Chapter 2
CLAIRE
One Month Later
Who moves into a new house at nine thirty at night?
I’ll tell you who. Murderers. Fugitives.
People in witness protection. Possibly vampires.
I’ve seen enough films to know that after-dark relocations fall into one of these categories, and none of them end well for the woman next door in her socks and glasses who was minding her own business, eating cereal on the couch.
The beeping started two minutes ago. It cut straight through the rom-com I was watching. So here I am, two fingers parting the blinds, one eye pressed to the gap, spying.
The house next door has been empty for four months. The previous owners left behind a feral lawn and a garden gnome I’ve been making eye contact with every morning through my kitchen window. He has a fishing rod and a painted-on smile that suggests he knows things about me.
Now there’s a moving truck reversing into the driveway, massive and white and badly lit by the single streetlamp on our road, and a man is guiding it in. Standing in the glow of the garage light with one arm raised, the other pointing, his profile intense against the dark.
He’s tall, wearing a T-shirt that’s doing nothing to disguise the shoulders underneath it, and his hair is short and dark, longer on top, catching the garage light every time he moves. His jaw is unreasonably sharp and grabs my attention.
The truck stops. Two men climb out of the cab, both thick-necked and broad. They start unloading. A couch. Boxes. A bookshelf that takes both of them to manage.
Mr. Unreasonable Jaw stands to the side, arms folded, watching. He glances at his phone, says something to one of the movers that makes the guy laugh, and then turns his head and scans the street.
His gaze sweeps across the front of my house.
I rip my fingers from the blinds so fast they clatter against the frame, and I drop to a crouch below the windowsill with my heart in my throat and my glasses sliding down my nose.
Smooth, Claire. Very subtle. If he didn’t know he was being watched before, the sound of cheap blinds being assaulted by a panicking woman has certainly clarified the situation.
I stay down for a full minute, but my knees protest. The carpet smells faintly of the lemon cleaner I used this morning. On the TV, still muted, the rom-com couple appear to be kissing in the rain, which is objectively unhygienic.
When I finally risk another peek, the blinds parting millimeter by millimeter, the driveway is busy with boxes and the jaw is nowhere in sight. Gone inside. Probably unpacking.
I return to the couch, pull the throw blanket over my legs, and unmute the TV. The golden-retriever guy is wearing a tuxedo now, so I’ve clearly missed some critical plot developments, but I’m still smiling, my thoughts drifting back to the man next door. It’ll be interesting to see who he is.
It’s been a month since the book signing, where photos of me with the ManBaker guy gave the online bullies another reason to drag up every ugly piece of that interview.
I haven’t ventured out much since. My social media accounts are frozen, my sales have cratered, and the second cookbook I’m writing may be turned down by my publisher.
I’ve reorganized my spice rack three times this week because it’s the only thing in my life I can control.
And now, for the first time in a while, the world outside my window contains a question I actually want the answer to.
That was Tuesday.
By Thursday, I’ve established that Mr. Unreasonable Jaw appears to live alone, drives a dark blue SUV, and has a habit of leaving his kitchen light on until well past midnight.
I know this because my study faces his kitchen.
I’m not spying. I’m simply a person who writes best at night and occasionally glances up from her laptop.
By Saturday, I know he owns a cat. A massive, white, absurdly fluffy cat that I spotted sitting on his kitchen windowsill at 7:00 a.m. while I was making coffee.
The cat stared at me through two panes of glass with an expression of imperial disdain, and I stared back.
We held eye contact for an uncomfortable amount of time before I looked away first. I’ve never won a staring contest with any animal, and I wasn’t about to start with a creature that resembled a sentient cloud.
By the following Wednesday, eight days after the truck arrived, I still hadn’t seen this man properly or introduced myself.
I’ve rehearsed the words “Hi, I’m Claire.
Welcome to the neighborhood” approximately forty times in my head, and each rehearsal is worse than the last because my brain keeps inserting catastrophic variables.
