overachiever habits are hard to break, I guess.” I grin.
He grins back, the skin of his right cheek leaning into the hint of a dimple. “It was a pretty fierce list. Very thorough. One might even say overly so.”
“I told you I was—”
“Excellent at research,” he interrupts, still grinning. “I remember. But preparation is only half the battle.”
His tone and expression are teasing, and I imitate both. “Are you doubting my competence?”
“Hell, no. Anyone who can make a list like yours is fully capable of looking up instructions on the internet. All I’m saying is, if you happen to run into any problems with the execution and need an experienced handyman...” He cocks a brow and gestures with a thumb to his apron, Handyman embroidered in big white letters across the front.
I laugh. “I’ll remember that.”
This is when he smiles again, big and wide, and it completely transforms his face. It’s a smile that’s just as fierce, just as sexy and magnetic as his look-alike brother’s, yet somehow, Gabe makes it his own. Maybe it’s the way his left cheek takes a second or two longer to catch up with his right, or the way his eyeteeth are swiveled just a tad inward. Maybe it’s the way his eyes crinkle into slits, and that dimple grows into a deep split. Whatever it is, Gabe’s smile is extraordinary in that it’s so ordinary, lopsided and uneven and unpracticed for red carpets and film cameras, and in that moment, I forget all about his famous brother. In that moment, I see only Gabe.
But now we’ve milked the moment for all it’s worth, and it’s time to go.
“Thanks for everything,” I say, reaching for my door. “Really. You’ve been a huge help.”
Gabe waves off my thanks, but he doesn’t turn to go. He stands there while I get settled, watching as I start the engine and fiddle with the gearshift, and then he stops me with a knuckle to the glass.
I hit the button for the window. “Don’t tell me I forgot something.”
“Yes,” he says, that extraordinarily ordinary smile nudging at the edges of his expression. “You forgot to tell me your name.”
“Abigail.” I extend my hand through the window, and his face blooms into a smile I can’t help but return. “Abigail Wolff.”
“Nice to meet you, Abigail Wolff. Gabe Armstrong.”
He shakes my hand, and a surge of solidarity for this stranger-who’s-not-quite-a-stranger spreads over my skin. I want to tell him I get it. I understand how one person’s death can tilt your entire world into a tailspin, how it can make you reevaluate your life and send you scurrying for a dead-end job in a dusty hardware store, how that one choice, that one event, that one split second can change everything.
Instead, I tell him goodbye, shove the gear stick into Reverse and point my car toward home.
The good thing about renovating a master bathroom yourself is that it takes loads of time. Six to eight weeks, including demolition and drying, so says the internet, and if there’s one thing I’ve had since Maria, it’s oceans and oceans of time.
It’s not that I’m overqualified for my current position as content curator for the nation’s leading health care website, though I most definitely am. My job is a forty-hour-per-week slog that, on my worst weeks, I can wrap up in less than half that time. Yes, I’m capable of so much more, but I can’t seem to muster up the energy to care. Content curation pays the bills and, as far as I know, has never killed a single soul.
It’s funny. Back when I was working—really working—as a journalist, there was no such thing as free time. When I wasn’t writing or researching or following leads, I was thinking about my next story. In the shower, on the water, during one of my mad sprints through the grocery store. Even my vacations, by definition a break from the daily grind, were not idle, and they were never long. Stolen snippets here and there, half days and federally mandated holidays, spent rowing or climbing or hiking through some forest somewhere, my mind tripping over ideas for my next piece. The harder I pushed myself, the faster my creative juices flowed. I didn’t have time to stop moving. Time is money. Time waits for no one. There’s never enough time in the day.
Now, though, I have more than enough to cart in all the bathroom supplies from Handyman, organize them by the order in which the internet tells me I will need them, line everything along the wall of the upstairs hallway and still be a good fifteen minutes early for my mid-afternoon skim latte date in Georgetown—even though I know it’s just not in Mandy’s DNA to arrive anywhere when she says she will. She pulls up at thirteen minutes past three, just as I’m settling onto a sidewalk terrace chair with two fresh drinks, my second and her first.
“Sorry I’m late,” she calls from across the street. “Client meeting ran way over, but the good news is, I knocked their sixty-dollar argyle socks off.”
“Come on. Socks don’t cost sixty dollars.”
“Not exactly the point here. The point here is—” an SUV whizzes by, stirring up the early-September air with the first of the fallen leaves, and Mandy disappears behind it, reappearing a second or two later with a wide grin “—they loved me. They gave me the job.”
She steps off the curb without checking traffic, without making sure the drivers have slammed their brakes and their tires have screeched to a complete halt. Which they do, of course. Mandy is the human version of Jessica Rabbit, a rowdy redhead with Bambi eyes and bee-stung lips who favors skintight jeans, high heels and flowy, flowery blouses. Stopping traffic is her superpower. There’s not a man on the planet who gets annoyed at the sight of her jaywalking across four lanes of city traffic as she’s doing now.
“She’s happily married,” I say loudly enough so that the one closest to me, a Paul Bunyan type in a minivan, hears me through his open window. He responds by leaning into the dash to get a better look at her ass.
She collapses onto the seat next to me, snatches up her cup from the table. “Did you hear me? Honeymoon Channel wants me to redesign their app. It’s a big deal, Abby. You should be thrilled.”
“I am thrilled for you.”
“Be thrilled for us.” She lifts her drink in a toast, then pauses for a long pull. “I sold your services, too.”
“I already have a job, remember?”
If she rolls her eyes, she’s considerate enough to do it behind her mirrored sunglasses. After Chelsea died, Mandy made no secret of her disgust with my decision to shove my press pass to the back of a drawer, and she’s spent the past three years encouraging me, rather loudly and relentlessly, to get back in there. To write something good, something meaningful, do something more exciting than my current drudgery.
But what Mandy can’t seem to understand is, there’s no shelf life on guilt. Someone died because of me, because of words I wrote. Just because I wasn’t the one to pull the proverbial trigger doesn’t mean I wasn’t to blame. Words, even when they’re carefully crafted, can be just as deadly as a bullet.
“Come on, Abigail.” Mandy shoves her glasses to the top of her head and leans into the table. “I’ve
