“You didn’t, though.”
“You didn’t let me.”
“That’s what I’m for,” she said.
He leaned back so he could see her face. She was looking down at him with that soft, unguarded look she didn’t bother to cover up anymore. “I love you, Grace. I’ve known it since the night I told you everything and you didn’t run. I’ve haven’t said it before now because I didn’t think I you deserved to have me love you.”
Her hands, resting on his shoulders, tightened their hold.
He continued, “A woman just drove a thousand miles to tell me I’m not the terrible person I thought I was and that I’m allowed to be happy. I love you. There’s no version of that sentence that has a ‘but’ in it. That’s the whole thing.”
For once in her life Grace didn’t have a quick answer ready. Her eyes filled, and he rose to his feet. She put her hand flat on his chest, over the place her hand always went, and he covered it with his.
“It took you long enough,” she finally said, in a voice that wobbled clear off its rails. And then, before he could say anything back, she said, “I love you too. I have for a while. I was keeping it myself because I didn’t think you were ready to hear it.”
“You were right. I wouldn’t have believed you because I didn’t think I was worthy of being loved.”
“Steele men can be so stubborn, sometimes,” she said in a long-suffering voice.
He laughed, and she laughed, and somewhere in the laughing he pulled her close and kissed her, slow and certain.
The cat got up in deep offense and stalked off to find a household with more dignity in it, and neither of them noticed her go.
20
The kitchen smelled like browning butter and the last of the season’s rhubarb, and under that, faintly, like the lake because the windows had been open since dawn and in late June the whole valley came indoors whether you invited it in or not.
Grace crimped the edge of the second pie and set it beside the first. Through the window over the sink the water lay flat and bright all the way to the far shore, where the mountains had finally traded their gray for green and stood there looking pleased with themselves about it. Down at the dock Lily’s laugh went up high and delighted followed by the particular heavy splash of a grown man who was, against all medical advice and his older brother’s explicit instructions, teaching a four-year-old to cannonball.
She made the third pie.
She’d be feeding nine tonight, maybe ten if Cooper got off shift in time. The supper had started as a small thing . . . a thank-you to Hank, mostly, and an excuse . . . and then Tessa had offered to bring her brisket, and Dillon had offered to bring Makayla, and Hank had asked, with the studied casualness of a man who’d forgotten how to ask for anything, whether Madison could come too. So now it was the kind of gathering that took three pies and a leaf in the table.
Two weeks. That was all it had been since a gray sedan with out-of-state plates had driven slowly up the drive and a woman named Sunny had walked into this house and set Reno free of a thing Grace had watched him carry since the first morning he limped into her bakery for a cinnamon roll he didn’t need.
Two weeks, and the shape of her whole life had quietly rearranged itself around the new facts of it, the way water finds the level it’s going to keep.
Cooper held the meeting for the families the Tuesday after Sunny visited the cottage. He’d done it the way he did everything, carefully and without flinching in the fellowship room of the church with its bad coffee and folding chairs. He’d laid out everything Lex Jansick said and didn’t say. The fire was set. The report was bought. He didn’t yet know by whom.
Grace had sat in the front row with Reno’s hand wrapped around hers and watched her friends learn that what most of them already suspected was true.
Charlotte had gone white and very still. Bonnie had asked three sharp questions in a row because Bonnie ran at problems the way other people ran from them. And Rose had cried. Rose, who’d spent four years secretly certain her husband made the mistake that killed all the others. Grace watched and set down the guilt for good and picked up in its place the harder, cleaner grief of knowing someone else was to blame.
Afterward the WoWS made more coffee, cut the pies Grace had brought, and sat together for a good cry. A lot of hugs were passed around, and by the time the pies were gone, they’d all collected themselves enough to go home to their kids and carry on with life.
Lucas Shoemacher was still alive. Still dying, slowly, behind the drawn blinds of the big house on the hill, attended by nurses and, lately, by lawyers.
Cooper had asked the widows for patience and Grace had discovered, to her own surprise, that she could give it to him. Not because the urgency had faded. But because the truth had a direction now, and Cooper’s entire nature was to get all the way to the bottom of a case no matter how long it took to get there. She’d waited almost five years already. She could wait a little longer.
Her phone buzzed against the counter. A photo: a small girl with chocolate ice cream from chin to eyebrows, and beneath it, in Sunny’s typing, “This is the tyrant. She says hi.” Grace smiled and thumbed back a row of hearts and set the phone down.
Sunny had stayed on in Apple Pie Creek for now, in a short-term rental house, “figuring some things out,” which Grace recognized. She’d done her own figuring once, alone, with a baby on her hip and a hole the size of a man in her life. She’d told Sunny there was a chair at the WoWS get-togethers any time she wanted it. Sunny hadn’t come yet. But she’d asked what time the next one started.
Lily came pounding up the porch steps wrapped in a towel printed with cartoon sharks, leaving a dark trail of water across the boards, with Reno behind her carrying her water wings and what was left of his dignity.
“Mommy! Mr. Reno did a cannonball and the water went ALL THE WAY UP and a fish jumped out!”
Reno rolled his eyes. “Total coincidence.”
