Chapter Five – Meryl
She had a list. And she was heading into Bear Creek, determined to get everything on it.
Not that this was how Meryl had intended to spend her second full day in Bear Creek. No, when she’d inherited Hilda’s house, she’d naively expected it to be as she remembered it, but with more dust.
Instead, the water damage caused by the now-identified leak had left her with major repairs. Repairs that would have been a lot scarier to contemplate if it weren’t for a certain Bear Creek inhabitant.
So here she was, driving into town to buy lumber, screws, and porch brackets on the advice of a man she had only just met. Spencer Thornberg. The man might just make all this extra stress worthwhile.
No, she was not going to start thinking of him as anything other than a competent contractor.
Too late, the voice in her head whispered.
The road curved down from Pine Cottage’s isolated position in the mountains, winding through stands of tall pines that occasionally broke to reveal glimpses of distant mountain peaks.
What a view. If Pine Cottage hadn’t needed so much work, she’d love to spend her brief time here exploring the wilderness.
“Galvanized three-inch deck screws,” she muttered, reciting Spencer’s recommendations from memory as she forced herself to focus on the morning’s task instead of dreaming of mountain hikes and mountain men. “Half-inch carriage bolts. Joist hangers. Post brackets.”
The words felt foreign in her mouth. She’d always considered herself reasonably handy. She could assemble furniture and hang shelves with the best of them. But this was different. This was structural. This was a house with actual bones that needed actual surgery.
And part of her was also annoyed at Spencer. Annoyed about the way he talked about the house. Annoyed that he was making her see how easily Pine Cottage could become a home.
Most of all, she was annoyed that thinking about him now brought back not just his advice, but the warmth of his smile, and the way that had unsettled her far more than it should have.
The road widened as she approached town, the trees thinning to reveal actual houses set back from the road.
Not cookie-cutter subdivisions, but individual homes with character, some small and neat, others sprawling and well-established.
Meryl found herself slowing down, taking in details she hadn’t noticed during her first drive through.
A stone chimney here. A wide front porch there.
Gardens that looked as though they’d been tended for generations.
A child’s bike lay on its side near one driveway.
A man in work boots was stacking logs beside a shed.
None of it was pretty in a polished sort of way. It just made the town feel established, as if people here expected to stay. Forever.
“Not me,” she murmured as she reached town and followed the GPS directions to Grayson’s Hardware & Supply, where she pulled into a parking spot.
The storefront was unassuming, with large display windows flanking a central door, and hand-painted signs advertising seasonal specials on everything from snow shovels to garden hoses.
Around the side, there seemed to be a yard with stacked lumber and what looked like farming supplies.
“Right,” she said, reaching for her list. “Let’s get this over with.”
A bell jingled as she pushed open the door. The smell hit her immediately, metal and wood, and it instantly reminded her of Spencer’s jacket.
Why did she find reminders of him in everything she thought, everything she saw? He really had gotten under her skin.
No, it was nothing more than a real appreciation of his advice. She’d never been the kind of woman who needed saving. But it would be unfair to deny that in some ways he had saved her. Saved her from a total meltdown and overreaction to the state of Pine Cottage.
That first time they met, he’d made her see that nothing was insurmountable. Nothing was beyond fixing.
At the cottage, at least.
Meryl headed deeper into the hardware store. It was wider than it had looked from outside, with high shelves running the length of the store and narrow aisles packed with more items than she could catalog at a glance.
Not a big box store. Not even close. This was the kind of place where things were organized according to some internal logic that probably made perfect sense if you’d been shopping there for thirty years.
“Morning,” called a voice from somewhere near the back. “Be with you in a minute.”
“Thank you,” Meryl called out, suddenly unsure where to start. Her list seemed both inadequate and overwhelming now that she was here, faced with so much choice. She spotted a section that looked promising, lumber and hardware, from what she could tell, and made her way toward it.
The shelves held more varieties of screws, nails, and fasteners than she’d known existed. She found herself staring at rows of nearly identical boxes, the differences between them suddenly crucial and completely mysterious.
“Can I help you find something?”
She turned to find a man in his sixties watching her with curiosity. His worn flannel shirt and canvas work pants suggested someone who knew exactly which end of a hammer to hold.
“Hello. Yes, please. I need deck screws,” Meryl said, consulting her list. “Galvanized, three-inch. And some other things for a porch repair.”
The man nodded, his gaze sharpening with interest. “New project?”
“Old project, actually. Pine Cottage. It needs... quite a bit of work.”
