Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
CHARLOTTE
By eight fifteen, I've asked Dale the foreman the same question six different ways, and by eight twenty, he looks like he’d rather lick wet paint than answer me.
“I’m not asking for state secrets,” I say, stepping around a tray of fresh glazing compound. “I’m asking who paid to keep a historic building from becoming a parking lot.”
Dale doesn’t look up from his clipboard. “Anonymous donor.”
“Yes, I gathered that from the word anonymous.”
“Then you’re ahead of most people.”
Lucy, standing beside a half-restored fern bench with two coffees in hand, makes a soft choking sound into her lid.
I turn my head. “Don't encourage him.”
“I’m admiring professional boundaries,” she says.
Dale gives her a look of deep respect. “Smart woman.”
Half the west wall of the conservatory gleams with repaired panes. The other half is still stripped down to bones. Sun spills through the glass in bright squares, catching paint buckets, tarps, ladders, and the careful hands of people making an old thing stand straight again.
It should be enough just to stand here and know Devane is safe.
It almost is. Except someone saved it with a check large enough to change a civic decision overnight and left no name behind.
No plaque. No press release. No smiling photo with the mayor.
In a town like Helena Bend, that's practically criminal behavior.
“I run a blog,” I tell Dale.
“I heard.”
“A local blog. People expect follow-up.”
“Then follow up on the east drainage trench. That’s exciting.”
“Dale.”
“Charlotte.” He says my name with the weary patience of a man who has underestimated my stamina.
I narrow my eyes. “Was it a foundation?”
“No.”
“Individual?”
“Maybe.”
“Local?”
“Depends on how you define local.”
Lucy drifts closer. “This is painful to watch.”
“For him or me?”
“For language.”
Dale snaps the clipboard shut. “I have wet paint, old glass, and a city inspector coming at ten. You want a story? Write that the crew is doing good work.”
I glance past him to the row of freshly painted frames, the careful labels taped to removed panes, and the green-black shine brought back without wiping away Devane’s age. He's right. The crew is doing good work. Still, there's a thread in the back of my mind, and I can’t stop pulling it.
“Fine,” I say. “For now.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“It wasn't meant to be.”
Lucy hands me my coffee as Dale walks away. “You know there are hobbies that don’t involve interrogating contractors.”
“I have hobbies.”
"No, you don't. You have interests."
I laugh because she wants me to, and because for one clean second the sound doesn’t hurt. Devane is saved. The words keep moving through me like a pulse. Saved. Not improved for a donor dinner. Not temporarily delayed. Saved.
I should be sleeping better. I'm not.
The note from the fundraiser is folded inside a paperback on my nightstand at Lucy’s apartment, because apparently my survival instincts have chosen literary organization as their final form. I haven’t told Lucy about it. I haven’t told anyone. Soon it's just us.
Every morning, I wake up and tell myself it was a threat made from far away. A stranger with a printer. A man enjoying the idea of fear more than the practice of it. Then I come here and check reflections in old glass.
Lucy bumps her shoulder into mine. “You’re doing that thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where your mind goes somewhere else while your feet stay planted here in reality.”
“I’m thinking.”
“You’re always thinking. This is different.”
I look up at the iron ribs of the ceiling. Fresh morning pours through them, clean enough to make a person believe in being remade.
“I’m fine,” I say.
Lucy’s expression doesn’t change. “Right.”
My phone buzzes in my coat pocket before she can press. Rick’s name lights the screen. Not a text. A call. My stomach does a small, confusing dip. Lucy sees it.
“Answer.”
“I was going to.”
“You were staring at it for too long.”
I turn away from her and take the call near a tray of labeled screws. “Hi.”
“Hi, Charlotte.” Rick’s voice is warm, a little quieter than usual. “Bad time?”
“No. I’m at Devane, pestering people.”
“Good. I’d hate to interrupt a day without harassment.”
“That’s generous of you.”
“I’m trying to be respectful of your brand.”
