“You’re going to give a talk at one of the...schools?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Which school?” he pressed.
She made an exasperated sound. “Why do you need to know?” He said nothing, staring at her with his jaw firmed up. “You need to know because you need it to be in Poppy’s planner, because if it’s not in Poppy’s planner it will feel incomplete to you, is that it?”
She’d long since given up trying to understand her brother’s particular quirks. He had them. There was no sense fighting against them. She was his sister, so sometimes she poked at them, rather than doing anything to help him out. That was the way the world worked, after all.
But she’d realized as she’d gotten older that he wasn’t being inflexible to be obnoxious. It was something he genuinely couldn’t help.
“Yes,” he responded, his tone flat.
If he was surprised that she had guessed what the issue was, he didn’t show it. But then, Isaiah wouldn’t.
“Copper Ridge Elementary,” she said, the lie slipping easily past her lips, and she wondered who she was.
Awoman. That’s who she was.
A woman who had made an executive decision about her own career and she did not need her brothers meddling in it.
And her makeup wasn’t significant to anything except that she had been sitting there feeling bad about herself and there was no reason to do that when she had perfectly good eyeliner sitting in her desk drawer.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Are we done? Can you add it to the calendar and pacify yourself and leave me alone?”
“Is everything okay?” he asked, the question uncharacteristically thoughtful.
“I’m fine, Isaiah. I promise. I’m just... Joshua is right. I’ve been working a lot. And I don’t feel like the solution is to do less. I think it might be...time that I took some initiative, make sure I’m filling my time with things that are important to me.”
Of course, she was lying about it being schoolchildren, which made her feel slightly guilty. But not guilty enough to tell the truth.
Isaiah left her office then, to update the planner, Faith assumed. And Faith left shortly after.
She put the address to Levi’s house in her car’s navigation system and followed the instructions, which led her on much the same route she had taken to get up the mountain to meet him the first time, at the building site. It appeared that his rental property was on the other side of that mountain, on a driveway that led up the opposite side that wound through evergreen trees and took her to a beautiful, rustic-looking structure.
It was an old-fashioned, narrow A-frame with windows that overlooked the valley below. She appreciated it, even if it wasn’t something she would ever have put together.
She had a fondness for classic, cozy spaces.
Though her designs always tended toward the open and the modern, she had grown up in a tiny, yellow farmhouse that she loved still. She loved that her parents still lived there in spite of the financial successes of their children.
Of course, Levi’s house was several notches above the little farmhouse. This was quite a nice place, even if it was worlds apart from a custom home.
She had been so focused on following the little rabbit trails of thought on her way over that she hadn’t noticed the tension she was carrying in her stomach. But as soon as she parked and turned off the engine, she seemed to be entirely made of that tension.
She could hardly breathe around it.
She had seen him outside, out in the open. And she had talked to him in a bar. But she had never been alone indoors with him before.
Not that it mattered. At all.
She clenched her teeth and got out of the car, gathering her bag that contained her sketchbook and all her other supplies. With the beat of each footstep on the gravel drive, she repeated those words in her head.
Not that it mattered.
Not that it mattered.
