26. Jake
JAKE
I fixed her gate hinge without being asked, because it is the only language I trust myself to speak right now.
It had been squeaking for a while, longer than the two weeks since the porch conversation, but I'd never had a reason to notice it until I was standing there at seven in the morning with a can of oil in my hand and nowhere else useful to put my attention.
The grass was still wet enough to soak through my boots, and somewhere down the street a dog barked twice at nothing in particular, the whole neighborhood still half asleep around me.
I worked the hinge loose, cleaned the pin, greased it, and swung the gate a dozen times just to hear it go quiet.
Then I left before anyone could catch me at it, because explaining myself felt harder than the actual work.
I told myself I wasn't hiding. I was giving her the version of an apology that didn't ask anything of her in return, no forgiveness required, no conversation she wasn't ready to have. It felt thin, some mornings, standing on her lawn with a tool in my hand instead of the right words in my mouth.
It was still the only version I trusted myself not to ruin.
She texted an hour later. Thank you for the gate. You didn't have to.
I know, I wrote back. Wanted to.
She didn't answer that one, which I'd expected, and I told myself the silence wasn't a door closing, just a door that hadn't decided yet which way it wanted to swing.
I kept finding things to fix after that. Small things, nothing that required a conversation to justify. A loose board on her porch step.
A dripping spigot around back that had probably been dripping since before I ever met her.
I mowed her strip of grass along the fence line one evening while she was out picking Lily up from Carol's, timing it so I'd be gone before she got home, because showing up felt like asking for something and I wasn't ready to ask for anything yet.
Noah noticed, the way he noticed most things nobody explained to him.
"Why do you keep fixing her stuff if you're not talking to her?" he asked one evening, sketchbook forgotten in his lap for once, watching me coil the hose back onto its reel.
"We're talking. Just not a lot."
"That's a weird kind of talking."
"It's the kind I've got right now." I sat down next to him on the step, tired in the specific way that came from working too hard on things that didn't need to be worked that hard.
"Sometimes when you can't say the right words yet, you do things instead. It's not as good as saying them. It's what I've got."
"Is it working?"
"I don't know yet. Ask me in a few weeks."
He accepted that with a shrug and went back to his drawing, some elaborate scene involving what appeared to be a fort made entirely of couch cushions, and I sat there a while longer just watching him work, grateful for a kid who didn't need every answer spelled out before he could trust it.
Lily found me over the fence a few days into it, crouched by a section of chain link that had come loose from its post.
"You're always fixing things," she said, hanging off the top rail with both hands, upside down in the way only a five-year-old attempts without consequence.
"Somebody's got to."
"Mama says you're busy a lot now."
"I've been working on some things, yeah."
"Are you fixing this too?" She patted the fence like it was a horse that needed reassurance. "It wiggles."
"I noticed that. I'll get to it."
"Will you come to dinner again? Noah says you used to come all the time and now you don't."
The question landed exactly where she'd probably intended it to, small and direct and impossible to dodge cleanly.
"I will. Soon. I promise."
"You sound like Mama when she says soon about broccoli. It never actually happens."
"This is different. I promise the fence and the dinner both happen." I reached out and steadied her before she tipped too far backward off the rail, and she laughed, delighted, entirely unbothered by having nearly fallen.
"Go find your mother before she wonders where you went."
"She knows where I am. She can see the fence from the kitchen window."
I looked up without meaning to, and sure enough, Aria stood at the sink, watching us with an expression I couldn't quite read from that distance, something between wariness and something softer trying to work its way through underneath.
I lifted a hand. She lifted one back, brief, and went back to whatever she'd been doing at the counter.
It wasn't much. It was more than I'd gotten in a week.
Deacon showed up unannounced with two beers and an opinion he hadn't been asked for, which was fairly standard operating procedure for him by that point.
"You've been over there fixing things for two weeks straight," he said, settling into the second lawn chair on my porch like he owned it. "The whole neighborhood's noticing. Mrs. Tanner asked me yesterday if you were starting some kind of handyman charity."
"I'm not doing it for the neighborhood."
"I'm aware. I'm just telling you what it looks like from the outside." He took a pull from his beer and studied me with the particular squint he used when he was building up to actual advice instead of teasing.
"How's it going, really? The slow way."
"Slow. She waves now. That's new this week."
"Progress is progress."
"It doesn't feel like much."
"It's not supposed to feel like much yet. That's how you know it's real and not you just performing patience for an audience." He gestured toward Aria's yard with his bottle.
"You did the thing wrong the first time by rushing it. Don't fix that mistake by rushing the apology too."
"When did you get wise?"