Recognition flickered across his face. “Hilda’s place? You must be her niece.”
“Great-niece,” Meryl corrected automatically. Then she frowned. “How did you...”
“News travels in a small town.” He smiled, the expression crinkling the corners of his eyes. “Frank Grayson. I knew Hilda for forty years. She was a good woman.”
“Meryl Aldwick,” she replied, suddenly conscious of how visible she was here. Not anonymous. Known. Connected.
That was a new feeling. One she kind of liked.
Frank nodded toward her list. “Deck screws, you said? For the porch?”
“Yes. And joist hangers. Post brackets. Carriage bolts. Possibly more things once I understand what half of those actually are.”
“Well, you’ve come to the right place.” Frank chuckled as he guided her along an aisle. “The porch has definitely seen better days. And I should know. I spent many an evening sitting on it with your aunt, enjoying a cold beer.”
“You knew her well?” Meryl asked, intrigued by her great-aunt’s life here, of which she’d only ever had tiny glimpses.
“We enjoyed each other’s company,” he replied with a wistful smile. “Now, let’s check out this list of yours.”
“Thank you.”
He scanned the list, nodding. “Yep, looks good.” He looked up. “Spencer mentioned you might be popping in and gave me a brief idea of what you needed.”
That caught her off guard. “Spencer. He did?”
Frank’s mouth quirked. “He stopped by earlier. Said he’d been helping you and that you’d likely be along sometime with a list.” He handed the list back. “And here you are.”
“Here I am,” she said, not sure how she felt about Spencer talking to Frank about her.
“You’re in good hands,” Frank went on, already reaching for a box from the shelf. “Spencer knows what he’s doing.”
“Very good hands,” she murmured as Frank led her through the aisles, pulling items from shelves with the confidence of someone who could find what he needed blindfolded.
As they walked, he asked practical questions about the cottage.
How bad was the water damage? Were the joists still sound? Had she checked the roof yet?
The questions were direct but not intrusive, focused on the house rather than on her. It felt different from city small talk, where people were trained to seem interested. Frank simply wanted to know what Pine Cottage needed. What she needed.
“Hilda mostly came in for gardening supplies,” he said as he set a box of screws on the counter. “Had quite the touch with roses.”
The rose bush. The one that had nearly swallowed the front path.
“There’s still one there, at least,” Meryl said. “It’s gone a bit wild.”
Frank nodded. “Old Duchess of Wellington. Hilda’s favorite. Needs a firm hand, but worth the trouble.”
Frank said it in the same tone Spencer used when he talked about timber, matter-of-fact, with the easy certainty of someone who believed some things were worth saving simply because they had been made well in the first place.
Meryl found that unexpectedly difficult to dismiss as sentimentality.
As he rang up her purchases, more customers entered the store. To Meryl’s surprise, most of them nodded to her or offered a brief morning greeting as they passed. Not nosy. Just being friendly, even to a stranger.
“You’re staying at the cottage?” Frank asked as he bagged everything.
“For now,” Meryl answered, deliberately vague. “Just until I get it in better shape.”
He seemed to hear what she wasn’t saying, but let it go. “If you need anything else, you know where we are.”
“Thanks,” she said, and meant it. If Frank hadn’t helped her, she’d probably have spent the whole day trying to find everything on her list.
She made a quick stop at the grocery for essential food and cleaning supplies, then headed back to Pine Cottage with the trunk fuller than she had expected and her mind fuller still.
The drive back felt shorter. Familiar, somehow.
When the cottage came into view around the final bend, Meryl slowed without meaning to.
The first time she had driven up that lane, Pine Cottage had looked like the sort of inheritance people hated. Too much work. Too expensive.
Now, for the first time, she found herself looking not only at what was wrong but at what had already changed. The cottage still looked battered, but even with the few repairs they had already made, it no longer looked abandoned.
She pulled up beside the cottage and sat for a moment with the engine running, looking at it.
Not hopeless, Spencer had said.
At the time, she had wanted to believe him because the alternative had been unbearable.
Now, with a trunk full of supplies and Bear Creek no longer feeling quite so alien, she found herself thinking he might actually have been right.
Meryl carried the bags inside one by one, setting them down carefully on the repaired section of the hallway floor.
Then she stood in the middle of the house, surrounded by screws and brackets and coffee, and felt, for the first time since arriving, not overwhelmed.
Not exactly.
Only as though the work ahead might be something she could meet, one list, one room, one day at a time.
The house creaked somewhere overhead, but even that sounded different now. Less like a warning. More like an old place welcoming a new friend.