Two weeks and three days later, Addison returned to Grayson Manor with a new car and a different phone carrier. The guest house Luke had secured for her belonged to his parents, Jim and Bonnie Flynn. It was detached and set back far enough behind the main house that Addison had all the privacy she needed. Still, it didn’t stop Bonnie from stopping by every night with an extra dinner plate and an offer of female conversation. At first, Addison politely declined, saying she could make herself a sandwich, but the word “no” wasn’t part of Bonnie’s vocabulary. Somehow, she always found a way inside Addison’s room and her heart, and by the end of Addison’s time there, she was eating dinner in Luke’s parents’ house every night, often with Luke joining them at the dinner table.
Over the past couple of weeks, Addison had made several trips back and forth to check on the progress of Grayson Manor. Each new day it seemed there was some kind of a new problem that prolonged her return, but eventually Luke declared the home fit enough for her to move back in. There were months of work to be done, but the shower had water, the lights turned on, and the stove could cook a meal. It was progress.
Luke was working on the floor in one of the upstairs bedrooms when Addison arrived. He’d tried to get her to stay on the main level, since they were renovating the upper level first, but Addison preferred the upstairs, saying the view from the middle bedroom was one of the loveliest she’d ever seen. There was no convincing her otherwise.
“It looks great in here.” Addison entered the bedroom, marveling at its transformation.
“You are looking at a close replica of what this room originally looked like,” Luke said.
“I can’t believe this house has been sitting here for all these years when it could have been lived in and enjoyed.”
Luke tilted his hammer toward her. “Maybe you should ask whoever left it to you.”
Addison had tried not to think about her mother every day since she had died. She tried not thinking about how much she missed her. She tried shutting out the memories of her mother being in the first row for every single one of her volleyball games when she was in high school or when her mother cried when they said goodbye on her first day of college. She tried because trying to forget seemed easier…though she suspected her thinking was skewed. Either way it was like a slow pain, churning and growing inside her body, waiting until the perfect moment to rupture.
“Did I say something wrong?” he said. “You look upset.”
She shook her head. “No, it’s okay. When I said I’d inherited the house, it was from my mother.”
“Makes sense,” he said. “She probably wanted to see it put to good use.”
“What I mean to say is…she’s dead.”
It was the first time Addison had said the words aloud since her mother had passed away.
“I’m sorry.” He shifted his gaze away from her, looking unsure about whether to continue.
“It was an accident, her death. I can’t—I mean, it’s hard for me to—”
“It’s okay if you don’t feel like talking about it. It’s not easy losing someone you love.”
Had he lost someone? A woman in his life, perhaps? At thirty-one, it was possible. Both of his parents were alive and well, she knew. Yet, there was a trace of seriousness in his tone, maybe a longing for someone.
Not wanting to talk about her mother’s death was one of the reasons Addison had yearned for the solitude of the country in the first place. After the funeral, she quickly grew tired of the incessant phone calls and the unexpected drop-ins by relatives or one of her mother’s friends. Her mother was gone. She didn’t need another one. She didn’t want another one. No one seemed to understand.
Luke’s attitude was different. He wasn’t nosey and insistent like the others. Over the last two weeks, she’d decided he was kind and patient, the sort of level-headed person who never got upset about anything. Being in his presence was a refreshing change from the life she’d just abandoned.
“Addison?” he whispered.
She gazed up, pushing the thoughts inside her head as far back as they could go. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Whatever happened, you don’t have to tell me.”
She walked over to the bed and sat down. “This might sound strange, but I want to tell you, and I haven’t talked about it with anyone. Not even my father.”
He smiled, wiped his hands on his jeans, and sat on the edge of the bed. “You can always tell me anything.”
She sat down next to him, choosing to stare at her hands than at him. “There’s no way of knowing what happened for sure, but from what we have gathered, this is what we think happened. My mother was driving home one night after seeing a movie with friends. It was late, around ten o’clock. The street she was driving on wasn’t very well lit. There was a kid on a bike dressed in a navy shirt and dark jeans. The bike he was riding was an old Schwinn. The reflectors had fallen off, and his parents hadn’t bothered to buy new ones, I guess. My mom’s cell phone rang. We think she reached for it, and at some point, it slid off the seat. She bent down to get it, and when she sat back up, she must have caught a glimpse of the kid. She swerved, missing the boy, but in her attempt to keep him safe, she lost control of the wheel. She overcorrected and her car flipped several times before slamming into a ditch. My uncle said when they found her the car looked like an oversized piece of crumpled newspaper.”
Luke rested a hand on her knee. “No wonder you wanted to get away.”
“I just want to be in a place that doesn’t remind me of her.”
“That’s understandable.”
“The city I lived in was the city I grew up in. Everywhere I looked, all I saw was her—in everything. There were so many memories. I wanted to move to a place where I could make my own memories, but as it turns out, this is the house she lived in as a child.”
“Did you spend a lot of time together?”
“Not as much as she wanted me to. She tried so hard to see me, but I was always too busy—with my career, with my life, in my relationships. I put her off, saying something like we could always get together “next week.” Then next week would roll around, and I’d reschedule again. I learned my lesson a little too late.”
“You’re putting a lot of blame on yourself,” he said.
“One month ago, I was living a completely different life. I thought I knew where I was going and what I wanted. I didn’t know anything. It took her dying for me to see what I should have seen all along. How many people live like that—blindly following the path they think they’re meant to follow?”
He shrugged. “A lot, I’d guess.”
“What made you want to work on houses for a living? Out of all the occupations you could have chosen—why this one?”
“It’s my passion,” he said.
“Old houses?”
He shook his head. “Not exactly. I see things differently than most people.”
“Like what?”
“Tell me something,” he said. “What’s the first thing you thought of when you saw this house?”
“I didn’t expect it to look so…old.”
“And?”
“Run-down.”
“You saw the flaws,” he said. “It’s okay. That’s what most people see. Your eye naturally goes to the things that need to be fixed.”
“And yours don’t?”
“I see a piece of fine art,” he said. “I see a house covered in many fine layers. My job is to peel them all back, layer by layer, brick by brick, until I uncover the beauty hidden beneath. There’s nothing more satisfying to me.”
The way his eyes sparked when he talked about doing what he loved gave Addison hope that one day she’d feel the same way about this place too.
“What about you,” he said. “What’s your passion?”
Addison shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it in so long, I’m not even sure I have one.”
“Everyone does.” He gently poked her shoulder. “You just have to be open to it when it finds you.” Luke tossed some tools into a box and closed it. “If you don’t need me for anything else, I’ll head home. See you tomorrow at eight, unless that’s too early for you.”
“It’s fine.”
“Most of the window latches were broken when I checked them, so I wedged some pieces of wood in between the frame. It’s a temporary fix, but it’ll keep them from being opened from the outside. I also installed the new handle you picked out on your front door, so don’t forget to lock it.”
Addison smiled. “I appreciate it, but I don’t think there are too many break-ins out here.”
Luke glanced back and smiled. “It’s always better to be safe.”