least we know the alarm works, huh?” she asked. It could shut up any time now. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
Harry gave her a sympathetic smile. “Well, you were distracted.” The alarm stopped blaring at last.
Paige glanced down at the incomplete planting project. “I’ll have to finish this later.” Or would she? She wouldn’t be able to see them bloom. The realization gave her a fresh stab of sorrow. “I need to buy treats for one of my students.” After such a shock, she could use a treat herself.
She could get cupcakes at the café and bakery a couple of blocks away from Jefferson Elementary. If she got there early enough, she’d have time to get a pumpkin spice latte.
It had been forever since she’d stopped in at that place, and one needed to take advantage of pumpkin spice latte season when it came around.
And she’d do a little more writing on her story about the princess and the cabin. Why not? In at least one way, the place would be hers forever. She tried to take comfort in the thought.
After she said goodbye to Harry and went back inside, she took a moment to look around her. Although the bathroom and the two bedrooms had white walls, here in the kitchen and in the living room, the original log walls surrounded her, uneven, filled in with stripes of white mortar. The plank floors, although rough in places, nonetheless glowed. They were the exact color of Darjeeling tea sweetened with a bit of the red clover honey Paige had bought from the Union Station farmer’s market, though the jar was almost empty now, just a few sweet drops remaining.
The small rooms had always given Paige the feeling that she was safely tucked away with her dreams. Gradually over the course of the past two years, she’d added her own handmade touches, along with thrift shop treasures: a chartreuse lamp, a cuckoo clock, several vintage tea cups and saucers and a rack on the wall to display them. Looking around, Paige noticed for the first time that the ceiling above the fireplace was smudgy from the smoke. The chimney didn’t draw perfectly. Would this deter prospective buyers? Probably not.
She had to get going. In the bedroom, she changed out of the yoga pants and sweatshirt she’d slept in and into her work clothes. Since she’d learned to sew, she’d created some dresses and skirts in bright, whimsical prints that amused her students: cats, snowflakes, dinosaurs, stars. She chose the one she’d just finished.
After putting on a little makeup and grabbing her jacket and purse, she checked the time. She wouldn’t have a ton of time to linger at the café, but if she didn’t hit any bad traffic, she could at least stay for fifteen minutes or so.
I am not going to let this ruin my day, she promised herself. Who knew? Maybe the sale of the cabin would be a blessing in disguise. She was a huge believer in those.
Although, it would be one heck of a disguise. After she’d moved in, she’d felt so happy, and she’d started writing more. She loved the place with her heart and soul…
Wait a minute. Was it possible she could buy the place?
She hadn’t even thought about buying a house for quite a while. On her salary, she struggled to save money. Expenses always popped up, and she spent a not-inconsiderable amount on extra supplies for her classroom. Once she’d moved into the cabin, she’d more or less planned to rent it forever, or at least, as long as she could.
But she suddenly recalled one of the teachers at school talking about buying a home. According to him, a first-time buyer didn’t need to put much down. Maybe she could actually afford to make it hers. Who knew? Maybe it was meant to be.
It was impossible.
But what if it wasn’t?
chapter two
Dylan lumbered to the kitchen, still groggy, and grabbed the steel coffee canister. When he lifted the lid, two beans rattled around at the bottom. He sighed.
He wasn’t in the habit of eating breakfast. A banana, sometimes, if he’d been to the store recently, and most often, he hadn’t. The kitchen in the loft-style apartment was actually gorgeous: new cabinets, marble countertops, always clean. The two things he used were the refrigerator, which frequently held leftover pizza or kung pao chicken, and the coffeemaker, which couldn’t help him now. He’d have to get dressed and get to a café. Usually, he fueled up with caffeine right after getting out of bed, and the variation in his routine unsettled him.
In the living room, he paused to gaze out the huge sixth-story window. Clouds hung over his downtown neighborhood. When he’d first moved in, big trees had stood in front of the newest construction. He’d admired them for surviving in a small plot of soil and breaking through the pavement; he could appreciate that type of raw determination. But then, out of idle curiosity, he’d poked around online to figure out what species they were. Their name, “tree of heaven,” was ironic; they were known for not only destroying sidewalks but also putting out a chemical that killed nearby plants. Dylan had been glad when workers had removed them and planted a row of sugar maple saplings in their place. Their top leaves were starting to turn cheddary orange.
As he picked up his phone, a glum feeling settled over him. New texts. Please don’t be Mark.
But of course, it was his boss. Two messages from him detailed extra changes he wanted to the presentation due that morning, and a third one explained a new assignment. Dylan briefly considered going straight to the office and drinking the coffee there, but he’d been at the office for a few hours on Saturday and wasn’t ready to face it again quite yet.
In the bathroom, he scrubbed his face but skipped shaving. Even at his investment banking firm, a day’s worth of stubble was acceptable. He dressed quickly, grabbed his laptop bag, and was out the door.
Soon afterward, he parked outside Dolce Café and Bakery and strode to the door. He caught another guy, with a girlfriend or wife, glancing from Dylan’s new luxury car to Dylan in his perfectly tailored gray suit, in an almost automatic moment of admiration and envy.
Dylan didn’t mind getting noticed like that, once in a while. He’d earned it. As a kid, he’d sometimes attracted attention for the opposite reason. When he’d shown up for school two days in a row in the same outfit, or wore pants with permanent stains on the knees, other kids had given him plenty of grief. These days, nobody could look down on him, and nobody could get under his skin.
A long line of people stood waiting to order. Great. He should’ve gotten an earlier start to the day. He tried to tamp down his impatience by looking at stocks and scanning business headlines on his phone. When he finally reached the counter, he made his usual order—black coffee, the largest size, the darkest roast—left a dollar in the tip jar, and sat down at the counter. After taking the first blessed sip, he opened his laptop and pulled up the PowerPoint presentation. He never should’ve taken the whole Sunday off. It always made Mondays worse.
If he finished the deck in the next hour and drove into work, he’d be able to print it out and check it before putting it on his boss’s desk at nine a.m. He’d learned the hard way that errors were much harder to catch onscreen. He’d started the job four years ago, and after the first presentation he’d worked on hadn’t gone over well with the client, his supervisor at the time had called him into her office to point out the misplaced comma on the one-hundred-twenty-sixth slide of a one-hundred-forty-three-slide deck. Dylan was pretty sure punctuation hadn’t been the deal breaker, but
