Chapter 13
Elise
Roman’s message arrived while I was adjusting the kerning on a title I had already adjusted six times.
Would you like me at the exhibit on Saturday?
He had accepted my refusal and one future date exactly as offered.
The exhibit was different.
Tessa had turned the back half of her bookstore into a small gallery for Cedar Harbor artists.
Six of my recent covers hung between shelves usually devoted to cookbooks and local history.
The event belonged to the life I had built after leaving Greyford.
My clients and local designers knew me as Elise Ward, the woman with the cottage near the water and the habit of working too late.
They did not know I was somebody’s missing wife, or that Roman had spent three weeks teaching me even a wife could be cropped out when her presence complicated the composition.
Yes. You’re invited. Come as a guest. Please don’t explain our marriage to anyone unless I do first.
What time should I arrive?
He left help unoffered until I requested it.
I sent him the public start time.
Then I put my phone facedown and changed the title spacing back to the version I had begun with.
Saturday evening, the bookstore smelled of paper, coffee, and lemon oil. Warm lights ran along the brick above my covers, each beside a description Tessa had edited until it contained fewer apologies.
“You keep touching that one,” she said.
I lowered my hand from the corner of a poster. “It’s crooked.”
“It is level. So is the mat.”
Tessa handed me a glass of sparkling water. “Your husband has not arrived yet, so you’ll need to find another emergency.”
“He isn’t arriving as my husband.”
“Fine. The man you are dating after already marrying him has not arrived yet.”
I took the glass before she could splash a mystery novelist.
The baby shifted low beneath my ribs. I pressed my palm to the side of my dress until the movement eased. At twenty-five weeks, she had developed opinions about standing, sitting, and any waistband I had once considered comfortable.
Tessa’s gaze softened. “You okay?”
“Yes.”
“And if he turns this into a public act of penance?”
“He won’t.”
The answer came too quickly.
Tessa noticed. She noticed everything and usually had the mercy to let me notice it next.
The bell over the front door rang.
Roman stepped inside alone, in a charcoal sweater beneath his coat, with no tie, flowers, or performance. His gaze found me, and for one second my body recognized him before the rest of me decided what to do.
Then he turned toward the first displayed cover and gave the card beside it his full attention.
Tessa leaned close. “He’s behaving suspiciously like a normal person.”
“Keep observing quietly.”
A client called my name from across the room.
While I spoke with clients, Roman moved through all six covers without hovering.
When I glanced over, he was studying the one I had almost removed—a historical romance built around a weathered blue door, with the heroine’s hand near the edge instead of her whole body centered in the frame.
He read that card longest.
Only after he had seen all six did he approach me.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Thank you for inviting me.”
“You came at exactly seven.”
“I was nearby at six forty-two.”
A laugh slipped out of me. “Of course you were.”
“I spent eighteen minutes not arriving early.”
“That must have been difficult.”
“One of my more demanding recent exercises in restraint.”
“What do you think?” I asked.
He studied the walls. “Do you want the polite guest answer or the answer from someone who knows your older work?”
“The second one.”
He nodded once, taking the question seriously.
“You used to make the focal point impossible to miss. Even when the brief called for restraint, you gave the eye one place to land.” He indicated the row of posters without touching them.
“These make the viewer work a little more. The important thing isn’t always centered.
Sometimes it’s partly outside the frame, but the absence changes everything around it. ”
My fingers tightened on the glass.
He looked at the blue-door cover. “That one would have shown the woman’s face three years ago.”
“It did in the first draft.”
“Why did you change it?”
“The book wasn’t about whether she was beautiful enough to be chosen. It was about whether she would open the door.”
Roman’s eyes returned to mine.
He left the metaphor where it belonged.
“It’s stronger this way,” he said.
Something inside me shifted with the baby.
“You noticed the type too?” I asked.
“The spacing is wider. The older covers held everything tighter.”
“That sounds like criticism.”
“It isn’t.” His mouth moved at one corner. “I’ve learned not to tell you how much space a thing should take.”
He said it with the flatness of a fact paid for in rent, travel, and lost time.
“Elise.”
I turned as Mariah Bell, one of my longest-standing clients, approached with her wife. Mariah hugged me carefully, asked about the baby, and spent two full minutes praising the cover Roman had just studied.
Then her attention shifted to him.
“I don’t think we’ve met.”
Roman looked at me.
