Secret Baby of the Single Dad Next Door

1. Aria

ARIA

Falling through my new neighbor's trellis on moving day, I didn't expect to land soaked and speechless against a stranger's bare chest.

I definitely didn't expect my whole body to go warm and unbothered by it, like this was something we'd done before.

And why did some reckless part of me swear I already knew him?

Six years of secondhand moving trucks should have taught me that nothing labeled runs great actually runs, so I don't know why I was surprised when the ramp gave out first.

The dresser I'd hauled through four apartments went one way, and I lunged the other to catch a box of camera gear before it hit the driveway.

I lost that fight. Somewhere behind me, Lily screamed that the tree man was climbing our fence, and I caught one glimpse of a stranger vaulting the garden gate like it personally owed him money before my heel caught the leg of an old trellis.

The sprinklers roared to life at the worst possible second, and the trellis went out from under me, the whole rickety structure taking me down like a very undignified surfboard, straight into a bare, soaked, extremely unimpressed chest. His hands closed around my arms before I hit the ground.

My face ended up six inches from his collarbone, which is not generally how I like to meet people.

He wasn't, in fact, a tree man. He wore nothing but a tool belt, forearms built for hauling lumber, not hobbies.

For one long second, neither of us moved. Water ran down both of us in matching streams, and his jaw did something complicated, somewhere between irritation and disbelief.

"You always land on people you've never met?" he asked.

His voice was low and a little rusty, like he didn't use it often. Up close, he had a scar through one eyebrow and eyes the gray of a lake before a storm, and something about the whole arrangement made my stomach do an unhelpful little flip.

"Only the ones standing where I'm falling," I said. "It's a very specific talent."

He set me back on my feet like I weighed nothing, which was either flattering or slightly insulting, and stepped back fast enough that I got the message. Whatever that flip in my stomach had been, he wasn't here for it.

"That trellis is on my side of the property line," he said.

"It's on the ground, which last I checked belongs to gravity."

His mouth twitched, though it wasn't quite a smile. More like a smile had knocked and he'd decided not to answer the door.

Lily arrived at a dead sprint, sneakers slapping wet grass, and screeched to a halt in front of him with the total lack of self-consciousness only a child has. Behind her, half hidden by the gate, a small boy watched with enormous dark eyes and said absolutely nothing.

"Are you a tree man or a fence man?" Lily asked.

"I'm neither," the stranger said. "I'm a contractor. I build things."

"Did you build the fence?"

"My grandfather did. I fixed it."

"That's cool," Lily decided, already losing interest in him and zeroing in on the silent boy instead.

"I'm Lily. I'm five. Who are you?"

The boy didn't answer. He looked at his father, or at least I assumed that was who this soaked, glowering man was, and the man's whole posture changed, softened at the edges in a way it hadn't for me.

"This is Noah," he said. "He doesn't talk much. That doesn't mean he isn't listening."

"That's okay," Lily said, with the breezy confidence of someone who had never once considered that a person might not want to be her friend.

"I talk enough for two people. Want to see my room? I don't have a room yet, it's still in boxes, but I will."

Noah looked at his father again. His father gave the smallest possible nod, and Noah took one careful step through the gate like he was testing whether the ground on this side would hold him.

I finally found enough brain function to introduce myself properly, once I'd wrung water out of my sleeve and given up on looking like a competent adult.

"Aria Mitchell," I said, holding out a hand that was still dripping.

"I just moved into the cottage. Inherited it, actually. My aunt Rosalind..."

"I know whose cottage it was," he said, not taking my hand right away, like he needed a second to decide whether to.

When he finally shook it, his palm was rough and warm, entirely too steady for someone who'd just had a stranger fall on him.

"Jake Hartley," he said. "I'm next door."

"I gathered that, given the overalls and the ambush."

"It's not an ambush if it's my own gate."

"Tell that to my nervous system. Nobody warned me the gate came with a person attached."

That twitch again, quick and gone. I decided I was going to enjoy making that happen more often, which was an unhinged thought to have about a man I'd known for ninety seconds, so I filed it away and pretended I hadn't had it.

The sprinklers finally shut off, sputtering into silence, and the sudden quiet made the whole scene feel even more ridiculous. Water dripped off the trellis, off both of us, off the boxes scattered across what used to be a driveway. Somewhere behind me, a crate of dishes was very audibly not okay.

"Your irrigation system tried to kill me," I said.

"That's the old system. I've been meaning to replace it."

"How long have you been meaning to?"

"A couple of years."

"That's not an irrigation system. That's a booby trap with a subscription."

He looked at me for a second like he wasn't sure whether I was funny or unhinged, which was fair, since I wasn't entirely sure myself.

Then he crouched down and started gathering the pieces of the collapsed trellis, stacking them with the efficient movements of someone who fixed things for a living and didn't know how to stand still around a problem.

"You don't have to do that," I said.

