“It looks like no one lives there.”
“You’re right.” The way the brown grass was overgrown, the way the screen door hung, only halfway attached.
“Mom says she keeps it that way on purpose. But I’m not sure that’s the real reason.”
“Why would she want that?”
“She says so people don’t come to the house and bother me while she’s at work.”
“She’s at work a lot?”
Ella’s lips closed, as if she’d suddenly remembered she wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers.
“Forget I asked. That was a rude question.”
The girl appeared surprised, her dark eyebrows lifting. “My mom says I’m full of rude questions.”
“Oh, good, they’re my favorite.”
Ella giggled. “How old are you?”
“How old do you think I am?”
Tilting her head, Ella considered. “Fifty.”
“Wow! No.”
“Twenty-one?”
“Flatterer. I’m thirty-three. How old are you?”
“How old do you think I am?”
Tuesday considered. She was tall enough to be twelve, but she had a young demeanor. “I think you’re eleven.”
Ella blinked. “How did you know?”
“I’m a teacher.”
“What grade?”
“Fifth. Usually.” Who knew what she’d teach in the future? If anything? “Are you in sixth?”
Ella nodded. “I hate it.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re doing geometry and my teacher doesn’t even care that I don’t understand it.”
“What don’t you understand?”
“Any of it. I sometimes get the answers right because I can kind of guess angles with my stupid protractor. But I can never remember how to tell if something’s acute or obtuse. I don’t know why, and that’s driving me crazy.”
Tuesday didn’t laugh, even though the little girl most definitely sounded like an adult on the last few words. Undoubtedly, her mother said something similar, often. “The word acute has the word cut in it. A sharp angle can cut you, so an angle that looks like a blade is acute.”
“Oh!” Ella looked surprised.
“Your teacher never taught you that?”
“No, no.” Ella waved her hands. “Can you help me?”
Tuesday took a step backward. “Um.”
“Please? You’re our neighbor, so you’re not a stranger. Mom won’t mind. I like being around you.”
The words were simple and sweet, going straight to Tuesday’s blood like sparkling wine. “You do?”
Ella shrugged. “Sometimes it happens fast.”
Tuesday thought of Aidan. “Sometimes it does.”
“So you’ll help me? With geometry?”
“Ella, I—” Tuesday should say no. She wasn’t ready. But she didn’t know how to say it without bursting this girl’s hopeful bubble.
The girl was intuitive, that much was clear. She stopped. Immediately. As if Tuesday had yelled at her instead of just stammering.
“Never mind,” Ella said.
“Wait—”
But Ella was already retreating, her hand covering her neck. “S’fine.”
“Ella.” Tuesday reached a hand forward. “It’s not—”
“Not about my scar,” Ella muttered. “I know.” She reached for the latch of the gate.
“Your scar?” Oh, no. Tuesday wasn’t going to let that one go. She hurried, taking long steps, and managed to get next to the girl. “You think this is about your scar?”
Ella rolled her eyes. “It was from a pan of spaghetti water, I was three, I pulled it down on myself, and I don’t remember it at all. No, it will never go away. No, it doesn’t still hurt.”
Tuesday pulled up her shirt, exposing her stomach.
Ella gasped.
Tuesday took a breath and felt the cool air hit all the parts of her skin that weren’t knotted and roped by the thickened skin. “I don’t care about your scar.”
Ella covered her mouth with her fingers.
“Yeah?” Tuesday wanted to drop the hem of her shirt, but Ella’s eyes were huge, taking it all in.
“That’s a bad one.”
“It’s still pretty fresh, that’s why it’s still so angry looking.”
“How long?”
“About eight months.” It was hard to believe. The crash felt like yesterday and at the same time, it was forever ago.
“Does it still itch?”
“All the time. Does yours?”
Ella looked surprised to be asked. “No. But I kind of remember that it did. Sometimes I still scratch it.”
“They told me not to.”
