Twenty-seven
London didn’t realize how tired she was until she closed the door to her suite and the noise finally dropped away. It had been six weeks of calamity and constant motion. She’d survived Christmas at The Colchuck—again—this time, with a different kind of clarity.
Not everything needed to be carried the way she had been carrying it.
The second day of January always marked the shift. The inn softened. Guests thinned to long weekends and quieter stays. The town relaxed, slipping back into something less structured, more comfortable. Glühwein would linger throughout winter, but the rush was over until Oktoberfest.
London eased into the lounge chair beside her bed, phone already in hand. They’d spent the day before getting reacquainted. Agreeing to try a life together again—slowly. She stared at the screen for a moment.
Too soon?
Maybe.
But not wrong.
Would you like to have dinner together tonight? I’ll cook.
The response came almost immediately.
Yes.
London felt the “yes” deep in her stomach. Not insecurity. Not exhilaration. Not the pull that used to take over before she had time to think. She knew that version of herself. She’d lived in it long enough to recognize the momentum just as soon as it started to insist on having its way.
This was different.
She wanted to see Harper. Not because she needed to.
# # #
The kitchen came to life slowly. First, with the sizzle of onions hitting a hot pan, sultry and sweet, then deeper as chicken browned and filled the air with the smell of London’s childhood. Her mother’s chicken paprikash was one of Harper’s favorites—she only hoped she could do it justice.
The secret, Lorraine had always said, was not rushing the chicken. “Cook it too fast and you’ll end up with tire rubber,” she’d say and giggle, her specific lilt only hers.
London added paprika and stirred, letting herself settle into the rhythm of it, the low heat, the patience it required.
Voices carried from the front desk. A guest, maybe—asking for recommendations, directions. The usual.
“I’m telling you.” Sebastian’s voice cut through more clearly now. “If a man tells you something is ‘wood-forward,’ you leave. Immediately.”
This wasn’t guest small talk. London leaned just enough to see around the corner. Harper stood at the desk, one shoulder angled into it, the stick of a lollipop resting loosely between her fingers.
“That does seem like a trap,” she said.
“Turns out it’s just his new cologne scent,” he continued.
“But I warned him—that’s not going to sell.
Woodsy, sure. Cedary, yes. Wood-forward?
It sounds like cologne Magic Mike thinks he wears.
” Sebastian smoothed the front of his black houndstooth pants.
“I love him but sometimes that man is just clueless.”
Harper laughed, low and easy, and brought the candy to her mouth.
London didn’t realize it until that moment—Harper in her carpenter wear, leaning against a counter, lollipop tucked between her lips, was, without question, an unfair thing to walk into a room and see. She watched anyway, storing this vision in her memory bank for later.
“Hey,” London said when she was ready to be known. There was a line between savoring a moment and becoming creepy.
Harper turned, smile already there.
London crossed the space without thinking, reaching up to pull the stick from Harper’s mouth before pressing a quick kiss to her lips—nothing dramatic, but not exactly subtle either. Sebastian knew. There was no reason to pretend otherwise.
“You hungry?” she asked as she offered the lollipop back. “Also, what’s with this?”
“Sebastian’s latest offering.”
“Curated,” he said. “From L Chocolat. Only the best, you know.”
Harper popped the candy back into her mouth and glanced toward the bowl on the counter. “Well, curated or not, these are excellent.”
“Did the curated chocolate pop ruin my attempt to cook for you?”
“Not at all,” Harper said. “I didn’t stop for lunch. There is so much to do there—I’m back in high pressure mode.”
“What about me?” Sebastian’s words said one thing, but his face gave away that he was only pushing because he could. “I’m hungry, too.”
“You have access to an entire kitchen.”
“Yes, but none of it was made for me,” he said, glancing between them.
Harper smiled around the lollipop. “That does seem like a you problem.”
Sebastian considered that, then sighed dramatically. “Fine. I’ll take my chocolate and my deeply underappreciated palate elsewhere.” He picked through the bowl. “I didn’t want your delicious smelling dinner anyway.”
“Join me?” London turned to Harper with a hand outstretched.
“By the way,” Sebastian added when they were just out of sight. “I hope this ends with you two upstairs together.”