I smile, then catch myself smiling and glance toward Lucy. She's doing a piss-poor job of pretending to read a paint can.
Rick clears his throat. “I was wondering if I could take you to dinner tonight.”
There is no soft maybe in it this time. No careful someday. Just a proper ask, steady and kind. My thumb presses against the side of the phone.
Dinner. A date. Not logistics. Not campaign talk squeezed between donor spreadsheets. Not someone making me feel chosen because I belong to a man who forgot how to choose me in the only moment that mattered. Just dinner.
“I know that may be fast,” he adds. “And if it is, I’ll back off. No awkwardness.”
That is what gets me. Not the interest. The room he leaves around it.
“No,” I say. “It’s not too fast.”
The silence on his end changes.
“I’d like to,” I say before I can retreat into qualifications. “Tonight works.”
His breath comes out soft. “Good. Seven?”
“Seven.”
When I hang up, Lucy is looking at me over the rim of her cup.
I lift one finger. “Be normal.”
“I am a portrait of restraint.”
“You look like restraint is causing you medical distress.”
“Rick Marston asked you out.”
“He did.”
“And you said yes.”
“I did.”
Her face softens, and that is worse than teasing. “How do you feel?”
I look across the Conservatory. At the glass. At the ladders. At a worker on his knees scraping rust from a threshold with slow, patient strokes.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “But I want to find out.”
Rick takes me to a restaurant he does not own, which feels like a courtesy and an act of professional self-denial.
“It’s important you know I can eat food I didn’t supervise,” he says as the hostess leads us to a table near the window.
“Brave.”
“I’m growing.”
The place is small, quiet, and lit by shaded lamps instead of anything designed to flatter a phone camera. I like that immediately. I like that he asked where I’d feel comfortable, then listened when I said somewhere nobody would make a fuss. Nobody does.
A woman at the bar recognizes me and gives a sympathetic smile that lasts half a second too long, but she doesn’t come over. No one says Logan’s name. No one glances at my left hand like it owes them a press statement.
Rick notices anyway. He waits until we’re seated and the server has poured water before he says, “If this feels strange, we can call it dinner between friends.”
“It does feel strange.”
His face stays open. “Okay.”
“But not bad strange.”
That gets me a smile. Not triumphant. Just pleased.
We talk about Devane because I can’t not talk about Devane.
I tell him Dale’s entire personality is an unpaid invoice.
Rick tells me the city inspector once tried to shut down his patio over a two-inch railing discrepancy and still orders takeout every Friday.
I eat more than I expect to. I laugh twice without checking whether anyone heard.
It's nice. That is the word I keep coming back to, simple and insufficient. Rick is nice. Dinner is nice. His attention is nice. He asks questions and waits for the answers. He does not handle me like broken glass or lean on my sadness as proof he is better than the man who caused it.
When I mention the anonymous donor, his eyebrows lift. “Still chasing that?”
“Obviously.”
“Of course. Forgive me.”
“Someone saved Devane and won’t take credit. That’s suspicious.”
“It could be generous.”
“Generous people still have names.”
“Some don’t want applause.”
The thought lands too close to a place I don’t want to look. I pick up my water. “Then they shouldn’t do mysterious things in my town.”
Rick studies me for a moment. “Do you want it to be someone specific?”
“No.” Too fast.
He doesn’t call me on it. That seems to be his gift. Rick notices doors and doesn’t shove them open.
After dinner, he walks me to my car. Downtown is damp from an earlier rain, brick sidewalks shining under the streetlights. I keep my keys in my hand from habit now, one edge pressed into my palm. Rick’s gaze drops to them, then moves away.
“My offer to walk you up still stands,” he says.
“I’m okay,” I say.
He doesn’t argue. “Text me when you’re inside?”
The request is gentle enough that I don’t resent it. “I can do that.”
He smiles. “Thank you for tonight.”
“Thank you for asking.”
The words come out quieter than I mean them to.