“Yeah, well.” Ella sighed and she sounded twenty years older. She pointed at Tuesday’s torso. “Are you okay? Like, inside?”
Strangely, she couldn’t lie to this kid. “I can’t have children. Other than that, I’m okay.” So very not okay.
“Do you mind?”
“Yes.”
“That sucks.”
It was nice to hear, actually. “Agreed.” Tuesday let the hem of her shirt drop. “I just wanted you to know you’re not alone.”
“Thanks.” The girl’s gaze fell to the ground.
“What is it?”
“Well, it’s just that yours…no one can see yours.”
That was true. In most cases, Tuesday’s scar was invisible to the world. Ella’s scar, unless she wore a turtleneck—did they even make those anymore?—was on view to the world. “That must be really hard on you.”
Ella’s eyes widened. “It is.”
“Why do you look so surprised that I say that?”
“Because grownups always say it’s not a big deal. That I should just ignore it. Mom says I should not care that I have it, that it makes me strong.”
Tuesday could feel her mother’s gaze on her own face as she lay in the hospital bed. Don’t worry, darling, no one will see that. And if they do, no one will care. You lived through it. You’re stronger now.
“Well, they’re not the ones with the scar, huh?”
Ella grinned. “They’re not.”
“We are, though.”
“We are.” She held out her closed fist.
Tuesday stared at it for a moment.
Oh.
She fist-bumped the girl gently.
“Scar club!” said Ella.
“Scar club.”
“Bye!”
In two steps, she was through the gate, and when Tuesday moved to call her back, she wasn’t even in her yard—she’d disappeared into the house with a quiet bang.
Damn it. She wasn’t ready for a friendship with a kid. Not yet.
Unless that kid was Ella… Maybe?
Ella was right about one thing, though. Sometimes things did happen fast.
Chapter 18
F
elicia rounded up Aidan just as he was coming up from under the house. Tuesday was with her, and Aidan spent a good five seconds thumping his ball cap against his leg to get the dust from under the house off it.
Felicia flipped a page of her notebook. “How does it look down there?”
He pressed his hands to his lower back and straightened as much as he could. “It’s good. Foundation is fixed, and we earthquake retrofitted it, too. Now we’re ready to do the rest of the work inside.”
Felicia snapped her fingers toward Gene. “Sorry, Aidan, can you say that again? On camera?”
He did, feeling like an idiot. Why did they even call it reality TV? There was nothing real about it.
Except for the way his heart beat sped up whenever Tuesday entered a room. That was, well—that was really fucking real.
“That’s good,” said Tuesday. “That’ll save us money, right?”
She was great on camera. A natural. “You’d think so, yeah, but unfortunately I found that the floor of the bathroom is pretty rotted through. There was a leak in the bathtub overflow valve, an
d water’s been pooling underneath the tub for years.”
Tuesday pushed her hair back out of her face. “That explains the moldy smell. I was hoping that was just stagnant water in the pipes.”
“Nope.”
Her face fell. His fault. “I can fix it, though.”
“For a lot more money. I know.”
“Nah. It’ll still come in under the estimate.” Liam was going to kill him.
But the way her face had brightened made his forthcoming death worth it.
Felicia gave him a skeptical look, her right eyebrow arched. She gestured at the camera again. “Can you please tell Tuesday why you think you’ll be able to save her money?”
Felicia was just being nice. She was trying to push the Ballard Brother brand—they liked to under-promise and over-deliver, coming in under budget when they could.
“If it was my house—” he started. It wasn’t. That was the whole problem. God, it was complicated. How did he give advice to a woman who owned the house of his dreams?
“Yeah?” Tuesday leaned forward. He could smell her perfume, light and clean, like sunshine on wild mustard blossoms.
“If I was redoing the place for myself—” he cleared his throat “—I’d tear out this downstairs bathroom, and make it bigger. Make a place for a clawfoot, since the floor can handle the weight. Tankless water heater. Redo the whole subfloor, maybe even bring in geothermal.”
