Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Grady
Istare at my open laptop, the confirmation for my flight glaring up at me from the screen.
The welcome party was a study in everything I lack. For months, I’ve watched Chloe blossom at the center of her pack, surrounded by a love so complete it has its own gravity.
Now, with a pup on the way, that world is expanding, while mine has stalled. A fact that the party threw into sharp relief, making my family’s demands feel inevitable.
I turn my head to stare at the cane propped against the desk and flex my knee, waiting for the ache to fade. The familiar tightness remains. I need to accept this as my new reality.
I don’t want to keep hoping things will go back to normal.
I need to start moving forward again, which means no more running away from my obligations.
I don’t know how long I sit there before a light knock comes from the door, and Chloe lets herself in, bringing with her a gust of cold and the brief whiff of snow-melt and cedar. A beanie covers her pink hair, and her cheeks are flushed from the short walk from the Homestead.
“Oh, sure, come right in,” I grumble. “Not like I might be working or anything.”
“Then you should respond to my text messages.” She waddles closer, one hand on her belly. “Forcing a pregnant woman to brave the cold to see you. For shame, Grady Finch.”
I sniff and lift my chin. “You should have taken my silence as I’m busy.”
“Uh huh. I see how busy you are.” Her pink eyes flick to the screen before she sets a white bakery box on the coffee table. “Since you’re not actually working, I want to show you something.”
I eye the gray sky through the window. “How slushy is the path?”
Her hands move to her hips. “If I can waddle my way here without being able to see the ground, you’ll be fine.”
“Ugh. You’re so annoying.” I shut my laptop and grab my cane to lever myself up.
The knee protests but holds, and she shifts with impatience as I pull on my jacket and scarf.
I step outside and squint, the bright air a shock after the cabin’s gloom.
Snow has melted to muddy patches in the shadows of the trees, and the central path is a mess of gray slush churned up by resort handcarts.
The woods blunt the wind off the water, but a chill still cuts through my jacket, and I immediately regret leaving my gloves behind.
Chloe leads me along the path, her boots leaving prints in the packed dirt.
I limp around a slushy puddle. “Do I get a hint about this big surprise?”
“Nope.”
The path turns, following the shoulder of a rise, and I use the pause in the climb to take in the new cabins.
They’re set back from the Homestead, with real porches and unfinished decking. Leif’s cabin is among these, though I haven’t been over to visit yet.
He moved to the island in early January, but I’ve never seen the inside of it, because he’s never offered, and I’ve never found a way to ask without reopening an old wound.
Last summer, our friendship was an easy weekend ritual at the Saturday Market. But then he pulled back without explanation, and even after the truth about Carson came out, we never got back to that easy companionship.
Now, I look at his cabin as we pass. Firewood is stacked neatly on the side, and he’s finally hung some curtains.
At the end of the row, a more substantial structure sits back from the lane, with a wide covered porch and the suggestion of a second floor in the roofline.
Chloe heads for that one and stops at the steps.
“They just finished installing the solar panels,” she says, and gestures up. “You can see them from here.”
I spot a row of panels set flush with the southern pitch of the roof, the black rectangles bright with condensation. The porch planks creak underfoot as we step up to the door. She holds it open for me and follows behind.
Light comes through the bare windows, with the ones at the back offering an unobstructed view of the tree line and, farther off, the hint of water.
There’s no furniture yet, just bare walls, raw pine floors, and the smell of sawdust clinging to unfinished wood.
The living space is open concept, with a kitchen counter along one wall and two wide doorways leading off in either direction.
Chloe doesn’t say anything at first. She waits, hands in her coat pockets, her focus on me instead of the room.
I move through the space, the rap of my cane on the planks echoing, the sound lending the place a sense of size, or perhaps only accentuating the emptiness.
My hand finds the kitchen counter, then the jamb of a doorway.
In the first side room, I take in the clean corners of the walls, no baseboards yet, nothing but raw edges lined up for the work still to come.
“I know you’ve been viewing places in Pinecrest,” Chloe calls from the living room. “But if you wanted to stay on the island—” Chloe stops and tries again. “There’s room for you here.”
I lean in the doorway, my bad leg half-locked to keep from shaking. “You had a two story cabin built for me?”
“There’s an elevator.” She gestures toward the space behind the stairs. “To make it easier to go up and down.”
“But you built me a cabin?” I say again, incredulous.
She shrugs, a little bashful. “It’s the least I could do after all those years of relying on you so much, not only as my agent, but also as my media specialist. I’d rather have you in the Homestead where I can bother you at any hour of the day or night, but Dominic said you needed a space of your own. ”
“Chloe…”
She steps forward, her hands still in her pockets, her shoulders hunched to fight off the cold.
