My first instinct, landing before I've formed the thought properly: trouble.
By the time I've crossed the kitchen and opened the back door, a second instinct has arrived and it is considerably less professional.
"You must be the tenant," I say. “I see you’re all moved in.” I spy some empty boxes next to the door of the suite.
She blinks once, and the smile adjusts into something that is trying not to become a grin. "Oh — hi. I was going to knock." She lets a beat go by. "You looked busy. With the spices."
My jaw tightens. She saw that.
She shifts the mug to her left hand and offers me her right. "Gemma Lockhart."
Her grip is firm and she holds eye contact while she does it.
"Beck Delano," I say.
"Captain Delano," she says, easy, like she's just confirming something she already knew, which means Micah got there first. Or someone Micah knows, which in this town amounts to the same coverage.
The back door bangs open behind me.
"DADDY IS THAT THE NEW PERSON."
Ivy arrives at full velocity, T-Rex in hand, socks losing traction on the boards, and inserts herself directly between me and my tenant with the total certainty of a child who has never once doubted her own welcome. She tips her head back and looks up at Gemma with the frank, unhurried appraisal of someone who has not yet learned that staring requires an apology.
Gemma looks back down at her, and it isn't the careful brightness adults perform when they're trying to seem good with kids. It's the real thing — she's actually glad to see her, in the uncomplicated way of someone who finds a six-year-old turning up on a cold porch with a plastic dinosaur to be an entirely reasonable and welcome development.
Six weeks is the original lease term.
Standing on my own back porch in my work clothes, looking at the woman my daughter is already smiling at, I have the quiet and unwelcome sense that six weeks is going to be a very optimistic number.
Chapter 4
Gemma
My landlord looks like someone carved a lumberjack out of granite and then made him angry about it.
I discovered this approximately twenty minutes ago when I stepped onto the back porch with my coffee and he appeared through the back door in his work clothes, jaw set like he was bracing for a structural fire. Then his six-year-old tornado of a daughter showed up, asked if I liked dinosaurs, and informed me that the orange cat on the railing is "very SERIOUS about being orange." After that, Beck scooped Ivy up for bedtime and disappeared inside.
Which is how I ended up standing on the back porch alone, wondering if I should go back to my suite or if that would be weird.
The cold is sharper here than Denver. Not the wet kind that soaks through your jacket in increments, but clean and immediate---the kind that makes the inside of your nose prickle and turns your breath into small visible clouds. The mountains at the edge of town are dark shapes against a sky so full of stars it looks deliberate, like someone arranged them specifically to make people from cities feel inadequate about their viewchoices. In Denver, ambient light ate the sky whole. In Copper Ridge, the sky has things to say about itself.
Clarence sits on the railing and stares at me.
"I've been here less than twenty-four hours," I tell him. "I don't have answers yet."
He blinks. Slow. Unimpressed.
The back door opens and Beck fills the frame. He's changed out of his work clothes into a grey henley that does nothing to downplay the granite situation, and he looks at me the way he probably looks at structural damage---assessing, methodical, already calculating what needs to happen next.
"Should go over house rules," he says. "Since you're here."
His kitchen is exactly what I expected and somehow still surprising.
They moved in today --- same as me --- but you wouldn't know it from his side of the wall. The coffee maker is set up and running, the knives are in their block arranged by size, the dish towel hangs square on the oven handle. Two boxes sit stacked in the corner, still taped shut, and somehow that's the most revealing thing in the room: he unpacked in order of priority. Coffee first. Knives. Everything functional, everything in its place. The spice rack is alphabetized.
I notice the spice rack because I am the kind of person who notices spice racks at eight PM in a stranger's kitchen, which is information about me that I'm choosing not to examine right now.
It's the kitchen of a man who controls what he can because some things he couldn't. I recognize it because I've met that person in the mirror --- I just cope differently. Cheerful chaos as a defense mechanism instead of order.
