.
She took a drink of iced tea. It was strong and cold, with mint from Gloria’s garden.
Jake had rebuilt the swing during his first summer at the cottage. One chain had rusted through, part of the seat was rotten and the frame was cracked. He could have replaced it, but something had stopped him.
“It felt like it belonged to somebody,” he said.
Emma looked down at the weathered cedar beneath her hand.
“You saved more of this place than you knew.”
“Maybe it saved me too,” he said.
Emma turned toward him.
After what he’d told her the night before, she understood what he meant.
Three years earlier, Jake had arrived in Key West with almost nothing and moved into a cottage he knew nothing about.
While he repaired the porch and pulled weeds from Gloria’s lilies, the house had apparently been doing something for him too.
Emma wondered if it was doing the same thing for her.
She had come to Key West because a real estate broker called about a cottage she hadn’t known she owned. She had expected to stay a few days, settle whatever needed settling and return to Chicago.
Instead, she was sitting on her grandmother’s porch drinking iced tea with a man she was beginning to care about.
The thought should have felt impossible, but it didn’t.
They sat quietly for a while, moving the swing with their feet. Emma watched Jake’s hands around the glass. She remembered how badly she had wanted him to kiss her the night before and how relieved she’d been when he hadn’t.
Jake began talking about the cottage and how different it felt when Emma was there. He didn’t ask her to stay and she wondered why. She listened, but part of her attention stayed on the fact that his knee was close enough to touch hers.
“Do you think I’m going back?” she asked.
Jake took a moment before answering. “I’ve been assuming you are.”
“Why?”
“Because Chicago is where your life is.”
“Was.”
The word came out before Emma had time to consider it.
Jake looked at her but Emma looked away toward the garden.
Maybe Chicago was still her life. She had an apartment there, a career she had spent twelve years building and a best friend who knew almost everything about her. She couldn’t erase any of that because Key West had begun to feel good.
But something had changed, and with every passing day it was getting harder to ignore.
For years, Emma had thought of her life as settled.
She had a job she was good at and enough money to live comfortably.
She knew which train she took to work, where she bought groceries and which Thai restaurant delivered fastest when she got home after nine.
She had mistaken happiness with comfort and so she never questioned whether she was happy or not.
Gloria had seen that before Emma had.
I have watched you make your life smaller so it would fit inside a job.
Emma had read the sentence enough times that she knew it by heart.
She looked out at the pergola Jake was building and tried to imagine herself back in her apartment in Chicago. It was hard to picture it.