Tonight, as usual, she’s settled into the quiet nook off the foyer that serves as her home office. A few hours stretch between now and bedtime, to be filled with lesson planning or reading or poking around on the Internet, something she doesn’t get to do at her day job, unlike many of her friends.
Officially, this room—-which has solid cherry pocket doors, a marble fireplace, built--in bookshelves, and vintage wall sconces that were originally gas—-was intended for the entire family to use. Unofficially, it’s hers alone, cluttered with her books and files and decorated with tag sale finds: a fainting couch upholstered in rose velvet, a doily--topped pie crust table, an antique baby buggy with a yellowed christening gown draped over the handle.
Hearing the familiar opening music for NFL’s Monday Night Football coming from the TV in the living room across the foyer, she quickly sets aside the stack of social studies tests she’d been grading.
Rather, trying to grade. And pretending to grade, when Jake slid open one of the doors and poked his head in here earlier to ask what had happened to the pistachio nuts he’d bought over the weekend.
“They’re in the top left cupboard,” she told him, red pen poised as though he’d just interrupted her from doing something other than fretting about the mysterious package she’d received this afternoon.
“No, they aren’t. I just looked.”
“They’re there.”
“They’re not,” he volleyed back, and they embarked upon yet another discussion of the sort they’ve had countless times over two decades of marriage.
“Mick must have eaten them,” Jake decided.
“Mick doesn’t like them.”
“No, he just doesn’t want to be bothered with the shells. But if he was hungry enough—-and when isn’t he?—-then he probably . . .”
Shut up!
That was what Rowan wanted to scream at her unwitting husband in that moment. Didn’t he realize how insignificant his stupid pistachio nuts were? Didn’t he know she had other things to worry about?
No. He didn’t.
Still doesn’t. Thank God. She’s not about to bring it up, and Mick was already at his busboy job when Jake walked in the door after work. He won’t be home for at least another hour. By then, with luck, he’ll have forgotten all about the package that came in the mail, which is currently stashed in a dark corner of the attic. She wanted to throw it away, but with the garbage can latch broken, raccoons might get into it overnight and leave it strewn across the steps for the whole world—-Jake—-to see.
Right now, he’s safely occupied with Monday Night Football and the pistachios, which of course he found in the top left cupboard after all, right where she said they’d be.
It’s not that she runs a highly organized household. Far from it. But after two decades of marriage and one of medication, there is a certain order to the chaos. Jake somehow has yet to fully grasp it.
She pushes the stack of social studies papers aside, drops the pen, and opens her laptop. Before she allows herself to start typing, she looks over her shoulder again to make sure Jake hasn’t resurfaced in the doorway.
Satisfied that she’s alone, Rowan opens a search engine, resigned to searching for the man who’s been on her mind ever since she realized what was in that box.
Cookies.
Burnt cookies.
Thirteen of them.
“Why thirteen?” he asked on that snowy afternoon, watching her carry the baking sheet over to the oven. “That’s unlucky, isn’t it?”
“Not for me,” she said. “When I was a kid, my sister taught me how to bake, but she always wanted me to put exactly a dozen balls of dough onto the sheet for every batch. She was a real stickler for recipes and rules.”
“And you weren’t big on rules?”
She allowed herself to grin naughtily at him. “Never.”
She knew she was flirting. Somehow, she didn’t care.