What if he’s seen the interview clip? Or he thinks I’m the food snob from the internet?
So I stay in my study and write, when I hear a loud crash from next door.
I push my glasses up my nose and wander over to the living room window.
His kitchen is directly across from my living room, separated by a shared fence, and slightly blurred out by the curtains.
He’s shirtless, wearing jeans, slung low on his hips. Shoulders, chest, stomach, arms, all of it carved and defined and catching the overhead light. He’s got his cap on, so it’s hard to see his face.
He’s moving fast. Darting across the kitchen with a mixing bowl in one hand, the other arm gesturing at nothing, and he’s talking.
Animated, expressive, a full-body conversation that involves his whole torso, and I can’t tell if he’s on the phone or talking to himself or performing for an invisible audience.
Then the white fluffball launches itself from somewhere and into his arms, and he catches it one-handed while still holding the bowl. The cat’s tail whips across his face, and he laughs.
I press closer to the glass.
He sets the cat on what appears to be a tall stool near the counter, and it sits upright with the posture of a judge presiding over a very important trial.
He returns to the counter, and I lose sight of him for a moment.
Clattering. More laughter. The sound of a heavy object being dropped on a hard surface.
Then he’s back in frame, moving away from the counter rapidly, and there’s a substance dripping down his chest.
My breath catches.
It’s dark and thick and trailing from his collarbone down the center of his chest in a slow, obscene line, and for one unhinged second, my brain supplies a single thought: blood.
He’s murdered someone. The night move-in. The living alone. The cat. It all makes sense. He’s a handsome murderer with good bone structure and a fluffy white accomplice, and I should call the police. Except I can’t move.
Then he drags his index finger through the trail on his chest, slowly, deliberately, and lifts it to his mouth.
Not blood. Chocolate, and I exhale.
He sucks his finger clean and grins at the cat, who is watching him with an expression of absolute contempt, and he says a word I can’t hear, but the shape on his lips looks a lot like taste.
He scoops a fingerful from a separate small bowl of cream and holds it out.
The cat leans forward, sniffs, and licks it delicately off his fingertip, making me assume he’s got cat-friendly cream just for his cat.
He throws his head back and laughs again, and the chocolate is still on his chest, still trailing a dark line down the grooves of muscles.
Damn, who is this guy?
My glasses are fogging at the edges because my face is pressed against the window, and I’m breathing heavily, which is not the image I want associated with this moment but is technically accurate.
He moves again. Spinning back to the counter, hips shifting with the kind of unconscious rhythm that suggests music is playing.
He’s having the time of his life while he cooks.
Half naked, chocolate-smeared, dancing in his kitchen with a judgmental cat and a mixing bowl.
Whatever this is—baking, performing, a private ritual involving confectionery and a complete absence of shirts—he’s radiating a joy so unfiltered that my chest aches in a way that has everything to do with the fact that I can’t remember the last time I felt that free.
He bends to open the oven, and the jeans dip lower and the muscles along his back contract, and I gasp. I mean, I’m alone in my living room committing light voyeurism against a man who doesn’t know I exist, and I need to stop.
I don’t.
He straightens up, pushes the hair off his forehead with the back of his wrist, and the chocolate has spread. It’s on his jaw now, a smudge near his ear, and across three of his knuckles.
He grabs a cloth and wipes his hands, then tosses it over his shoulder and turns toward the window.
My window. My corner of blinds where I am standing, having pushed the blinds slightly aside, breathing on the glass, fogging up my own view, with one hand pressed flat against the window and the other clutching the blinds.
His gaze lands on the exact gap in the blinds where my face is.
He pauses. Tilts his head. And the corner of his mouth curves up, those blue eyes glinting… Eyes I’ve seen before.
Oh my fucking God!
It’s the sexy ManBaker from the book signing event!
