Page 114 of Key West Homecoming

She took a drink of iced tea. It was strong and cold, with mint from Gloria’s garden.

Jake had rebuilt the swing during his first summer at the cottage. One chain had rusted through, part of the seat was rotten and the frame was cracked. He could have replaced it, but something had stopped him.

“It felt like it belonged to somebody,” he said.

Emma looked down at the weathered cedar beneath her hand.

“You saved more of this place than you knew.”

“Maybe it saved me too,” he said.

Emma turned toward him.

After what he’d told her the night before, she understood what he meant. Three years earlier, Jake had arrived in Key West with almost nothing and moved into a cottage he knew nothing about. While he repaired the porch and pulled weeds from Gloria’s lilies, the house had apparently been doing something for him too.

Emma wondered if it was doing the same thing for her.

She had come to Key West because a real estate broker called about a cottage she hadn’t known she owned. She had expected to stay a few days, settle whatever needed settling and return to Chicago.

Instead, she was sitting on her grandmother’s porch drinking iced tea with a man she was beginning to care about.

The thought should have felt impossible, but it didn’t.

They sat quietly for a while, moving the swing with their feet. Emma watched Jake’s hands around the glass. She remembered how badly she had wanted him to kiss her the night before and how relieved she’d been when he hadn’t.

Jake began talking about the cottage and how different it felt when Emma was there. He didn’t ask her to stay and she wondered why. She listened, but part of her attention stayed on the fact that his knee was close enough to touch hers.

“Do you think I’m going back?” she asked.

Jake took a moment before answering. “I’ve been assuming you are.”

“Why?”

“Because Chicago is where your life is.”

“Was.”

The word came out before Emma had time to consider it.

Jake looked at her but Emma looked away toward the garden.

Maybe Chicago was still her life. She had an apartment there, a career she had spent twelve years building and a best friend who knew almost everything about her. She couldn’t erase any of that because Key West had begun to feel good.

But something had changed, and with every passing day it was getting harder to ignore.

For years, Emma had thought of her life as settled. She had a job she was good at and enough money to live comfortably. She knew which train she took to work, where she bought groceries and which Thai restaurant delivered fastest when she got home after nine. She had mistaken happiness with comfort and so she never questioned whether she was happy or not.

Gloria had seen that before Emma had.

I have watched you make your life smaller so it would fit inside a job.

Emma had read the sentence enough times that she knew it by heart.

She looked out at the pergola Jake was building and tried to imagine herself back in her apartment in Chicago. It was hard to picture it.

“I don’t know what happens when my leave is over,” she said. “I don’t know what happens with the cottage or my job or any of it. I’m trying very hard not to decide just because everything here feels different.”

“Different good?”