Kari pressed on. “Find things that suit me and this home. Besides, I like the empty space. It breathes with me. I know that probably sounds a little nuts.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t even think such a thing. It sounds divine. May I bring something?”
“If you’re staying here, you have to.”
“Not for me, silly. For you. Can I bring a gift? So you have something of me in your new home.”
“I would like that more than anything.”
“Then it’s settled,” Indrid said. “Now go see if you can locate your young man.”
“He’s not my anything.”
“Kari.”
“All right. All right. I’m going.”
* * *
Kari parked just up the main street’s gentle slope from Castaways. The instant the car stopped rolling, she cut the motor and opened her door and started walking. She was giving herself no time to argue her way out of this next step. She had no idea what to say. Asking some stranger for a way to contact a man she didn’t know, after having run away from their first real conversation? Absurd.
Yet as soon as she entered, Kari was glad she had come.
Connor Larkin was seated at the piano, with Ian on a barstool facing him. Ian had his guitar propped on one thigh and a notepad stationed on the baby grand’s closed top. He and Connor were both making notes and talking softly. Three heavyset women occupied more stools between the piano and the big bay window. The woman closest to Connor nodded in time to something Ian said and made her own notes.
Two more men occupied a pair of front tables, pages and phones and computers spread out before them. The woman Kari had last seen managing the restaurant sat at the table closest to the piano. She bottle-fed one infant, while another was held by the bartender. Four other people moved slowly about the restaurant, setting up for the night ahead.
A young Latino spotted Kari and said, “Sorry. We don’t open until six.”
Which was when Ian looked over.
He settled the guitar in its stand, jumped off the stage, and rushed across the restaurant. He moved so fast, he collided with the bar. Just bounced off it, ricocheted with a chair, and forged on. “You came.”
All the words she struggled to half form, all the excuses and reasons for being here, just dissolved. “I’m so sorry.”
“You’re apologizing?”
“Well, of course.”
The man looked impossibly handsome when he laughed. “I’ve spent hours racking my brain, trying to figure out what I did wrong.”
“Nothing.” The words gushed out, almost without thought. “You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s just . . . When you started talking about next week, it scared me.”
He showed confusion. “Next week?”
“Yes.”
“You mean the festival?”
She nodded. “They want me to go.”
The older man at the front table called back, “Ian, we’re waiting here.”
Ian showed no sign he had even heard. “They want you to go to Miami?”
“For the art fair.” She breathed around the enormity of it all. “I just found out. When you saw me in the car . . . It was my agent. That’s why I was late. Well, that and I was sketching a new concept. I needed to get the idea down on paper while the emotions were still fresh. And then my agent called. And said the art fair wants to do a retrospective.”
Ian shocked her then. A simple moment in time, but somehow her view of this man changed entirely when he asked, “Did you bring it with you?”