“Geothermal what—water?”
“Heat, yeah. You could pipe the whole house with it, but that would be pretty expensive. But just to bring it in here on one level, to heat the floors in winter, that would be easy.”
Tuesday shook her head. Her cheeks were so pink and her lips so full—he wanted to taste them again, the cameras be damned. “I still don’t get it. Geothermal from where?”
He stared. “You know about the hot springs.”
“What?”
Felicia laughed. “Whoops.”
Aidan stared at Tuesday. “That is literally the best thing about this house.” And it would have been a perfect house even without the spring. “There’s a natural hot pool at the bottom of the yard. Part of a chain of them on this side of town. And you didn’t know?”
“That’s the rotten egg smell in the backyard?”
“Yeah.”
“But where is it?”
“In the shared easement below your fence. You saw the gate, right?”
“Only the one that leads next door.”
“Oh, my God, let’s go.” He saw Felicia shoot a thumb’s up at Gene and his camera, but he ignored the TV crew as they followed on their heels. The fact that he got to show Tuesday the best part of the property made him feel giddy, like he was in his hang glider, soaring down toward the water and then banking back up again.
She was going to love this.
Chapter 19
T
uesday had seen something about a spring in the contract, and she’d meant to ask, but in her mind it was like the old wells in the backyards of older Duluth properties. They were capped. Dangerous. Ignored.
She never imagined a geothermal hot spring. Of her own.
The gate was hidden by the overgrown vines. No wonder Tuesday hadn’t seen it before. As it was, Aidan had to hack their way through a couple of thick branches of it in order to creak it open. She was impressed that he had a folding saw on his person. He dug it out of his tool belt, put on goggles, and sawed away.
“This is wisteria, right?”
Aidan nodded. He pulled on the gate. One more vine in the way. It almost hurt to watch him work. Firstly, the way his triceps flexed as he sawed was probably illegal in some parts of the country. He looked like a Greek God. He should have been on the side of an urn somewhere.
Secondly, it was wisteria. “Won’t that hurt the plant?”
“Yeah. It will.”
“Do we have to?” She winced as he finished breaking off a large overhang of thick vine.
“Oh, darlin’. You’re going to be so happy I did.”
His voice was pitched low, just for her (though of course Anna had her boom mic up—it hung over their heads like a fat squirrel on a pole). His words made Tuesday shiver.
She waited as he finished sawing. The gate to the neighbor’s yard squeaked once, as if Ella might be checking on them, but it didn’t open, and Tuesday didn’t look. She’d scared the girl once—she didn’t need to again.
“Is there just one? Hot spring?”
Aidan flipped the narrow saw closed and took out a pocketknife. “There are lots of them, all along this ridge. Most of them are private, like this one, but some are on public land. I can’t believe you’ve never heard of them.”
“I’m from Minnesota.”
He sawed cheerfully at several more vines that had wound around the gate’s handle. “So?”
“Apparently I know nothing about the whole state. I thought California was all white sand and bright sun and palm trees.” She hadn’t known it could get dark and rainy. She hadn’t known it would be so thickly forested.
She hadn’t known the man she couldn’t take her eyes off would look like one of the men who hunted in the Superior national forest.
“You disappointed?” Aidan put the pocketknife between his teeth and untangled the last vine, which appeared to have tied itself in a knot.
She didn’t answer. She wasn’t. She just didn’t know how to say it.
Aidan slipped the knife back into his pocket and pulled open the gate.
He waved his arm. “If you are, this should fix it.”
Tuesday’s favorite book as a child had been The Secret Garden. When Mary Lennox’s robin led her in, when the door had opened, nine-year-old Tuesday had gasped. She hadn’t been in her bed with snow falling outside, so much of it that school had closed, but she’d been in England with Colin and Dickon, making the garden beautiful. As an adult, she read it to her class just before every winter break. Her copy was dog-eared, the cover limp. She loved that book and its fictional garden fiercely.