I throw myself sideways so hard I clip the bookshelf, and a paperback falls on my head. Ouch.
My heart is hammering, my cheeks are on fire, and my glasses are crooked enough that the kitchen is leaning suspiciously to the left.
There’s a copy of Cooking for People Who Definitely Have Their Lives Together on the floor that just assaulted me, and Mr. Unreasonable Jaw definitely, absolutely, without question caught me watching him through my window like some kind of lace-curtain goblin.
Did he recognize me? Of course he would have… right?
I can never show my face again, which is going to be a slight problem, considering the ManBaker from the bookshop, the baking blogger sensation, now lives next door to me. The universe is taunting me. There’s no other explanation.
I crawl over to the kitchen, then get up only when I’m safely out of sight of every window and drink a glass of cold water like hydration might undo the last five minutes of my life. My breathing rushes, my skin flushes, and my pulse is on fire.
That’s when my phone buzzes on the counter, and I flinch hard enough to nearly baptize myself with the water.
I glance at the screen, expecting Katie, hoping for Katie, because I need to tell someone about the shirtless confectioner next door before I combust.
It’s not Katie.
Hey, doll. See you at Betty’s wedding. I know you won’t have a date, so I’ll save you a dance. It’ll be like old times. —L
The heat drains from my body in one cold rush.
I set the phone down, pick it up, and read it again. Doll. He knows I hate that nickname. Yet he used it anyway, casually, designed to remind me that he’ll be there, watching, and the one in control.
My gaze drifts to the fridge. The invitation for Betty’s wedding is pinned under a magnet shaped like a lobster, cream card stock with gold foil lettering, and I’ve been staring at it for weeks, trying to manufacture an excuse to not go.
Stomach flu. Family emergency. Spontaneous relocation to another continent.
Betty is my old friend from high school.
Her mother and my mother have been close since before either of us existed, and not attending would create a cascade of concerned phone calls and disappointed silences. I’m expected to attend.
But Louis is the best man. And I’ll be there alone. Again. Still. The Omega who can’t keep an Alpha and can’t hold a conversation on live television without detonating her own career.
The tightness flares back in my chest, spreading outward.
I press my fingertips to the counter, ground myself against the cold marble.
I count backward from twenty. I name five things I can see: fridge, lobster magnet, invitation, phone, my own reflection in the dark kitchen window, a woman in oversized glasses with flushed cheeks and frightened eyes staring back at herself.
That’s six. Extra credit.
I breathe. Slowly. The way my therapist taught me.
The way I practiced for months until it became muscle memory, until my body learned that tightness is not a heart attack, that heat behind my eyes isn’t the end of the world, that the feeling of every cell in my body screaming at me to run does not mean I actually have to.
The counter is cool. The kitchen is quiet. Somewhere in the house next door, a man covered in chocolate is cleaning up a disaster with a white cat supervising, and he has no idea that the woman on the other side of the fence is standing in her kitchen trying to remember how to breathe.
I delete Louis’s text, and I leave the invitation on the fridge.
Back in my study, I sit at my desk and return to my manuscript for book two.
The cursor blinks where I left off, in the middle of the blackberry crumble story and Nana turning almost nothing into magic.
I read the last sentence I wrote, then add another, and the squeeze in my chest loosens because I love writing about Nana.
The book. The recipes. The stories carrying the memory of a woman who never apologized for who she was, how she cooked, or the space she took up in a room.
Maybe that’s the part I need to remember.
Nana never made herself smaller so people could accept her more easily. She burned things, swore at pastry, laughed too loudly, and once told a town councilman that his wife’s scones tasted like building insulation. Everyone still adored her.
I stare at the page, and something inside me steadies just enough to keep going.
One sentence becomes two.
Two become a paragraph.
And for the first time all day, I’m not thinking about the internet or Louis or all the ways my life has gone sideways. My thoughts circle my new neighbor.
The one I still can’t believe is the online celebrity from the bookstore.