I board the plane. I take my seat. I put my earbuds in and pull up the playlist I’ve been listening to all summer, and every single song reminds me of her.
Somewhere over New Brunswick, I stop pretending this is temporary.
CHAPTER 36
I ALMOST GO BACK FOR A WHIFF.
BILLIE
Monday—a.k.a. day one without Peter—is fine. Totally fine. I’ve been on my own for thirty-five years. I can handle a few days without a man who alphabetizes his spice rack and calls me Beth in a voice that makes me forget I ever hated being called anything other than Billie.
Day two is also fine. I rip out a client’s rotting deck boards with a level of satisfaction that borders on therapeutic and only check my phone eleven times. Twelve. Twelve times. And that was just while I was at work.
By day three, I’m annoyed at myself.
I don’t miss people. That’s not how I’m wired. I like people, sure. I love my crew, I love Neve, I love my family in the complicated, jagged way you love people who’ve let you down more than they’ve shown up. But I’ve never been one to feel someone’s absence like a physical thing. I’ve never walked into a room and noticed the void where they should be.
Except now I’m standing in Peter’s kitchen—because I needed to check on the work on the guesthouse anyway, not because I wanted to be in his space,shut up—and the house isso quiet it hums. His coffee mug is still in the drying rack from Monday morning, and I think,oh, this is bad.
I leave before I do something embarrassing like sniff his pillowcase.
I almost go back for a whiff.
Work saves me, the way it always has.
There’s a rhythm to a job site that my brain latches onto in a way it can’t with most things. The ADHD makes offices unbearable—fluorescent lights, sitting still, linear thinking—but a construction site is organized chaos, and organized chaos is my native language. There are fifteen things happening at once, and I can track all of them. Move between them. See how they connect in ways other people’s brains can’t map.
It’s the one place I’ve never felt stupid.
We’re framing a garage addition in Bridgewater, and I’m up a ladder, adjusting a header, when my phone buzzes with a text from Neve:
Bureau meeting prep this weekend? I have wine and color swatches.
Right. The second Business Bureau meeting. The one where we present the marina revitalization plan that I somehow ended up co-championing because a certain brown-eyed investment banker made a compelling case. I save the text to respond to later—something I’ll forget to do and then remember at 2 a.m. while staring at the ceiling—and refocus on the header.
“Billie!” Steph, one of my part-time crew members, calls from below. Something in her voice makes my stomach drop before I even look down. It’s the tone my crew uses when there’s a problem they can’t handle, which is rare, because my crew can handle almost anything.
But they can’t handle my father.
Tim Cameron is standing at the edge of the lot with his hands in his pants pockets and the posture of a man who’s come to deliver an opinion no one asked for. He’s wearing the same Carhartt jacket he’s had since I was a teenager, and his truck is parked on the road like he didn’t want to commit to actually being here. That tracks. Commitment has never been his strong suit.
“Hey, Dad.” I come down the ladder with a calm I don’t feel, wiping my hands on my jeans. “What are you doing here?”
“Can’t a father visit his daughter at work?”
He can. He just doesn’t. Not unless he wants something, or unless he’s heard something he has an opinion on, which is the same thing.
“I need to talk to you about this marina project.” He saysmarina projectwith the same disdain someone might say root canal. “That’s not how this was supposed to go, you know? Lizzie, what are you doing?”
“Working. Which is what you interrupted.”
“I’m serious. You’re getting involved with the town council? The bureau? This tourist trap nonsense?” He shakes his head, and the disappointment on his face is so familiar it barely registers anymore. Almost. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”
Thereitis. The word he’s been reaching for my whole life without ever quite saying it.Embarrassing. As if my existence—the ADHD that made school a nightmare, the PMDD that made me “difficult” and “dramatic,” the bisexuality that he still refers to as a “phase,” despite the fact I’m thirty-five years oldand phases don’t typically last two decades—is something that happens tohimrather than beingmyreality.
“I’m embarrassing myself,” I repeat flatly.
“This isn’t what you do, Lizzie. You build things. You’re good with your hands. That’s your lane.” He gestures at the framing behind me like it’s evidence. “Leave the business stuff to people who?—”
