“I’m deflecting. How’s the pack?”
We talked for another twenty minutes. I approved the border patrol rotation, signed off on the housing allocation through a secure email Luca set up, and dealt with a territorial dispute between two betas that should have been resolved locally but escalated because nobody wanted to make decisions while the King was absent. I hung up and the woman behind the counter refilled my coffee without being asked. She was maybe mid-thirties, dark curly hair, and she’d been making increasingly obvious excuses to come to my table for the past week. Extra napkins I didn’t need. A pastry sample she insisted I try. This morning she leaned against the edge of the table and smiled.
“So, you’ve been our regular every morning for two weeks. You’re new in town?”
“Visiting.”
“Visiting who? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Someone.”
“Someone special?”
I looked up from the laptop. She was pretty. She was smiling at me in a way that was clear and uncomplicated and if I were a different man, in a different situation, I might have smiled back. But the only smile I wanted to earn was attached to a woman with green eyes and a dimple on the right side of her face who was currently refusing to go on a date with me.
“I’m here to get the love of my life back,” I said. “She’s not speaking to me yet, but I’m working on it.”
The woman blinked, then laughed. “Well, that’s not the answer I was expecting.” She picked up the coffee pot. “She’s lucky.”
“I’m the lucky one. If she’ll have me.”
She nodded once, refilled my cup, and went back to the counter. She stopped flirting after that, but she kept refilling my coffee, which I appreciated.
I closed the laptop at nine and drove to the house.
Andrea was leaving for her walk when I pulled up. She was in sneakers and a light jacket, her hair pulled back, and she looked up when she heard the car. She didn’t wave, didn’t smile, just glanced at me and kept walking. But she didn’t scowl either, and two weeks ago she wouldn’t have looked at all.
I watched her walk down the sidewalk. She moved differently here than she did in Atlanta, slower, looser, like the tension she’d carried in her shoulders at the office had finally let go.Her face had more color. She looked healthy, rested. Every time I saw her I had to fight the urge to close the distance between us because she was right there, twenty feet away, beautiful, pregnant with my child, not mine anymore. The ache of that never got easier no matter how many mornings I showed up.
The porch step had been bothering me since the first morning. It dipped and creaked when you stepped on it, the wood soft at the edges where moisture had gotten in. Andrea walked over it every morning on her way out and every morning I watched it bend under her weight and thought about the fact that one bad step could send her falling, pregnant, onto concrete.
I went to the hardware store after breakfast, bought lumber and nails, and came back. Andrea had left for her walk. Her grandmother was in the kitchen.
“What’s all that?” she asked, looking at the wood under my arm.
“The porch step is rotting. I’m going to replace it.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“I know.”
She followed me outside with her coffee and watched me set up. I knelt on the porch, pulled the old board loose, measured the replacement against the gap. It didn’t fit. I measured again. Still didn’t fit. I could feel her watching me from the doorway.
“You’ve done this before?” she asked.
“How hard can it be?”
“Mmhm.” She came outside, set her coffee on the railing, and crouched beside me. “Give me that.” She took the pencil from behind my ear and marked the cut line. “You’re measuring from the wrong edge. The gap is wider on the left because the frame has warped. You need to account for that.”
I looked at the mark she’d made. She was right.
“My husband built half this porch,” she said. “I watched him make every mistake you could make. By the time he finished I could have done it better myself.” She straightened up and picked her coffee back up. “Cut on that line. And hold the hammer higher up the handle. You’re choking it.”
I adjusted my grip. She nodded.
“Better. Still wrong, but better.”
I spent the morning on the porch step while she supervised from the doorway, correcting my technique with the patient bluntness of a woman who had been watching men fail at home repairs for fifty years.
