It’s incomprehensible how she has Joseph wrapped around her little finger. A bitter divorcé, he had resisted all attempts to make him an honest man again.
None of the ladies auditioning for the role of Logan’s stepmother managed to get him to change even the foyer table. But he folded like a chair for my mother.
“Have you seen her recently?”
“Yes.”
“Care to be more specific?”
His voice is paternal. “Carter, your mother is allowed to have her own life.”
“And I’m very interested in who she spends it with.”
His answer is drowned by the cherry and white death trap coming to a stop on the small driveway.
In the most absurd development, since I decided to keep my distance, Eliza hadn’t tried to pull me back in. I wasn’t counting on it.
No. The distance is good.
But.
Mornings have a bland taste when one easily annoyed redhead isn’t there to pester me with the most inane questions.
Following the same foraging trails she dragged me along felt less of an adventure and more like I’m rambling about with no purpose.
“We’ll revisit this,” I tell Joseph absent-mindedly and hang up over whatever his retort was.
I can’t even have the satisfaction of scoffing at her overreaction. The cabin is always in order, a healthy breakfast waiting for me daily. She gracefully exchanged her warm and bubbly presence for a civil distance. She plasters on a polite smile, but her answers lack the usual abundance of detail. Eliza gave me exactly what I wanted.
The acute sense I’m missing something of vital importance corrodes my resolve with each passing hour. I don’t even question it when my legs take me outside.
After keeping herself busy during the day, I know where she’s going to avoid me.
The LED lantern hanging from the shed’s beam carves a cold glow in the dark, white strips of light sneaking out through the wood plank walls. Eliza is kneeling on a tarp with a paintbrush in her hand, focused on a table leg. Some strands fall from her bun and tickle her face, but she just blows them away absentmindedly. Her moves are fluid, and her face lacks the tightness she tries to hide whenever we’re in the same room.
A warm light I don’t get to see any other time dances behind her eyes when she works. I don’t want to spook her and I wait, mesmerized by this other side of her, leaning against the porch rails.
The icy light above her makes Eliza look like an eerily beautiful creature of the woods. It brings into sharp relief the delicate collarbones and the hollow of her cheeks. The movements of her hands resembles a ritual and I half expect her to say an incantation and turn the table sentient.
The moment she straightens, sitting on the heels of her boots, I step into the ring of light and the little forest fairy freezes. For a heartbeat, she’s on the precipice of reaching back. Meeting me in the middle. But with a determined clench of her jaw, she refrains from crossing the line in the sand.
She gathers the chisels, hammers, putty knives, and pieces of sandpaper and puts them back in the shed.
“How can I help you?” she asks, her back to me, cleaning a metal brush with a rag.
That customer care politeness bothers me in a way it shouldn’t and the persistent pressure in my chest returns. I had the same uncomfortable feeling when I saw she had moved the keys to the shed. I’m no longer one of the people she trusts with them.
But this frosty wall is doing its job. There have been zero incidents since the fence. The wandering dirty thoughts running through my head whenever she’s too close are not something I want to explore, it’s just pent-up sexual frustration built up over the months I’ve been focused on recovery.
“How’s your tiny house going?”
She grimaces but turns it into a perfect fake smile. “Finn and the guys are working hard. Not much I can do to help them.”
It’s possible she won’t move out any time soon and I find myself unbothered by it. But I’m not about to live like this for the next few weeks.
I’m locked in a staring contest with a tall graying woman wearing denim overalls when I open the front door. She’s holding a small crate with plants I know nothing about. Can Eliza use them to poison me?
The woman in question rushes to my side, almost pushing me out of the way, and takes the wood box from our visitor.