“This is Roman Hale,” I said. “He’s my child’s father.”
Mariah smiled and extended her hand. “Nice to meet you.”
Roman shook it. “You too.”
The sentence could have ended there.
I looked at him—at the ring he had never removed again, at the hand that stayed at his side instead of finding my back, at the man standing inside my new life without rearranging it around himself.
“And,” I added, “he’s someone I’m dating again.”
Roman went still. Relief touched only his eyes.
Mariah’s wife grinned. “That sounds promising.”
“It sounds current,” I said.
Roman’s gaze held mine. “Current is good.”
No one asked for the story behind it. Mariah moved on to an author who had demanded twelve separate shades of red for a thriller cover. Roman listened without pretending expertise. He stayed another hour without hovering, using only the name I had given the room.
He belonged nowhere in the room.
He did not make that my problem.
I wanted him there anyway.
Near closing, I found him at the blue-door cover again.
“You have a favorite,” I said.
“I do.”
“Because of the door?”
“Because the woman’s hand is already on the latch.”
I looked at the painted fingers near the edge of the image. “She hasn’t opened it.”
“No.”
“You don’t know which way she’ll choose.”
“No.”
He met my gaze.
“That’s why it works.”
---
The wind had sharpened by the time we left. Tessa locked the bookstore behind us after announcing that pregnant artists and reformed project managers were exempt from stacking chairs.
“My car’s at the far end,” Roman said. “Do you want me to walk with you or stay here?”
“Walk with me.”
He matched my slower pace without making it visible that he was doing so. The parking lot overlooked the black line of the water. Beyond the low barrier, waves broke against the rocks with the patient violence of something that never needed permission to return.
“You chose a restaurant,” I said.
“For next Friday. Harbor Table, if you still want it.”
“I do.”
“Seven?”
“Seven.”
We reached my car.
I turned toward him, expecting the familiar pause—the point where he would ask, and I would have to decide.
He did not ask.
“Good night, Elise.” He took one step back. “Your work was beautiful.”
He meant to leave.
The certainty of it moved through me more sharply than any attempt to stay could have.
“Roman.”
He stopped.
I caught the front of his coat.
His breath changed, but his hands remained at his sides.
The wool bunched beneath my fingers. I had held this same coat years ago in rain, in laughter, in the impatient seconds before he kissed me against our front door. My body remembered the angle of him, the heat beneath layers, the way his attention narrowed when I touched him first.
That memory did not own what happened next.
I did.
“Now you can,” I said.
His eyes searched mine. “Kiss you?”
“Yes.”
He waited one more beat.
Then he bent toward me.
The first touch of his mouth was careful enough to hurt.
Not tentative. Roman had never kissed me without knowing how. But every part of him held the question open. His lips moved over mine once, warm and familiar, while his hands stayed where I could see them.
I pulled him closer by the coat.
The sound he made was small, rough, and gone almost before I heard it. His restraint shifted but did not disappear. He kissed me again, deeper this time, and my knees weakened before caution caught up.
I knew the shape of his mouth, the pressure that softened my knees, the warmth of his breath when he changed the angle. Now I also knew the kiss could end when I chose.
I opened for him. His hand lifted, stopping inches from my waist.
I caught his wrist and drew his palm against my side, above the curve of our daughter. His fingers flexed once, the grip of a man who wanted to pull me against him and knew the choice was mine.
Want rose fast and bright. Too fast.
The parking lot vanished at the edges. For one dangerous second I wanted the old ease—the version of us that had never needed to ask because we had mistaken familiarity for permanent permission.
My chest tightened.
I released his coat and stepped back.
Roman’s hand left me immediately.
He stayed exactly where I had put him, breathing hard, his gaze on my face.
“That’s enough,” I said.
The cold reached the damp place on my lips. I pressed them together, still tasting him.
My eyes burned.
I hated that he saw it. I loved that he did not come closer.
“Next Friday,” I said.
“Seven.”
I opened my car door.
Roman waited until I was inside, then walked away before I started the engine.
At the cottage, I stood in the dark kitchen with my keys still in my hand. The rooms were mine—the worktable crowded with proofs, the mug Tessa had bought me, the folded baby blanket on the chair. I had wanted the kiss, and I had ended it.
I sat down and covered my face.
For the first time since I left Greyford, I did not cry because I missed the Roman I had lost.
I cried because I was beginning to see a Roman who might be different.