worked silently until the shelving unit was nearly empty. Having Shane around calmed her. She didn’t have to keep up appearances with him.
And being with her seemed to calm him, too.
“This is going much more quickly than I expected, thanks to you.”
He grunted, looking embarrassed, and then slowly smiled. “I’m glad I can help you.”
Bonnie turned back to the job at hand with a twinge of guilt.
Keith had offered to come and help with clean-up duty after work. Beth had said she’d take Katie home with her and Ryan. Wednesday night was macaroni-and-cheese night, and Katie loved it almost as much as Ryan did. Bonnie had sent Katie home with Keith, instead. The little girl had missed her bath the night before and had had a long day.
And Bonnie had needed a break from them.
She would rather die than have Keith know she was dissatisfied with the life they’d built together—a feeling that had been oddly exacerbated by the events of the past twenty-four hours.
She just needed a little time to get herself back in line.
“Do you know who started the fire?” Shane asked, each word spoken deliberately.
Shaking her head, Bonnie shrugged. “People from the sheriff’s office said somebody threw a book of lit matches in through that vent up there.” She pointed to the outside wall of the closet.
Shane stared blankly toward the ceiling. “How do they know that?”
“Because it landed on the wet mop and didn’t completely burn.”
He took a full minute to process that. Then, “Do they know who did it?”
She felt a surge of pity at the obvious struggle he was having. Conversation was difficult for him.
“No,” she said. “I guess there was too much fire and water damage for fingerprinting. It was probably just kids, playing a prank.”
“Why would someone play a prank on you, Bonnie?”
“After looking at things today, my brother, Greg—who’s the sheriff now—doesn’t think they were going after me. There’s not much chance they knew that the vent led into the Little Spirits supply closet.”
“Oh.”
Yeah, and an even bigger “oh” was the fact that Bonnie had been a tiny bit disappointed that Greg hadn’t seen the fire as a premeditated act aimed at her. She’d almost had an excuse to move on.
Bonnie stopped, shaking, hands on the edge of the garbage can she was peering sightlessly into.
An excuse to move on? Where on earth had that thought come from?
She had nothing to move on to. Nowhere she wanted to go.
She loved her husband to distraction. Would give up her life for her daughter. Little Spirits had been a far greater success than she’d ever dared hope.
And still, she was consumed with a nebulous need for more. It made no sense to her.
How could she suddenly resent the very things she’d spent her life dreaming of, praying for, building?
“Are you okay?” Shane’s words pulled her back.
“No,” she told him, walking back to the closet.
She couldn’t prevaricate with Shane. It would be too cruel to this man who was trying so hard to make sense of an already bewildering world. And she didn’t need to pretend with him. In Shane’s mind, what was, was. He wanted predictability, craved patterns and rules, but there was no analysis of motivation, no judgmental thought, no opinion of what should be. Only an acceptance of the environment around him.
Most importantly, her confusion wouldn’t hurt Shane.
“People were talking to you today like you were sad. I saw them when I was waxing floors.”
“I know they were.” They were standing, one on either side of the mangled shelving unit, tilting it to get it out the closet door. “You may not remember, but Little Spirits is something I’ve talked about my whole life and I’ve worked really hard to make it successful. Most of the people in this town know that. So they think it would be really disturbing for me to have it intentionally vandalized. Or even damaged by accident.”
He stopped, stared at her, his gaze intent. The brown depths of his eyes had always been compelling.
“I remember.”
Bonnie didn’t know how to respond. When Shane had suddenly reappeared in her life a couple of months before—her new handyman, instead of the high-powered financier she’d heard he was in Chicago—she’d immediately accepted the man he’d become. Never probing for traces of the man he’d been.
Beyond acknowledging to her landlord that they knew each other, they’d never once referred to their personal past.
The two of them deposited the ruined unit by the emergency exit door.
“What do you remember?”
“That you always wanted to take care of people.”
Yeah. He was right about that. Was that all he remembered?
“And now you don’t?”
Breaking eye contact, she shrugged, dipped back into the closet to start clearing rubbish from the corner. “Of course I do.”
He was hauling out what was left of the vacuum cleaner Beth and Greg had bought her for Christmas.
Bonnie scratched her cheek, felt the slimy wetness of soot from her fingers and wiped her face with her shoulder. She’d brought sweats and a T-shirt with her to work that morning to wear for closet gutting. She was glad she had. She’d probably be throwing them away when she got home that night, because of their smell alone.
“What’s wrong, Bonnie?”
She piled a few more pieces of unidentifiable trash on her outstretched arm.
“I don’t know,” she said, sighing as she dumped it into the rapidly filling can. “I love this place. It just…doesn’t excite me like it used to. I’m feeling differently about a lot of things lately, and that kind of scares me.”
“Different about what things?”
She dumped and gathered more mostly unrecognizable residue. What the fire hadn’t destroyed, the sprinkler system had. “My life, my work, my marriage, Shelter Valley.” She rattled on as she worked. “It used to be that those things filled my every waking thought. They gave me strength and incentive.” Now it almost felt as if they were holding her back.
“I think you wanted to be married and stay in Shelter Valley and take care of people.”
His words were slow, deliberate. His work, focused on one task—cleaning everything out of the closet—with
