Page 74 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

Then my laugh arrives, and it's real, and he never notices the gap. But I do. I notice that I went looking. A man folded two hundred chairs badly because he loves me, and I ran his face like a suspect's.

I could stand to know less about myself tonight.

We finish the last rack together. He holds. I fold. We are, it turns out, an excellent chair team, which he declares should go in the town newsletter.

At the door he pulls his jacket back on and pats the pockets the way he does. Keys, phone, screwdriver, apparently.

"Grant sent two more Dallas clients my way this week. Estate work, both of them." He says it the way he says everything good, like he's reporting weather. "He keeps this up, I'll need a second filing cabinet."

"Look at you. Big city practice."

"Small town practice with a long driveway." He smiles. "It's good for the town, is what it is. Money like that finds Willowbend, some of it stays."

The questions are right there. Sitting on my tongue with their shoes on.

Which firm. Anybody I knew back then. When do they come in.

Easy questions. Wife-shaped questions. The kind a woman asks with her arms around a man's neck, half listening, proud of him, and he tells her about retainers and the one who talks too long, and it's nothing, and they laugh.

I don't ask them.

I watch him instead. His face while he talks about his week. His hands. The easy way he stands in my doorway, a man with nowhere to hide and nothing in his pockets but a screwdriver.

There's nothing to see.

I file that too. That there was nothing to see. My files have a section for that now, apparently. Absence of findings, noted, dated, initialed.

"You're tired," he says, and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. "Don't stay late doing sums you already did."

"I like when they balance twice."

"I know you do." He kisses my hair. Right at the crown, the way he's done since the first time he dared. "Lock up tight. Call me when you're done and in the cottage."

And he goes. Down the steps, across the gravel, into the truck. He doesn't look back and there's no reason he should, and I stand in the doorway watching his taillights the whole way down the lane, which is a thing I'd rather not think about either.

The Hall is different empty. Everybody says so. They mean it's lonely, and they're wrong. It's not lonely. It's honest. Two hundred chairs racked clean, the floor swept, the roof shut, the whole barn holding its breath the way it does between events.

I kill the stage lights. Then the strings over the dance floor, section by section, walking the length of my grandmother's building in the shrinking light.

Her poem hangs on the east wall where it's hung since the week I buried her. Framed in the oak Henry milled himself. I know it without looking, the way you know a scar. The one about taking the love that stumbles toward you. About how it never arrives walking straight.

I stop in front of it with my hand on the last switch.

Here is the whole file, laid out fair, the way I'd lay it out for a client: a hug in a parking lot. A man who fixed my door and folded my chairs and knows I give the roll to the birds.

That's everything. That's the entire case.

There is nothing to act on. Any woman in this county would read that file and close it, and she'd be right to, and I would help her carry the box to storage.

So I do what I'm best at.

I keep watching.

The switch clicks. The east wall goes dark, and Gran's poem goes dark with it, and I stand a minute in my grandmother's building listening to nothing at all.

Then I lock up tight, like he asked.

Chapter twenty-two