Her phone buzzed with a text from Ben:“Can we talk?”
Something about his request made her stomach turn. If they were going to have a serious talk, she’d rather it be away from the inn.
“Sure. Can I come by your place around seven?”
“Great. See you then.”
She found him at his workshop that evening, after dinner, after another family discussion that went nowhere. He was working on something, sanding wood with the kind of focus that suggested he was avoiding thinking about something else.
“Hey, thanks for stopping by. I know you’ve got a lot going on but I wanted to run something by you.”
Kate nodded. “It’s fine. What’s going on?”
“Melissa wants to get back together,” he said.
Kate's stomach dropped, but she kept her voice steady. “What do you want?”
“I want to be up front with you. After everything with your family, secrets and lies, I wanted you to know.”
“We're not together, Ben. You don't owe me explanations.”
He set down the sandpaper, turned to face her fully. “Don't I? We've been dancing around this for months, Kate. I've been patient, waiting for you to be ready, but maybe I've been fooling myself. Maybe you're never going to be ready.”
“That's not fair.”
“Isn't it? After all these months you’re still here talking to me like we're casual acquaintances. Like I haven't been falling in love with you since March, like you haven't been feeling the same thing.”
The words hung between them, too big for the workshop, too real for Kate's carefully maintained distance.
“I don't know how to do this,” she admitted. “Every time I start to think maybe I can see a light at the end of a very long tunnel, another shoe drops.”
“Everything's always falling apart. That's life. But sometimes, in the middle of the chaos, you have to choose happiness. You have to choose love.”
“Like my mother did? Look how that turned out.”
“She got years with someone who adored her. She got four children who loved her. She got a life that was hers, not her mother's. That's not nothing, Kate.”
Melissa appeared in the doorway then, because of course she did. She took in the scene, Kate and Ben standing too close,the emotion thick between them, and her pretty face hardened slightly.
“Am I interrupting?”
“Yes,” Ben said, not looking away from Kate.
“We were just talking,” Kate said, stepping back, rebuilding distance.
“About the inn renovations, I'm sure,” Melissa said. “Ben's always been dedicated to his projects.”
The way she said projects made Kate feel like one of them, something to be fixed and finished.
Ben stared at Kate, seemingly waiting for an answer to a question he never asked.
“I think we’re done here. I’ll catch you later,” she said. She excused herself, left Ben and his ex-wife in the workshop, and drove back to the inn through the May evening that felt too beautiful for the ugliness of family secrets and romantic complications.
At the inn, she found Lillian's Mercedes in the parking lot. Her grandmother sat in one of the porch chairs, looking out at the harbor, seeming smaller than she had even three days ago.
“The doctors want to start hospice care.”
They sat in silence, watching the harbor lights begin to twinkle in the growing dusk.
