"I've been thinking," he said, setting down his fork. "About the arrangement."
Her stomach tightened. Here it comes, she thought. He's changed his mind. He wants me out.
"Jake called this morning," he continued. "Early. Before you were up."
She waited, her coffee cup suspended halfway to her mouth.
"The studio above the gallery isn't going to work out. The tenant who was supposed to leave decided to stay another month." He met her eyes, and she saw something there she hadn't expected. Not irritation. Something closer to resignation. "Jake's scrambling to find you something else, but with the craft fair and that fishing tournament next week, the whole town's booked solid."
The news landed like a stone in her chest. "So what does that mean?"
"It means Jake offered to put you in his mother's guest room, like he said. But his mother lives forty minutes outside of town, and you came here for Copper Moon, not the middle of nowhere." Brian picked up his fork again and pushed his eggs around the plate. "So I told him you could stay here. For the full three months, if that's what you need."
Tessa's breath caught. "Brian, I can't ask you to do that."
"You didn't ask. I offered." He still wasn't looking at her, his attention fixed on his plate like the eggs required intense concentration. "Look, I know this isn't ideal. For either of us. But you came here for a reason, and that reason wasn't to sleep in some stranger's mother's house an hour away from the water."
She set her mug down carefully, afraid her hands might shake. "Why would you do that? You don't even know me."
He finally looked up, and his eyes were steady on hers. Pale blue, like ice in sunlight. "Because I know what it's like to need a place to land. And because the Calloways would have my head if they found out I turned away someone they'd already welcomed."
She felt tears prick at her eyes again and blinked them back fiercely. She was so tired of crying. So tired of being the woman who fell apart at every kindness.
"I don't know what to say," she managed.
"Say you'll stay out of my way when I need space, and I'll do the same for you." A hint of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "We're both here for peace and quiet. Seems like we can find that together without killing each other."
She laughed, a watery sound that surprised them both. "I think I can manage that."
"Good." He stood and carried his plate to the sink. "Then we have an understanding."
The morning stretched out soft and unhurried. Tessa took her second cup of coffee out to the deck and sat in one of the Adirondack chairs, watching the light shift across the water. The air smelled like salt and pine, and somewhere in the trees, a bird she couldn't identify sang a complicated song.
She'd brought a book with her from Chicago, a bestseller everyone at the hospital had been talking about. She'd been carrying it for months without cracking the spine. Now she pulled it from her bag and tried to read, but the words kept sliding past her eyes without sinking in.
It was hard to focus on someone else's story when her own felt so unfinished.
Brian emerged from the house around ten, work gloves tucked into his back pocket. He'd changed into older jeans, the kind that had earned their faded knees honestly, and a T-shirt that had probably once been black but had washed to charcoal.
"I'm going to work on the addition," he said. "The framing needs to be finished before Hank and Colby come by this weekend to check on progress. They'll never let me hear the end of it if I'm behind schedule."
"The friends you mentioned? The ones you're opening the shop with?"
"Yeah." He pulled the gloves from his pocket and tugged them on. "Hank's the one who got us into vintage bikes in the first place. His family has this 1942 Crocker that's been passed down for generations. Beautiful machine. He raced it in the Copper Moon Cup this past summer, and that's when we all decided to stay."
"And now you're building a business together."
"Trying to." He looked out at the water, squinting against the glare. "The shop's coming along. We've got the space on Bay Street, got the equipment. Just need to finish the build-out and get the word out. Colby's the real mechanic; I'm more the muscle. And Hank, well. Hank's the one people trust."
She heard something in his voice, a note of self-deprecation that didn't quite land as a joke. "What about you? What do people trust you for?"
He glanced at her, surprised by the question. "Showing up, I guess. Doing the work that needs doing." He shrugged. "Not much else to offer."
She wanted to argue with that, but she didn't know him well enough to push. Instead, she said, "The addition. Is that for the business?"
"No, that's for company, and expansion.” He started toward the side of the cottage where she could see lumber stacked against the tree line. "Initially, I wanted something for when Hank and Colby visited, but we're all here now. Hank and Bree got married this past fall, and Colby's married to Sabrina. So now it's for family who visit and adding value to the cottage. Three bedrooms are more valuable than two. I may turn one into an office or something. I had the wood and the plans, so I decided to go with it. I've helped Colby and Sabrina build her cabins, and I loved the idea of adding something of my own to this one."
She watched him go, noting the easy way he moved across the uneven ground. For a big man, he was surprisingly graceful. Like he'd spent his life learning how to take up space without apologizing for it.
