“We’re going to be spending time together while we renovate The Dowell House,” Hannah pointed out. “And it’s going to be a lot of work.”
Avery held up her hands, which were freshly manicured. “Do I look like I’m getting involved in actual manual labor? We are going to end up paying someone else to do most of it.”
“I know,” Hannah said. “But it’s still going to be time-consuming to oversee it.”
“We have time to sit together and make a quilt,” Lark said. “If we don’t make the time...” She closed her eyes. “I feel like I’ve barely seen either of you since I left home.”
“Because you haven’t,” Hannah said.
“I didn’t see Gram enough. And now it’s too late.” Lark appealed to her sisters. “Remember sitting on the front porch of The Miner’s House? And we would each get a little quilt square? And we’d actually sit together and we didn’t fight or anything. It was good.”
“I don’t do this stuff anymore,” Hannah said. “I might not be performing while I’m here but I can’t stop practicing. I have to get everything with the house organized, I don’t know that I want to undertake...quilting.”
“Come drink wine then,” Avery said. “You have to put your violin down sometimes. Do it at this appointed time.”
“Why don’t you want to do it?” Lark asked. “You liked it when we were kids.”
“Until I found the thing I loved doing. Anyway, you know what I’m allergic to? Domesticity.”
Avery rolled her eyes. “Well don’t get too close to me. I might get some on you.”
“You take everything awfully personally,” Hannah said.
“And you’re taking a little bit of quilting awfully seriously.”
“Mom’s not going to be super into it either,” Avery pointed out, ignoring Hannah now.
“She barely knows how to thread a needle. And you know she’s going to get mad about it because she hates it when she doesn’t know how to do something.”
Something shifted inside Lark’s chest. “We’ll teach her. Because Gram didn’t. But she did teach us. And it’s not lost. It’s not too late.”
Conviction burned in her chest, along with something else. A deep need to share this. To pass it on. Like the stitches on the quilt would stitch up something inside of her. Close something off that had been there, frayed and gaping for years.
“Okay,” Avery said. “I’ll do it. I’ll convince her.”
Lark raised her glass. “Excellent. The Ashwood family quilting circle will commence this week.”
4
He says he wants to marry me. That will mean...staying here. I can’t bear the thought of it. I love him, but I cannot imagine that life. In a kitchen, looking at the same view I’ve seen all my life with children tugging at my hem. Even he could not make it bearable.
Ava Moore’s diary, 1923
Hannah
It seemed somehow quintessentially Bear Creek that there would be a generalized handyman. Who not only did basic plumbing, but other odd jobs. Drywall repair, electrical. It was the kind of thing some people found charming about small towns. And if Hannah squinted and tilted her head slightly, she could almost see it.
But mostly she found the lack of options here just...a lot of work. It wasn’t like in Boston where she could order groceries, dinner, a car or a date all with her phone.
Though she supposed a handyman who was basically a human Swiss Army knife was a convenience of a sort.
And it was of course exactly what they needed to get The Dowell House functional again.
The wiring was finicky, owing to the fact that their grandfather had done a fair amount of work on the place on his own. And absolutely shouldn’t have. The man wasn’t qualified. Sometimes a light switch in one corner of the kitchen turned a light out in the parlor, and it was things like that that were going to make it difficult for guests to enjoy a stay.
What had surprised her was that there had been a website with a contact form, and she’d been able to contact the business through the internet and make an appointment that way.
In her opinion everyone should do it like that. If she could avoid a phone call, she would.
She wanted efficiency. Not small talk.
She was puttering around the kitchen when she heard the sound of a truck, a big truck, with a rumbling, clanking engine pull up to the property.
“You would think a handyman might make his truck sound like it wasn’t on its last gasp,” she muttered as she went over to the window and looked outside. It was indeed a big dually, all white and chipped with red lettering on the side that said All Around Handyman.
“Not a mechanic, though,” she said against the window.
The figure inside shifted, and got out of the truck, rounding to the passenger side so that Hannah could get a better look at him. He was not, as she had imagined, a middle-aged gray-haired man with a beer belly. Rather the guy was young, with dark brown hair and broad shoulders. And when he turned to the side, she felt like she had taken a punch straight to her solar plexus.
That profile was as familiar as her own.
More.
She blinked rapidly, shocked that tears were filling her eyes. Tears. Over the ex-boyfriend that she had broken up with nineteen years ago.
It was just shock. She wasn’t remotely heartbroken over Joshua Anderson. Not back then, not nineteen years later.
Then he turned fully, facing the kitchen window, and looked up. She felt like she was sixteen years old all over again.
And she knew that the face she saw, superimposed over whatever his actual thirty-six-year-old face looked like, was just the boy that she had fallen for, hard and fast, clawing tooth and nail to try not to. Because she had always known she was going to leave, and she had never, ever wanted to have a relationship with a local boy.
But she could remember then. That he was the most beautiful thing she