The hot spring was even better than that.
The gate opened to a rugged staircase that led down into a little clearing. A natural grotto made of rock outcroppings stood in a semi-circle. Tall trees grew in a ring, twenty feet away from the water—redwoods and a couple of pine. But right around the pool were just low, flat rocks covered with a mossy carpet.
The water glittered, dark and sparkling.
It was triple the size of the biggest hot tub at her parents’ YMCA. But there were no safety warnings, no lifeguards. No concrete, no wall clocks. Just the rocks, and the high blue sky above. A white plume of steam rose—wider at the middle of the pool, dissipating at the edges. The wind soughed in the branches and a chirruping came from a fat squirrel perched halfway up a sycamore. The air smelled strongly of pine leaves, and mildly of rotten eggs.
She loved it.
“What do you think?” She felt Aidan’s careful eyes on her.
“Oh.” It was all Tuesday could say. She knew the cameras were on her—she knew they’d probably use this footage—and she didn’t care. Happy tears came to her eyes, hot and surprising. This was hers, this was home, this was incredible. “Oh.”
Behind them, Felicia laughed. “How are you feeling about the property now?”
“This is seriously part of the property? You’re sure.”
Aidan’s lips tightened for a split second, but the smile stayed in his eyes. “Yep.”
“Is it safe? Or is it one of those boiling pools that’ll take your skin off?” She’d read about the ones in Iceland—pools in which a person could actually boil eggs for dinner.
“It’s about a hundred degrees on the edge and a couple degrees hotter in the middle.”
“Oh,” she said again.
It was magical.
A tiny forest grove with a hot pool of her very own. She would move down here, abandon the house and set up housekeeping here. All she would need was a hammock and a box full of trail mix. She’d
read books by the side of the spring, and she’d slip in when she got cold. She would forget to worry about all that had happened in the past, and all that might happen in the future. This was a perfect place to be alone.
Or with one other person.
She looked at Aidan. Her heart skittered in her chest, as if she’d tried to skip it across the flat water. “Have you been in this pool before?”
He’d been looking over the water, but his gaze slammed into hers a split second after she’d spoken. “Yeah. A teacher of mine lived here, and sometimes we’d go in after dinner.”
“Nice.”
Aidan looked at the cameras. He looked at Felicia. “Let’s take a dip.”
Surprise rippled down her arms. “What?”
“Let’s get in.” His hands went to his tool belt. Unceremoniously, he dropped it to the moss.
“Now?”
“No better time.”
“I don’t have a swimsuit.” It was a weak protest.
“You got on underwear?”
Oh, yes. She did. She’d never admit she’d purposefully chosen her newest black bra and panty set that morning. She hadn’t been thinking that he would see it, but she’d chosen it nonetheless, ignoring the fact that she’d thought of Aidan while she’d done up the bra clasp. “Of course I do.”
“Same thing as a suit. Come on.”
Felicia looked surprised. “Aidan, are you sure?”
Tuesday realized she’d made up her mind last night. It just hadn’t sunk in till this moment. “Felicia?” She tried to keep her hands from shaking.
Felicia was looking at her pad of paper, flipping the pages as if she could find the script they were obviously deviating from. “Yeah?”
“I’ve decided I’m going to date Aidan. Not Jake.”
Felicia dropped her notebook. The pages slapped the air at her feet. “Sorry?”
Aidan gave a brief whoop and then whipped off his shirt. His chest looked better than it had in Tuesday’s imagination, which was saying a lot. His abs were taut, defined. A fine trail of dark hair led to the top of his jeans, where his fingers worked on his belt. Both shoulders were covered in thick blue ink, something she hadn’t expected. Tribal bands, and something else—a bird of prey of some sort crept over his shoulders.
Build it Strong (The Ballard Brothers of Darling Bay Book 2) Page 9