23. Leah
LEAH
The storefront smelled like fresh paint now instead of sawdust. One whole wall had gone soft and warm under two coats of Antique Ivory while the other three still waited bare, drop cloths bunched at the baseboards, half-empty cans lined up along the exposed brick.
I'd talked Derek into helping the second he showed up off shift, mostly because I liked having him there and partly because I genuinely needed a second pair of hands, and I was starting to regret both reasons in roughly equal measure.
"You're supposed to keep the line straight," I said, watching him drag the trim brush along the edge where wall met window frame, the resulting stripe wandering like it had somewhere better to be. "That's the whole job. Straight line."
"It is straight."
"Derek, it looks like a heart monitor."
"A steady one, though. No arrhythmia."
"That's not the compliment you think it is."
He stepped back, studied his own work with the same flat, assessing stare he probably gave a burning building, and I watched something like genuine offense cross his face at the sight of what he'd actually produced.
"I'm a fire chief." He said it like a legal defense. "I can cut a hole in a roof in under ninety seconds. This trim line defeated me."
"A trim line. Not even a whole wall. Just the line."
"The line is the hard part. Everyone knows that."
"Nobody knows that. You're making that up right now."
"I'm not making it up. It's a widely acknowledged fact among painters." He dipped the brush again, determined, and produced a second wandering stripe directly beneath the first, somehow worse than the original. "See. Consistent."
"That's not the good kind of consistent."
"I never said it was good. I said it was consistent.
" He turned to look at me, paint flecked across one cheekbone and both forearms, entirely unbothered by his own incompetence in a way that should not have been as charming as it was.
"You're welcome, by the way. I'm cutting my losses on trim and moving to something I can actually do. "
"Which is what, exactly?"
"Rolling. Big open spaces. No precision required."
"That's not really how rolling works either."
"It's exactly how rolling works. You just push it around until the wall looks less sad." He said it with total confidence, the same tone he probably used to brief a room full of firefighters, and I decided against arguing further, mostly because I wanted to see how this went.
He grabbed the roller before I could object, loaded it heavy with Antique Ivory, and swept it across the lower half of the wall in one confident stroke that immediately proved him wrong, the roller catching a ridge in the drywall and flinging a fine spray of paint straight across the front of my sweater.
I stood there for a second, staring down at myself, then up at him, and watched the realization of what he'd done register on his face, somewhere between horror and the specific helpless look of a man who knew apologizing wouldn't undo it.
"That was an accident."
"Was it?"
"It was genuinely an accident. I have never once in my life aimed paint at anyone on purpose." He set the roller down slow, like a man trying not to spook something. "I can get you a towel."
"I don't want a towel." I dipped two fingers straight into the open can beside me before I'd fully decided to do it, and flicked them at him without any warning at all, a fine arc of ivory landing squarely across his jaw and the front of his shirt. "There. Now we match."
He looked down at himself, then back at me, and something shifted across his whole face, slow and dangerous and delighted.
"You didn't!"
"I absolutely did."
"That's the least impressive thing about you and also the funniest." I dipped my fingers again, laughing too hard to properly aim the second round.
"You couldn't paint a straight line if your whole department depended on it, and you're about to retaliate with a paint roller like it's a weapon of war. "
"It is a weapon of war, as of right now."
He came at me with the roller raised like a sword, and I bolted for the far side of the room, laughing hard enough that I nearly slipped on the drop cloth.
We shrieked and dodged around half-finished walls and paint cans until he finally cornered me against the exposed brick and painted one deliberate stripe down the center of my nose, gentle despite the chase that led to it.
"There," he said, low, close, entirely too pleased with himself. "Now we really match."
I grabbed his shirt front and pulled him down with me as I finally lost my footing on the drop cloth.
We went down together in a tangle of limbs and paint-streaked fabric, laughing too hard to actually be hurt by the fall, flat on our backs on the plastic sheeting with ivory paint drying in streaks across both of us and the whole ceiling spinning slow and warm above me.
"This is a professional business establishment," I said, wheezing, staring up at exposed pipes and unfinished drywall. "Clients are going to walk through that door in a few weeks and see actual finished walls, and none of them will ever know what happened on this exact spot of floor."
"I'll know."
"You're not allowed to bring it up during a consultation."
"It's covered in paint and we're both on the floor."
"I'm aware of that, thank you."
