"It's annoying."
"It's both," she agreed, smiling. Then she grabbed a paint sample card and held it up to the light. "What do you think? Dove gray or silver sage?"
I looked at the nearly identical shades and made a show of studying them seriously. "Dove gray."
"Why?"
"Because you want me to say dove gray."
She laughed, swatting my arm. "You're learning."
I pulled her back against me, resting my chin on top of her head, and watched the light move across the kitchen walls. Outside, the marsh hummed. The ocean whispered. Everything felt right in a way I didn't trust but couldn't resist.
"I'm happy," I said quietly.
She went still in my arms, then tilted her head back to look at me. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." The word felt strange in my mouth. Foreign. True.
She smiled, slow and soft, and something in my chest cracked open wider.
I had no clue about the storm coming over the horizon.
No idea that the man upstairs with his new backpack and his cheap Connecticut license was the leading edge of something dark.
No warning that the calm I'd found here—the peace I'd started to believe in—was about to shatter.
I just held Hazel in the sunlit kitchen and let myself be happy.
For now, that was enough.
16
HAZEL
I’d never been the kind of woman who planned afternoons around a person. I planned around lists and deadlines and weather reports and “if this, then that.” But morning bled into afternoon, and by the time the marsh turned the color of a pear’s skin, I caught myself daydreaming.
I saw us moving through the island like we belonged here. Gideon at the farmer’s stand, testing tomatoes with a soldier’s care as if ripeness were a mission parameter. Gideon on the beach where the hard-packed sand met the lacy edge of water, our footprints laid like punctuation marks until the tide edited them away.
It went further. My mind leapt whole scenes with the elegance of a skipping stone. I imagined him teaching me the gut logic of tools, the balance and bite of them, the way a good blade hums. I imagined running routes I’d never bothered to explore, the two of us cutting past the golf carts and crab traps and teenagers. I even imagined a little ceremony that had nothing to do with vows and everything to do with claiming a life: the two ofus standing ankle-deep in the inlet at dusk, pockets heavy with screws and shells and promises.
It was way too early to imagine that. I knew it, logically.
And it startled me, this ease. The urge to walk into newness when oldness had always felt safer. Maybe that’s what my grandmother had intended, tucking the deed into her will with a year-sized string: not exile, but invitation. She’d given me a house full of doors and a man had appeared like a key I didn’t know I’d needed.
By late afternoon, paint chips lay across the dining room table like a flock of pale birds. Maude hummed in the kitchen, the oven huffing warm breath. I could smell onions swinging sweet in butter and pork surrendering to heat, the kind of comfort that makes memory loosen its fist.
Gideon came in dusty and satisfied, a sunburn threatening along the back of his neck. He washed his hands in the small sink by the back door, careful with the knuckles he’d chewed up on trim, then bent to press a soft kiss to my temple as if he’d been doing that for years. I breathed him in—sawdust and soap and a thread of something metallic I was learning to recognize as him when he’d been measuring: pencil shavings, maybe.
“You pick?” he asked, nodding at my paper birds.
“I’m auditioning,” I said. “Dove gray and morning oyster made it to the finals, but silver sage could still win.”
His mouth did that quiet not-quite-smile that lived more in his eyes. “We could paint one of the rooms tomorrow morning. See which color works with the light.”
“Deal.”
We set the table together, easy as breathing—three plates, three napkins, forks marching like soldiers. Maude drifted in with a casserole so divine I nearly prayed to it, the cornbread from before reborn as stuffing, edges crisped to the exact point where comfort becomes an indulgence.