“Bash.” London shot him a look over her shoulder.
“What? I do.”
# # #
“So,” London placed a platter of chicken between them on the table Harper had built. “Tell me about your day.”
Harper told of yet another changed plan about how to remodel the lobby at The Sleeping Lady, but this time, they were certain they had it.
She’d spent the morning talking to everyone who felt their opinion mattered, and the afternoon ripping out work she’d done before The Colchuck flooded.
With help, it would still take another couple of days to get back to a reasonable starting point.
“I mean, it’s their money, but—” Harper said as she selected a piece of chicken from the platter. “I don’t like re-doing work I’ve already done. So wasteful.”
“So wasteful.” She'd been doing that since Harper came back—echoing her, filling in her sentences. Twenty years of speaking the same language, and the fluency was still there.
Harper picked at her chicken, still talking through the lobby changes and London noticed the music shifted—Indigo Girls. Unmistakable. London glanced toward the kitchen. Subtle, Sebastian.
“I just—I want to help them, but I get frustrated with the bureaucracy of it all. Makes me long for when it was just me and the woodshop.” Harper gestured with her fork. “This is delicious, by the way. Your mom would be proud.”
London let out a soft whew. Why was she nervous about cooking for someone she knew so well? They’d both changed during their time apart, but Harper was still Harper. She’d never been one to critique food someone else had made for her.
“Is that your goal?” she asked. “To get back to furniture making?”
“Don’t know.” Harper shrugged. “I don’t really have a plan past this gig. I figured I was going back to San Francisco after, but obviously—things have changed.”
Careful, London coached herself.
“Actually—” she put her fork down. Her hand found the edge of the table without meaning to, smooth and soothing to the touch. Harper had built this in the midst of everything falling apart. “Great segue.”
London looked up from the table to see Harper watching her hand move against the grain. “We should probably talk about the inn.”
Harper reached for her wine and leaned back in her chair, the way she did when she was preparing to listen, not talk. “I’m listening.”
London nodded, a quick, full-body nod she couldn’t quite contain, and followed Harper’s lead. Wine was good. Wine would help.
“I want your thoughts. But I’d like to tell you how I got to that meeting with the broker. And then—” London took another sip. “We should talk about what to do next. Or not do. I don’t want to decide this alone.”
“Okay.” Harper nodded once.
“I was already halfway out the door. Before the flood. Before any of it.”
If Harper was surprised, it didn’t show.
“I’d spent the last year trying to figure out what went wrong. With my life. With us. I’d started thinking about what it would look like to leave,” she said, dabbing at the corners of her eyes. “The town. The inn. The life I thought I was meant to have but I clearly couldn’t do anymore.”
It was the first time she’d said it all out loud. Her motivation. Her fear. How the voice inside her head said she needed a fresh start somewhere no one knew the version of her she’d been in Leavenworth.
“And then the storm happened, and poof.” London flicked her fingers outward. Poof. “It felt like something that was less of a choice and more of a foregone conclusion. It was too much. I thought I didn’t want this life.”
Harper’s glass was empty now, a Red Mountain merlot downed as the Indigo Girls continued in their relentless, knowing way.
“But I think what I was really doing—” London said, “Was finding a clean way out of something that didn’t feel clean anymore.
I’ve learned—you’ve taught me—I don’t want to do that anymore.
Cut and run. So—” London stopped. She'd run out of words, or maybe just run out of the nerve to say the rest of them.
The difference between knowing something and saying it out loud had never felt so large.
Harper reached for the wine bottle and refilled her glass, then London's, with the same steadiness she brought to everything that required her hands. She set the bottle down carefully on a coaster.
“You didn't want to cut and run," she said, not a question. "But you also didn't know how to stay.”
“Yeah. That’s—yeah.”
Harper turned her wine glass, the wine sloshing slowly, as if she were intentionally aerating it. “So, what changed?”
“Everything,” London said.
“That’s—”
“Vague?”
“Yep.”
“Well, everything did change. We got to know each other again, in a way I didn’t expect. The town showed up for me, also in ways I didn’t expect. What once felt like a burden started feeling a lot more like my family’s legacy.”
“And?” Harper turned the glass.
