having dinner with him tonight,” she said with a grin. “I get points for that, right?”
“You do.” Casey reached for her hand and squeezed it. “I’m sorry, honey. About all of this.”
“I’m not.” She trained her grin directly on Casey this time. “It’s going to be good, Casey. Really. I need to do this. And this time I’m going to make it work.”
At four o’clock, Toby stood in the side yard, surveying Grace’s handiwork, a bottle of water in one hand and something that was half frown and half smile on his face.
Leave it to Grace, he thought. That room upstairs had been collecting junk and dust and cobwebs for years, and within days of her arrival half of it was, well, littering up his side yard and part of the driveway, but still. The room was almost clean now.
Grace didn’t think twice. Okay, sometimes she didn’t think ever, but at least she got things done. Did things, took chances, even if they sometimes—okay, most of the time—backfired.
It was a hell of a lot more than he could say for himself.
He glanced up at the sound of shuffling footsteps and found Quinn Barnett, his next-door neighbor, ambling up the driveway.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said, and wound an arm around the girl’s bony shoulders. She was fifteen going on forty, as serious a kid as he had ever met. He adored her.
“I hate it when you call me that,” she said, eyebrows drawn together in a precise frown.
“I know,” he said easily. “What’s up?”
“I should ask you.” She waved a hand at the junk on the grass. The glass face of a broken clock glittered up at them in the late afternoon light. “What happened?”
“A friend of mine is here,” he said with a fond smile. “She’s going to stay for a while.”
“And trash the place?” Quinn said dubiously. She wriggled out from under his arm and poked at one pile of debris with her booted toe, unearthing an ancient camera. “Hey, can I have this?”
“You can have it all, as far as I’m concerned.” He let her poke through the piles and leaned against the hood of his old Celica. “And she’s not trashing the place.” Yet, he added silently, trying not to smile.
“So what is she doing here?” Quinn asked. She was squatting on the pavement, idly flipping through the pages of a water-damaged book on botanicals.
“Starting over.” He shrugged when she looked up at him, eyes sharp under the dark fringe of her bangs. “Seriously. She left her husband and she’s…I don’t actually know what she’s going to do yet, but the thing of it is, she’s not scared, you know?”
Quinn nodded slowly, something like envy in her eyes, the book still clutched in one hand.
“I can’t imagine doing that,” Toby said, and heard the awe in his voice as if from far away. “I mean, I think about it for a good long while before I decide to order mushrooms instead of sausage on my pizza, you know?”
Quinn smiled sadly, and it took Toby a minute to remember she was only fifteen, just a kid, really. Not that she’d ever seemed like much of a kid, even when she was seven, curled up on her front porch with a book, a tattered stuffed snake draped over her shoulders. Snakes don’t get enough love, she’d told him then.
“Yeah. I do know,” she said now, and turned her gaze back to the book in her hand, something very close to a blush heating her pale cheeks.
“She’s trouble, no doubt,” Toby told her, walking over to join her beside the clutter, pawing through it idly. “But sometimes I think trouble is underrated.”
At seven o’clock, armed with her best positive attitude and a big appetite, Grace walked into the Canal Street Café for dinner with her dad.
She loved him, she even liked him, but spending time with him had always been a test of her patience. If she was the hare, her father was the tortoise—on sedatives, and with one broken leg. Ordering a meal usually took a good fifteen minutes, and that only after weighing the pros and cons of each entrée, sometimes wandering down a few lanes of trivia concerning the origins of certain pasta dishes or the historical uses for chickens.
The Café was one of Wrightsville’s institutions, a little converted cottage overlooking the water, as famous for its mismatched china and tablecloths as it was for its food. There were only a dozen tables aside from the counter in the back, which was half lunch spot and half bar, and Grace could smell cheeseburgers frying when she walked in the door.
She could also see her father, the man who usually preferred books, if not the History Channel, to other human beings, chattering happily with Georgia Griffin and her son, Nick.
Good God, the man was everywhere she looked.
Georgia spotted her hovering near the door and waved. “Grace, dear! Come join us!”
Her father glanced up and beamed from behind his glasses. “There’s my girl. Come on over, honey!”
He stood up to hug her, and she let the familiar scent of him wash through her—Old Spice, old books, and leather. Georgia stretched up to kiss her cheek, and Grace hugged her, too. No one made cake like Georgia, and no one except Georgia had ever bothered to ask if Grace needed a woman to talk to once in a while. Her son could be a pain in Grace’s ass—when he wasn’t being surprisingly, intensely sexy all of a sudden—but Georgia definitely wasn’t.
“Hey, Grace,” Nick said. He was slouched in his chair, a scowl already settled on his face, and he didn’t look happy to see her. She didn’t blame him. She wasn’t exactly thrilled to see him, either. She had splinters in both hands and sore shoulders from carrying junk down to the basement.
Then again, it was easier to deal with him when they were squared off like they always had been. It pushed the idea of kissing more than his cheek to the back of her imagination. Almost.
She nodded coolly. “Nick.”
“Sit down, sweetie.” Mason pulled out the chair beside him and patted it. “You don’t mind if we eat with Georgia and Nick, do you? Nick brought Georgia here for her birthday. Isn’t that nice?”
Nick scowled harder, and Grace bit back a grin. That was Nick, the reluctant hero, the Good Son through and through.
She’d known it even way back when his dad had taken off. Nick was just twelve. Left with his mom and his sisters, Katie and Meg, Nick had turned into the man of the house overnight. He took over mowing the lawn and putting out the trash; he shoveled the snow and killed spiders. He didn’t always like it, and it wasn’t as if he never complained, but he’d stepped right up, all business. Katie and Meg used to complain that Nick was stricter than their dad had ever been, and way more of a worrywart. They weren’t wrong, either.
She smiled as Mason handed her a menu and wound his arm around her shoulders. “I’m proud of you, Gracie. I think you did the right thing, coming home. We can keep an eye on you here, help you through this.”
Oh, perfect. She narrowed her eyes at Nick, but he just shrugged. What exactly had he told them before she arrived? She was almost thirty years old. She didn’t
