Page 86 of Key West Homecoming

Rachel dropped her at Winslow’s a little after six. Edmund had fallen asleep in the back seat too, his chin resting against his chest. Emma gathered her things and closed the door quietly.

“Call me tomorrow,” Rachel whispered through the open window. “I’ll let you know as soon as the will is filed.”

“I will. Thank you for today.”

Rachel glanced toward the sleeping Edmund. “It was a good day.”

Emma nodded and then watched the car pull away before going inside.

Jake had been awake before sunrise.

He made coffee and took it to the front steps while the sky lightened over the palms. He thought about the way Emma looked when she came out of the kitchen after reading Gloria’s letter.

He’d wanted to do something for her and had known enough not to try. He believed that sometimes leaving a person alone was the thing you did. He’d learned that the hard way.

He drank his coffee and looked toward the corner of the porch where Emma had found her father’s initials. After a while, he got up and walked over. He crouched beside the railing and ran a finger along the underside until he found the shallow grooves.

D.K.

David Kendrick had been seven years old when he carved them there. Jake pictured a boy with a pocketknife, checking over his shoulder to make sure his mother wasn’t watching. Maybe he’d expected to come back the next summer and the summer after that and see his initials every time.

Jake sat on the porch step.

He understood more about leaving something behind than he used to.

For seven years, his hands had been used at fires, car wrecks and medical calls out of a Miami station. He had liked being a paramedic and had been good at it too, until being good at it stopped being enough to keep the worst parts of the job from following him home.

The company came afterward. Two ER doctors at Jackson Memorial were developing a trauma monitor small enough to carry in a paramedic’s kit. They needed someone who had actually tried to use equipment in the back of a moving ambulance at three in the morning. Jake became their third employee.

They built it and tweaked it until it worked. Eventually they sold the company.

Jake walked away with enough money that he didn’t have to worry much about earning more. What he needed was somewhere to go, and so, one day he filled a duffel bag and drove south.

A week after arriving in Key West, he signed the lease on the cottage from Arthur Kendrick. They met at a coffee shop, where Arthur showed up with a folder of papers and an easy smile. Jake had been too tired then to accept both without asking many questions.

That was three years ago.

On his first afternoon at the cottage, Jake had gone straight to the garden. He pulled weeds from the lily bed until his back hurt, his knees were stiff and his hands scratched and bleeding. When he was done he sat on the porch step and cried for the first time in eight months.

The cottage gave him something to care for when he wasn’t sure what to do with himself. He learned the names of the plants and figured out which ones needed morning light and which ones did better in the shade. He rebuilt the porch swing during his first summer and built the bench beneath the lignum vitae two years later.

For most of the last year, he had thought about putting a pergola in the back corner of the yard. He’d even bought the cedar in the spring, but there had never been any reason to hurry.

Until now.

Jake looked toward the back garden.

A week ago, Emma had walked through the gate and asked him questions he wasn’t prepared to answer. He didn’t like her much at first, or at least that was what he’d told himself. Now she was in Miami with Edmund and Rachel, retrieving the original will that might finally make the cottage legally hers.

If it did, Jake had no idea what that meant for him.

Emma lived in Chicago. She had a career there and a life she had every reason to return to. She’d told him she most likely would be in Key West for a month, and he had no reason to believe that had changed.

Still, when he thought about her leaving, his heart raced and stomach turned.

Jake had spent three years building a life that asked very little of him emotionally. He had friends in town. He worked when he wanted to and spent most days outside. He wasn’t lonely, or at least he hadn’t thought he was.

Then Emma showed up.