He rolled onto his side to look at me, paint drying pale against his jaw, something soft and unguarded in his face that had nothing to do with the mess around us, and for a long moment neither of us said anything at all, just lay there on the floor of my half-finished business, breathing hard, grinning at each other like idiots.
"Worth it," he said eventually.
"Definitely worth it."
He kissed me right there on the drop cloth, unhurried, tasting faintly of paint fumes and cold coffee, and I decided, somewhere in the middle of it, that I did not care one bit about the state of my sweater or the wall we still hadn't finished.
We didn't get much more painting done that afternoon. Neither of us minded.
He left a little after dark, kissing me once more on the doorstep with paint still drying in his hair, promising to bring proper drop cloths next time instead of whatever we'd improvised with, and I stood in the doorway of my own quiet cabin afterward, warm all the way through in a way that had nothing to do with the space heater.
The good feeling lasted almost exactly as long as it took me to sit down on the couch with my laptop.
It started small, the way worry always did with me, a persistent itch that wouldn't let the afternoon stay simple.
He'd told me the twenty third was hard for him.
He'd told me almost nothing else, no names, no details, nothing beyond Boston and a call that had sent him running two thousand miles to a town small enough to disappear into.
I told myself I wasn't going to look. I said it three separate times, out loud, in an empty living room, which should have been my first sign that I was about to do exactly the opposite.
I opened the laptop anyway.
The search felt clinical at first, almost defensible, the way anything does when you're the one doing it and telling yourself it's harmless.
Boston fire department. Late winter, close to the holidays.
A rough year range I guessed at based on how long he'd said he'd been in Pinewood Ridge.
Archive after archive of local news came up, most of it useless: weather reports, city council minutes, unrelated house fires that made my stomach drop before I confirmed they weren't the one.
Then I found it.
The headline sat there plain and small on an old news archive page, dated exactly the way I'd feared it might be, a short paragraph beneath it that I read twice before the words fully landed.
Firefighter killed in structure collapse during rescue attempt. Occupant recovered.
I sat very still, laptop glowing in the dark of my own living room, my heart going too fast for a page of text that told me almost nothing.
No names. No details beyond a street address I didn't recognize and a time of morning that meant nothing to me.
Just enough to confirm the shape of what he'd been carrying, and not nearly enough to understand any of the parts that actually mattered.
My hand hovered over the trackpad, one click away from a name I had absolutely no right to learn this way, in the dark, alone, without him in the room to decide for himself whether I got to know it yet.
I closed the laptop before I could scroll any further.
The shame arrived almost immediately, sharp and specific, worse somehow than if I'd been caught doing it. I'd promised myself I wouldn't look, and I'd looked anyway, the kind of quiet violation nobody else would ever know about except me.
He had given me exactly as much as he trusted himself to give, standing in a town square full of ice sculptures with his voice gone rough and careful. I had gone home and tried to take the rest of it without asking, like his trust wasn't the whole point of how he'd offered it.
I sat there in the dark a long moment, laptop closed on my knees, and made myself a promise instead, quiet and private, the kind I intended to actually keep this time.
I was not going to search again. Whatever the rest of that story was, whoever that headline belonged to, I would wait for Derek to hand it to me himself, in whatever piece he was ready to give, whenever that turned out to be.
It was the least I owed him after two years of him learning the hard way that most people couldn't be trusted with the fragile parts.
I set the laptop on the coffee table, screen down, like putting it out of sight might undo what I'd already done, and sat there a while longer just breathing, letting the shame settle into something quieter, something I could carry without it showing on my face the next time I saw him.
I thought about the version of myself who used to plan other people's weddings for a living, the one who'd learned to read a room in about four seconds flat and never once missed the moment somebody needed space instead of questions.
That version of me knew better than this.
She'd have waited without needing to talk herself into it three separate times first.
My phone buzzed against the cushion beside me, bright in the dim room, and I nearly ignored it entirely before curiosity won out the way it usually did.
Maddie.
Heads up. Derek's ex just rolled into town for Katie's wedding. Rachel Voss. You didn't hear it from me.
I read it twice, the words rearranging themselves slower the second time, landing with a weight the first read hadn't quite prepared me for.
An ex. A name I'd never once heard him say, not in every quiet thing he'd handed me since the tree lighting, not even tonight with paint drying in his hair and his mouth still faintly warm against mine on my own front step.
I set the phone down very carefully on the coffee table beside the laptop, the way you'd set something down that might go off again if you weren't careful with it, and sat there a long while in the dark of my own quiet living room with two separate things I now knew and had no idea what to do with either of.