“Look, you’re probably not—” she begins, but stops, and her pink eyebrows pinch together. “You don’t have to decide now. Or ever. But the Wrights want you here. Not only as a friend. You’re family, Grady.”
I’m not sure what to say. My eyes drift to the window, to the way the glass turns the winter light into gray bands across the floor.
After a moment, I say, “Is this you, or them?”
Chloe shakes her head. “It’s both. Packs are about choice as much as anything else. And you always have the choice to leave. But you also have the choice to stay.”
A lump forms in my throat. “It’s a nice space. It would be better with a couch.”
She grins. “We could fix that. And there’s a bakery box with your name on it.”
She gestures at the hallway, stepping aside to let me pass first.
I move through the room, and Chloe follows, quiet but not nervous, her steps light on the new floors.
In the kitchen, she pulls a box from the unfinished cabinet and reveals four donuts, all different. “Surprise!”
I peer at the box. “It’s a little anticlimactic after giving me an entire cabin.”
“No take-backs.” She claims the apple fritter and leaves the rest for me. “You can take them back to Kyle’s cabin, or you can eat them here and think about how you might want to set up the space.”
She takes a big bite of her donut. “I have to get back to work. Gotta lock in some orc smut before this baby comes. Stay as long as you like.”
Before I can respond, she gives me an awkward hug around her rounded belly and slips out the front door, closing it with a soft click.
I lean my cane on the counter and open the box. There’s a maple bar, a jelly, and a cake donut with sprinkles. I pick the jelly and take a bite over the sink out of habit, catching the powdered sugar before it hits the floor.
The filling is raspberry. Chloe always picks raspberry.
The quiet here holds a different quality than the quiet at Kyle’s place.
There, silence always comes with the possibility of a knock at the door, a voice from the hall, and the sense of occupying borrowed space.
Here, even with the workers hammering from the Phase Two site, the noise is far away, buffered by brand-new insulation and fresh drywall.
I finish the donut and wipe my hand on my jeans. I walk the hall again, slower. In the primary bedroom, I stop at the window.
I imagine how the light will fall across a bed in the mornings, the way the room would warm up first thing, but stay cool all day under the shade of the evergreens.
In the second room, the tap of my cane echoes. A rug would soften the sound, and shelves lined with books would swallow it. I picture my books lined up along the wall, the spines all different heights and colors.
The kitchen still lacks appliances, but the counter is wide and smooth, almost inviting. I run my palm over the surface as I picture a coffee pot here, a bowl of fruit, and the inevitable pile of mail, keys, and other detritus that grows in the heart of a home.
A pang rings through me, so clear it startles me. I can see myself here in a way I couldn’t anywhere else, except maybe at Emily’s cottage.
I find the elevator where Chloe said it would be and ride it to the second floor.
There, I find more bedrooms, far more than I need, and an open loft space that could serve as a family room, but I can already picture myself in the suite on the ground floor. No reason to take a longer trip when it’s just me here.
I ride back downstairs and settle on the bottom step, my bad leg stretched out until the tension in my knee eases. I listen to the quiet. The insulation is effective here, and the cabins are set apart from the primary walking trails, so I wouldn’t be disrupted by visitors to the island.
This is a place to work, to live, to build a life.
I take in the space one more time. Nothing can be decided today. But this option, this possibility of living here not as a guest but as a part of what Chloe and the Wrights are building, loosens a knot of unease I’ve been carrying for a long time.
I could walk out tomorrow and tell them yes, and they’d make space for me, not because they needed to, but because they wanted to.
I push myself up, collect the donut box, and head back outside, where the cold bites deeper, and I have to grip the railing to keep from slipping on the icy step. Here, the air carries the scent of pine needles and wood smoke.
I glance back once more at the house and feel the smallest tug behind my ribs, a thread I didn’t realize was tied to anything.
I walk the long way back to Kyle’s cabin, imagining this as my life from now on. Misty Pines has seen so many changes in my life, and it feels somehow fitting for it to bear witness to this next chapter, whether a new beginning or an end.
Back inside Kyle’s cabin, I shiver despite the warmth, a chill settled deep in my bones that the heated air can’t touch.
I find a clear spot on the kitchen counter for the donut box and limp to my temporary desk to open my laptop.
The flight confirmation is still pulled up. One future, contained and predictable. I think of the empty cabin, the space waiting to be filled.
My fingers hover over the trackpad. A few clicks could cancel the ticket. I could walk to the Homestead and tell Chloe yes.
Instead, I open my email, attach the file, and send the itinerary to my parents.
The click of the trackpad is the only sound in the room.