Harris grabbed a bottle of beer out of the fridge, then headed down the hall of the inn. The long day clearing away the wreckage had drawn to a close when the sun set and working on the site became too dangerous. Harris had gone back to his room and set to work ordering plywood, insulation and windows and scheduling a concrete pour. His attention wandered a thousand times.
Probably because he’d been listening for Mellie’s steps in the hallway. She must have stayed late after dinner at her sister’s house, because the clock ticked past ten and she still hadn’t come back to the inn. Finally, he’d given up on his work and gone downstairs to enjoy the evening air. Or at least, that’s what he told himself.
Mavis was asleep in the back bedroom of the inn, and the other guests had checked out earlier today, leaving the building mostly empty. So when the front door finally opened a little after ten thirty, Harris’s heart skipped a beat.
Why did he torture himself like this? They had ended things long ago, and each of them had a life in a different state, a different world. And yet sometimes, the part of him that remembered an impatient, more immature self at eighteen thought perhaps the past could be rewritten. Lord knew he’d made enough mistakes in his younger years—and a few as an adult—that he would do over if he could. He’d been given a chance to fix things with Mellie—could he really let that opportunity go?
He turned and saw Mellie in the doorway. Her gaze caught his, and for a second, he worried she would go straight to bed and not talk to him. She leaned toward the stairs, as if she’d decided to avoid him.
“Want a beer?” he said, too fast. “And then you can tell me the secrets to long life. You interviewed the town’s oldest living resident, right? I’d love to hear about it.”
Too much? Too desperate? Too insane? Damn. What was it with this woman, that all his thoughts became a jumbled mess whenever she was around? He forgot about the past, forgot about their broken history, and couldn’t think about anything other than being with her.
Mellie came down the hall, depositing her purse and notepad on the hall table. She looked tired, as if the long day had had more challenges than just an interview and a family dinner. “I’d love a beer.”
He headed into the kitchen, grabbed a second one, opened it and handed it to her. She took a long drink, then gestured toward the back porch. They went outside and sank into the twin Adirondack chairs.
“Cheers,” she said and clinked her bottle with his. The faint chitter of crickets came from the shrubs. Mellie sipped her beer, and the tension in her shoulders relaxed by degrees. “So, did you guys get a lot of work done on the house?”
“More than I expected. All the demo is done, and tomorrow we get to start building.” He’d pushed the town commissioners to do a rush approval on the plans. A generous donation to help build a new ballfield in town had helped move that along. Harris knew he’d have to make up all these expenses down the road, but he lived pretty inexpensively in a humble apartment, and kept his business costs low just so he could do things like this.
In the end, the money meant a family would have a home in a few weeks, instead of cramming into a motel room or a relative’s basement for months. It had been a chaotic day, but the Barlow brothers had kept the project under control.
Dozens of Stone Gap residents had been there yesterday from sunup to sundown, working until it got too dark. John and his family had only been residents for a few years, and yet the town embraced them like long-lost cousins. For a second, Harris wondered what it would be like to make this town his permanent home. The idea appealed quite a bit.
Could he set up a home base here? And still complete the mission he’d had in his heart ever since he quit working for his father? Could he finally, after John’s house was complete, give himself a moment to live his own life, and still make reparations to the lives he had ruined? Deep questions for a dark night, and questions he couldn’t answer.
“I talked with Della about having a fund-raiser on Saturday to make enough money for all the rest of the things the family is going to need—clothes, furniture, dishes,” Harris said. “We’re thinking of having a barbecue here at the inn.”
“That sounds like fun.” Mellie rested her feet on the edge of her chair and sank down a little. “I can see if Saul wants me to write up something about it for the paper. I’ll talk to him tomorrow when I turn in my story.”
“Do you still write everything in longhand first?” Back in high school, Mellie had kept yellow legal pads everywhere—in her backpack, on her nightstand, in the kitchen, pretty much wherever she went. He was always finding them scattered in her wake, her handwriting, neat and tight, flowing across the page with words and ideas and imagination.
She turned and smiled at him. “I do. I know it’s probably a huge waste of time, but my brain just connects with the words better that way. At least on the stories that matter.”
“And which ones are those?”
“Not the ones about kale salad and thin thighs. Those I always wrote on the computer. I still have a stack of legal pads that are blank and waiting for something with substance.” She picked at the label of the beer bottle, peeling it away in one long strip. “I went to work at that magazine, hoping I could write some things with depth. I did one piece on college graduates that had some meat to it. I hoped they’d let me write more like it, but then they hired a new editorial director, and we went to more fluff and less substance.”
The Mellie he remembered wouldn’t have been much about fluff. She may have been bold and adventurous—and he had loved that part of her when he still lived under his father’s thumb—but she hadn’t been the kind that cared about having her clothes make a statement. She’d never worried about wearing the most fashionable jeans or having the right color eye shadow. “Well, either way, your sister is proud as hell of you. Every time I talk to her, it’s all she talks about.”
Mellie scoffed. “If she only knew.” The words were a whisper under her breath. Harris wasn’t even sure Mellie meant to speak them aloud.
“What do you mean?”
She shook her head. Picked at the beer label. Avoided his gaze.
“Mellie...” He waited until she lifted her gaze to his. “Talk to me.”
A long moment passed. The weight that had lifted from her shoulders returned. She took a long sip of the beer, then let out a sigh. “I lost my job at the magazine and never told my family.”
“You did? When?”