For a second, we stand beside my car in the wet gold light, close enough that a different woman might lean in.
A freer one. A woman whose body doesn’t remember another man’s hands with such terrible precision.
A woman who doesn’t still know the exact lines of Logan’s mouth when he says please.
Rick doesn’t make me decide what to do with the space between us. He only touches two fingers lightly to my sleeve.
“Good night, Charlotte.”
“Good night.”
I watch him walk to his car. I wait until his taillights turn out of the lot, then I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. I can move forward. The thought is small. Unsteady. But it is there.
Then I turn toward the back stairs and see that the apartment light is on. Not the kitchen light. My bedroom, which may be a generous word for the small room that Lucy generously converted for me while I make the valiant effort to get my shit together, but it's mine.
And now, the light is on in that room. The light I know I turned off before I left. I stop so hard my heel slips on the damp pavement.
Lucy is closing tonight with her part-time barista.
She won’t be upstairs yet. I left my bedroom dark.
I remember because I stood in the doorway for too long deciding whether the black dress was too much for a first date, then snapped the lamp off with more force than necessary.
Now a thin line of yellow cuts beneath my curtain.
My phone is in my hand before I think. My thumb opens my favorites. Lucy. Then, below her, Logan.
My chest locks. The screen blurs around his name.
I can see him without wanting to. Logan answering on the first ring.
Logan already moving before I finish a sentence.
Logan’s voice going flat and dangerous in the way it used to on the field when something crossed the line.
Logan burning every road between himself and me to get here.
The one person who would know how to make me feel safe is the one person I can't call. Because he is also the man who made safety complicated. Because needing him would feel like proof I have not learned anything. Because if he comes, I don’t know which fear will be worse: the man who got in, or the relief when Logan arrives.
I call Lucy. It rings once. Twice. The light upstairs stays steady.
The back door to the café is locked when I try it. My hands shake badly enough that the key scrapes metal twice before it fits. Inside, the dark kitchen smells like coffee grounds and lemon cleaner. The stairs creak under my feet no matter how carefully I climb.
“Lucy?” I call softly.
No answer.
At the top, the apartment door isn't open. It is worse than open. It is closed almost all the way, with the deadbolt thrown out, gouging a pale mark into the frame where someone forced it past the strike plate.
For a moment, I can't move. My mind does stupid, ordinary inventory. The scratch in the paint. The warped line of wood. The tiny pile of splinters near the threshold.
Every light is off except my bedroom lamp. The living room looks untouched. Lucy’s throw blanket is folded over the couch. Her mug sits by the sink. The normalcy of it is obscene.
I should leave. I know that. I know that with every working part of me. Instead, I step inside because my bedroom door is open and something white lies on my pillow.
The room has been searched with care. That's almost worse than destruction.
My drawers are halfway closed, not fully closed as they were when I left.
The framed photo of Mom and me at the conservatory when I was a kid on my desk has been turned facedown.
My blog notebook sits open to a page of Devane questions, a line drawn under anonymous donor so hard the paper is torn.
On the pillow is a fern frond. Fresh. Green. Pressed beneath a folded cream card.
The room tilts. My phone buzzes in my hand. Lucy calling back. I stare at her name and can't make my thumb move.
I reach for the card. My fingers feel distant, like they belong to someone I'm watching from across the room.
There are only three words inside.
Sleep tight, Houseman.
The floor drops away. Not Charlotte. Not Mrs. Delaney. Houseman.
Logan's pet nickname for me in those little silly moments we shared when we believed no one was watching. It was Baby's last name in Dirty Dancing, my favorite movie that Logan always lovingly teased me about. When he wanted to get me smiling, he leaned on that name.
Houseman. A memory of him calling me that only months ago surfaces. He stood behind me in the kitchen, his lips to my neck in one of those rare moments when things hadn't seemed as hard as they were.
My hand closes around the paper until it crumples. This man hasn't just been watching me. He has been watching us. For a long time.