"It's in the way of my own gate." He didn't look up from the wood. "Might as well clear it while I'm out here."

"It's still my mess to clean up."

"I wasn't asking for permission."

I let him work in silence for a beat, mostly because I was still trying to figure out how a man could make stacking broken wood look like an argument he was winning.

Lily's laughter rang out from somewhere near the apple tree, high and delighted, and I turned to find her showing Noah how to climb the lowest branch while he watched her with an expression caught somewhere between terror and fascination.

"He really doesn't talk?" I asked, quieter now.

Jake's hands stilled on the wood for just a second.

"Not since his mom died," he said.

"It happened a couple of years back. Doctors say there's nothing physically wrong with him. He just decided the world got too loud to talk back to it."

I hadn't expected honesty. I'd expected a deflection, a change of subject, the kind of thing most people did when a stranger asked about their dead wife within the first five minutes of meeting them. Instead he'd just said it, flat and unadorned, like a fact about the weather.

"I'm sorry," I said, and meant it.

"I don't need you to be." He straightened up with an armful of broken trellis.

"I'm just telling you so you don't push him to talk. It doesn't work. It only makes him retreat further."

"Noted." I watched Noah drop off the branch into the grass, landing badly, and Lily immediately declare it the coolest thing she'd ever seen.

"For what it's worth, Lily doesn't know how to notice when someone's quiet. She'll probably talk at him until he can't help himself."

"Is that right?"

"She talked our mail carrier into a twenty-minute conversation about her opinions on cereal mascots last week. The man had places to be."

That got an actual sound out of him, short and surprised, gone before I could properly call it a laugh.

He carried the wood toward the fence line and dropped it on his side.

I was starting to notice things about him I had no business noticing, like the way he moved carefully, as if he'd spent years making sure he didn't take up too much space in a house that had gone quiet around him.

"You said you inherited the cottage," he said, not quite a question.

"From my aunt. She passed recently. I never even knew this town existed until the lawyer called."

"Rosalind was a good neighbor. She kept to herself, mostly, but she'd bring over tomatoes every summer like clockwork."

"I didn't know she gardened."

"She grew whole beds of them, right where your trellis used to stand." He nodded at the wreckage.

"You're welcome to keep planting there. The ground's good."

It was the longest sentence he'd offered me yet, and something about the offer, casual as it was, loosened a knot I hadn't realized I was carrying since the lawyer's phone call weeks ago.

I'd left the city with a moving truck, a five-year-old, and exactly one plan: to not have a plan.

And here was a stranger handing me tomato dirt like a peace treaty.

"Thank you," I said. "For the ground. And for not letting me faceplant on your driveway."

"I wasn't going to let a stranger break her neck on day one. It's bad for property values."

"That's very practical of you."

"I'm a practical man."

He said it without a trace of humor, which somehow made it funnier than if he'd been joking. I laughed before I could stop myself, and something flickered across his face, surprise maybe, like he wasn't used to being the reason someone laughed.

Lily came barreling back across the grass with Noah trailing a careful few steps behind her, both of them damp from the sprinklers and grinning in the specific way children grin when they've found a partner in crime.

"Mama, Noah draws SO good," Lily announced.

"He showed me a picture of a dinosaur eating a house. Can he come see my room? I mean my boxes."

"Maybe once we're settled, bug." I looked to Jake for permission, an instinct I didn't examine too closely. "If that's alright."

"He'll let you know if it's not." Jake glanced at his son, some silent conversation passing between them that I couldn't read, and Noah gave the smallest nod I'd ever seen a human being give. "I guess it's alright."

The two kids peeled off toward the gate again, already deep in negotiations about whether dinosaurs could, in fact, eat entire houses. For a moment Jake and I just stood there in the aftermath, dripping and awkward, both of us strangely unwilling to be the first to walk away.

"I should get back to unpacking," I said.

"I should probably fix that sprinkler timer before it takes out anyone else."

"Please. My dignity won't survive a second round."

Neither of us moved. A breeze came through and shivered the leaves of the apple tree between our two cottages, and somewhere in the branches a bird complained loudly about the disruption to its afternoon.

"This is the part where one of us actually walks away," I said.

"Take your time," he said, like he wasn't in any hurry to see that happen.

I turned toward my porch, gathering what was left of my dignity along with the surviving boxes, and made it three steps before his voice caught me from behind.

"Aria."

I turned back. He was standing there with his arms crossed, water still dripping off his hair, looking like a man who'd said more today than he'd planned to say all week.

"Welcome to the neighborhood," he said.

It came out flat, almost like a warning, the kind of thing you'd say to someone you weren't sure you wanted living next door.

He turned and walked back through his gate without waiting for a response, and I stood there in my ruined shoes with a broken lens hood at my feet, watching a stranger's bare back disappear behind a fence he'd built with his own hands.

He said welcome to the neighborhood like it was a verdict, and something under my ribs whispered that I knew him from somewhere. I didn't listen.