“A year ago. Around the same time as my divorce.” She laid a strip of label on the arm of the chair, then started in on the next section. “I started arguing that the magazine needed to run stories with more substance. In response, the new editorial director said I didn’t fit the direction of the magazine anymore, and she let me go.”
Mellie had a lovely writing style, with a light touch that brought life to her essays, papers or short stories. How could anyone fail to see the value of her and her skills? “Did you move on to another magazine? One that would appreciate your talent?”
She scoffed. “Writing about diets and moisturizers isn’t exactly a prestigious résumé. And in a city like New York, there are millions of writers. I took on some freelancing work and lived off my savings, and, well, now I’m here, working for the Stone Gap Gazette, at least for a little while. Maybe doing that can build up my résumé a bit in other areas—and help my bank balance at the same time.”
Mellie had to be in bad financial shape if she was taking on a job while she was on vacation. Harris wondered if he had any contacts he could call, maybe help her find a new job. Except he was in the construction industry, which was about as far from writing as a person could get. He hated not being able to help her, though.
She took another sip, then set the bottle beside the curled paper. “Either way, I don’t think profiling the town’s oldest resident is going to get me into a prestigious paper or magazine, but it’s a start.”
“And it’s better than writing about miracle weight-loss techniques, right?” He grinned, but she didn’t return his smile.
“Yeah.” Mellie let out a sigh, then got to her feet and leaned against the railing. She turned away from him and faced the dark expanse of lawn and lake, a landscape that seemed to disappear into nothing. “I’m glad you left your dad’s practice and went after your dreams, Harris. I wonder sometimes if I’m still trying to find mine.”
The soft, vulnerable admission drew him to her side. He didn’t touch her, just filled the space on her right. “Maybe you just got a little off track, Mellie. You’re an amazing writer, and I think you still have some great stories to tell.”
She shrugged.
His arms ached to hold her, to draw her into his chest like he used to do, and to inhale the sweet fragrance of her perfume. To ease the stress in her eyes and make everything better. “You know, I read those pieces about the first year in New York for those women college graduates.”
She turned to him, her face lit with surprise. “You did? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well, because it kind of seems like stalking to google your ex-girlfriend.” A whip-poor-will called out in the night air, the familiar song sounding lonely and distant. Harris knew that feeling. All these years he had been estranged from his family, on a one-man quest to set things right again with the people his father had hurt. The only woman he’d ever truly felt at home with was standing right in front of him, but she might as well have been a million miles away. “When I first saw you again, I was curious. So I looked up what you’d been writing, and I came across that series of articles. It was beautiful, Mellie. Heartfelt and honest and heartbreaking, all at the same time.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not the kind of thing editors want from me.”
He touched her jaw, met her gaze. “One editor. Not all editors. You’re a wonderful writer, Mellie, when you trust yourself.”
“Trust myself?” Her brows furrowed. “I do that.”
He paused a moment, then said what he’d been meaning to say ever since he found out about her career at a light and frothy magazine. He’d been surprised to find out the untamable Mellie ended up at a magazine as shallow as a wading pool. “I think it’s safe to write about kale salad, and the woman I remembered never played it safe.”
The Mellie he remembered took chances. She was the first to leap into a swimming hole, the one person he knew who wasn’t afraid of the dark or bears in the woods or anything else. Sure, she’d broken a few rules along the way—okay, almost all of them—by skipping school or swiping a pack of gum from the corner store, but there’d always been this sense of adventure, of danger about her.
She’d been the one he wanted to be. The one who ran with things, and didn’t fall into the prescribed life someone else had laid out for her. Maybe he’d been channeling a little of that the day he quit working for his father. “Where did that side of you go? It’s like one day you woke up and changed into someone else. What happened to the risk-taking girl I fell in love with?”
She shook her head and turned away from him. “You don’t know me anymore, Harris. You don’t know my life. Risks can get you hurt, and I’ve had enough of that, thank you very much.”
Something had happened to her, something that kept inserting itself between them. Whatever it was had tamed the wild in Mellie, but it also extinguished a lot of the light that he loved about her. “Once upon a time, you could tell me anything.”
“And once upon a time, you broke my heart.”
He scoffed. “Me? You were the one I caught with someone else.”
“And what did you do? Believed the worst about me instead of talking to me. So don’t stand here, Harris, and act like you’re someone I can trust. You broke up with me, not the opposite.”
“Then tell me now—what you were doing that night?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore, Harris. It’s in the past. And I’m over it.” But tears shimmered in her eyes and her words shook. Ten years may have gone by, but the night still stung. “It’s too late to rewrite history.”
“I don’t want to rewrite the past.” They’d been young, immature, and maybe it was best to leave all that in the rearview mirror. He wished he could go back and handle it better, not let his pride and temper keep him from listening. “But maybe we could start over, in the here and now.”
“You know how you could help me out? Change my life? Make it up to me?” She closed the space between them and raised her chin. “Tell me what happened the night of the fire. Tell me why you’re doing so much for a family you barely know.”
It took him a second to make the connection, to realize she wasn’t asking for a second chance for them. She was asking him to give her a second chance at her career. “Is that all I am to you? A scoop for some big-city paper?”
“What, do you feel like I’m using you? Well, why shouldn’t I? All I ever was to you was a way to piss off your father. I was the wild girl he disapproved of, the one person he would have done anything to get rid of. Instead, you did that yourself. The one night I needed you most, you left me.” She gathered up the scraps of label, crushing them into a ball in her fist. “So let’s not pretend that either one of us wants each other for something real.”
She spun away and went inside. The door shut with a slap that sounded as loud as a shot in the quiet dark.