“And I would like your help deciding what we should do next.”
“You don’t want to sell?”
“I realized—what you said was right. I made a decision in a vacuum. And then, when I walked Stephanie through the house, my life was everywhere. You were everywhere. I grew up in this house, Harp. You’ve rebuilt almost every stick of it. My dad died here. The last time Mum was coherent was here.”
“So, you don’t want to sell?” Harper repeated, but her tone was softer.
“I truly don’t know what I want to do but whatever it is, I want us to decide together.”
She meant it. That was what surprised her—not the saying of it, but how much she meant it.
“Do you need to sell? Financially?”
“No. We’re back on track with bookings. It’ll take a year to recoup the storm repair, but it’s doable, thanks to your help.”
“Do you want to stay in Leavenworth?” Harper’s eyes sparkled under the chandelier, their sometimes green, sometimes blue hue carefully neutral.
London pushed salad around on her plate. The honest answer was right there. She just had to let it out.
“I won’t be mad, Lon. Do you want to stay?”
“I don’t want to leave,” London said, greens stacked on the side of the plate now. “And I’m not sure I want to stay, either.”
She hadn’t rehearsed that. It had just come out. But she realized immediately—it wasn’t everything. Telling Harper everything was another risk in a conversation of risks.
“There's one more thing,” she said. “And I need you to know—I'm not telling you because I've decided anything. I'm telling you because I said I didn't want to do this alone anymore, and that has to mean something.”
Harper waited. In fact, Harper had given a masterclass in waiting.
“On my birthday, I was at Enzian,” London said. “Alone. Turning fifty. Mum didn’t remember,” she added, softer. “Which I don’t hold against her. And you and I weren’t really talking.”
“Mm-hm.” Harper was with her.
“I made a list,” she said. “Fifty things to do this year. Places to go. Things to try. A life that didn’t look anything like this one.”
That little dimple on Harper’s left cheek appeared, just there. Just for her. The Indigo Girls played on. Someone walked down the stairs, that squeaky stair announcing movement.
“It felt… possible,” London continued. “Like maybe I could just start over somewhere no one knew me. That’s why I called the broker.”
“How far did you get” Harper’s thumb moved over the stem of her glass. “On the list?”
London looked toward the ceiling, then back. “Far enough to write it. Not far enough to do any of it.”
“Can I see it?”
“Eventually.” London shook her head “It’s a little embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing? Why?”
Harper looked intrigued but was holding back. Which London supposed was fair. She’d want to know what was on Harper’s top list of things to do to change her life.
“Because it’s very much the list of someone who was trying to outrun herself,” she said. “And because some of it,” she stopped. “Some of it still sounds really good, and I don’t know what to do with that. Now that—”
“Now that we’re back in the picture.”
Harper knew her, still.
“Yes. And I meant what I said—I don’t want to lose you again. No silly list is worth fucking this up again.”
“What if you can have both?” Harper asked as she pushed back in her chair, grounding herself before continuing.
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t need to sell the inn. And I don’t have to stay here all the time. We can figure out something that actually works. Not just something you survive.”
London braced for the “but.” It didn’t come.
“It doesn’t have to be binary, babe.”
Of course Harper would dismantle a binary. London had spent days trying to figure out how to keep the inn without losing herself, and Harper had solved it in a simple sentence over chicken paprikash. That was so infuriating. That was so Harper.
“How so?”
“Maybe you stop trying to do all of it yourself,” Harper said simply. “Sebastian already runs this place. Let him take more.”
“And then we build something that has room in it,” she continued. “For you to leave sometimes. For both of us to leave. For you to figure out who you are outside of Leavenworth without burning everything down to do it.”
Closer to Fine played through the speakers and London looked down at the table. The grain. The edges Harper had shaped by hand. “I don’t want to lose this,” she said.
“Then don’t,” Harper replied. “Just don’t lose yourself keeping it.”
“Thank you,” London said, voice soft, the pounding in her chest finally quiet. The tension she’d been holding all evening loosened without announcement.
Harper's arms slipped around her from behind, hands resting at the base of her neck, comforting and sure.
London leaned into her.
And finally, it didn’t feel like something she had to hold together on her own.