Nina waved a hand. “City-finance stuff. I won’t bore you with the details. I’d rather hear about you living with Rourke.”
“See?” Jenny snapped. “I shouldn’t be there. It’s crazy.”
“I’m teasing. Listen, we still don’t know what happened at your house,” Nina pointed out. “You should stay with him at least until they figure that out.”
“Oh, God. A conspiracy theory?”
“No. I’m just being practical. And if it’s that big a deal, move into my place.”
“I might take you up on that.” Jenny knew she wouldn’t, though. Nina and Sonnet didn’t have room. “What I really need to do is figure out a permanent arrangement.”
“Don’t rush into anything. Remember what the adjuster said—don’t make any major decisions right away. And the most major of all is where you’re going to live, spend the rest of your life.”
Just hearing the words caused Jenny’s heart to kick into high gear, warning her that a panic attack was always lurking just beneath the surface. It was the strangest feeling to wake up in the morning and not know what your life was going to be.
Nina must have read the worry in her face. She gave Jenny a reassuring pat on the arm. “The last thing you need to be worrying about is what people think. Just take your time, okay?”
Jenny nodded and bundled up for the cold, and headed back to Rourke’s house. Three grateful dogs burst from the mudroom into the yard, and Jenny headed inside with a sack of groceries and a stack of books from the library. Eventually, of course, she would need to buy new copies of all those precious volumes she’d lost in the fire. There were childhood favorites, mercifully still in print—Charlotte’s Web, Harriet the Spy, The Borrowers. Others, the town librarian had warned, might be out of print, but she promised to track down a copy of You Were Princess Last Time, a tale of two sisters Jenny had wept over countless times when she was little. Then there were books she returned to again and again—a collection of essays on writing by Ray Bradbury. Tales of escape and reinvention, like Under the Tuscan Sun, and stories about food by Ruth Reichl. But those were the books Jenny remembered. One of her greatest regrets was that she had no record of the many books she wouldn’t remember.
Slowly peeling off her gloves and parka, she wandered to the living room and looked at the bookshelves there. She caught herself doing this often—searching Rourke’s house for evidence of who he was. Maybe, she admitted to herself, she was looking for who he used to be. People’s books said a lot of about them, but Rourke’s choices were as impenetrable as he was—police procedure, old textbooks, repair manuals. There was a big collection of well-thumbed action-adventure paperbacks with titles like Assault on Precinct 17 and Murder Street, which probably depicted a very different style of police work than Rourke did in Avalon. Some books, probably gifts from frustrated ex-girlfriends, appeared to be pristine and unread—relationship manuals doubtless intended to show him the error of his ways. She counted at least three separate editions of Relationship Rescue. The Relationship Rescue Workbook was still in its shrink-wrap.
Dream on, she silently told the women who had given him those books. She seriously doubted it was in any man’s nature to read a book like that and think it applied to him.
She went back into the kitchen to put away the groceries. She had never lived with a man before, so she didn’t know if Rourke was typical or not. She had been so used to taking care of her grandmother, rising early, getting her ready for the visiting nurse. It was a revelation to simply wake up on her own, to go through her day without planning it around Gram’s needs. After just a few days at Rourke’s house, a rhythm established itself. He got up early and fixed his amazing coffee. She would drink a cup while he showered, and then they switched. They had breakfast together—she quickly broke his habit of eating second-rate grocery-store pastries—and went off to work.
And at the end of the day, sounding hopelessly domestic, she found herself fixing tuna sandwiches and asking, “How was your day?” How was your day, dear?
She couldn’t help it. It felt perfectly natural. As did the subtle lift of her heart when she heard him come through the back door, stamping the snow from his boots and whistling to the dogs before stepping into the warm kitchen.
“Hey,” she said, “how was—” oh, God, she was doing it again “—your day?”
“Busy.” He didn’t seem bothered by the familiar tone of the question. “We had thirteen traffic incidents, seven involving alcohol, all of them involving slippery road conditions. A domestic disturbance, a check-forging scam, kids defacing school property and a woman who left her small child home alone while she went to work.”
“How do you stand it?” Jenny asked. “You see people at their worst, every day. It must get depressing.”
“I suppose what makes it okay for me is that I try to make things better. Doesn’t always work, though.”
“You mean sometimes you have to let the bad guys go?”
“Yeah. Sometimes. If there isn’t enough evidence or somebody screwed up, or because we have bigger fish to fry and can’t spare the manpower. Lots of reasons.” Before she could ask another question, he waved a hand. “Some of the stuff I do during the day, it’s not good dinner conversation.”
Like everyone, he brought home an invisible burden from work every day. But for most people, the burden didn’t consist of the petty crimes and cruelties of small-town police work. “Our lives are so different,” she said. “You go to work every day and see people behaving badly.”
He laughed. “No one’s ever put it quite that way.”
“And at the bakery, I see people who only need a cup of coffee and a fresh cruller, and they’re happy.”
“I should retire from the force and buy