"Somewhere around the third divorce I watched a friend survive badly. I pay attention. It's a skill."
He grinned, easy and warm, and some of the tightness in my chest loosened just being near him.
"You're doing fine, Jake. Better than fine, actually. Give it time."
"I hate that word."
"Everybody does. Doesn't make it less true." He was quiet for a second, turning the bottle slowly between his hands.
"You told Noah yet? About all of it?"
"I told him he's got a little sister. I kept the rest simple. He took it better than I expected. Asked if that meant he had to share his room, which apparently was the only part that actually worried him."
"That's the correct order of priorities for a six-year-old." Deacon laughed, low and genuine. "Lily?"
"Aria's handling that part on her own timeline. I'm not going to push it."
"Good. That's not yours to rush." He clinked his bottle against mine, a small, wordless toast to nothing in particular.
"You're getting better at that, by the way. Not rushing things."
"Two weeks of practice will do that to a man."
"Took you long enough."
"I know. I'm working on that part too."
The second week bent slower than the first, the way waiting always does once you've decided to actually be patient about it instead of just pretending.
I kept up the small repairs, kept my visits brief and useful, kept my distance in the specific, careful way that meant I wasn't disappearing, just not pushing.
Aria started leaving notes back. Nothing long. Thanks for the spigot.
Lily wants to know if you'll teach her to skip stones like you taught Noah. Small offerings, each one a door cracked open another inch wider than the last.
I taught Lily to skip stones on an evening warm enough that the light stayed gold past supper, standing beside her at the shallow end of the drainage pond two streets over, correcting her wrist angle with two fingers the exact way I remembered doing once before, a lifetime and a whole ocean of consequences ago.
"You're flicking too hard," I told her.
"That's what you said to Noah. He told me."
"It's good advice. Works the same for everyone."
She got one to skip twice on her third try, whooped loud enough to startle a heron off the far bank, and turned to me with the kind of triumphant grin that made the whole complicated summer feel worth every hard week it had cost.
Aria watched from the picnic table a little ways off, arms crossed loosely, not unfriendly, just careful, and when I glanced over she didn't look away fast enough to pretend she hadn't been watching the whole time.
"She's a natural," I called over.
"She gets that from somewhere, apparently."
It wasn't much of a joke, not really, nothing worth repeating to anyone who hadn't been standing there. It landed like one anyway, the first thing close to easy that had passed between us in two long weeks, and something in my chest unclenched at the sound of it.
By the end of the second week, Carol decided the whole street needed feeding, which was Carol's answer to most unresolved tension, and set up a cookout in her own backyard with enough food for twice the people actually invited.
Strings of patio lights she'd apparently owned this entire time went up along the fence line, and someone's radio played low enough to be background instead of demand, and for a while the whole evening felt like it belonged to a version of this summer that hadn't gone sideways at all.
Deacon manned the grill like it owed him money.
Noah and Lily ran some elaborate game involving a soccer ball and rules only they understood, shrieking with laughter every few minutes over some infraction neither of them could fully explain to the adults.
Carol moved between conversations with a pitcher of lemonade like she was refereeing a much larger event than the one actually happening, topping off cups nobody had asked her to refill.
Aria sat two chairs down from me instead of across the yard entirely, which felt like the loudest kind of progress nobody else at that cookout would have noticed.
"Explain to me again," Deacon said, flipping a burger with more drama than the task required, "why a grown man needs a woman to draw him a diagram before he understands the difference between a tomato and a fruit."
"It's a legitimate botanical distinction."
"It's an excuse to keep arguing with a pretty neighbor, and we both know it."
"That's not what happened."
"It's exactly what happened. I was there. I watched you lose an argument about produce and call it a highlight of your week."
He pointed the spatula at me like a weapon, flipping the burger without looking down at it, a skill honed over years of grilling for an audience that never stopped talking. "You've got a real gift for making the simplest things complicated, Jake. Always have."
"Some of us like a challenge."
"Some of us like an excuse to keep looking at somebody without admitting why." He said it lightly, grinning the whole time, but it landed somewhere true enough that I didn't have a fast comeback ready.
Something in Aria broke loose at that, sudden and unguarded, her head tipping back, one hand pressing flat against her chest like she needed to hold the sound in before it escaped her entirely.
Every small fixed hinge and mowed strip of grass and skipped stone suddenly felt like it had been worth the wait, all of it leading to exactly this, an ordinary backyard, an overcooked burger, and a sound I would have rebuilt the whole fence twice over just to hear.
She laughed, really laughed, at something dumb Deacon said, and it was the first sound in weeks that made the whole yard feel like it was thawing.