Chapter 5 - The House on Larkspur Lane
The next morning, curiosity beat pride.
The address took me to a quiet dead-end street on the edge of town, Larkspur Lane, where a white craftsman house sat under two enormous maple trees. Somebody had spread fresh mulch along the flower beds. Blue balloons were knotted around the mailbox post.
Marcus was standing in the driveway with four guys from our crew.
Then I saw Nora on the porch.
Old jeans. Scuffed work boots. A faded sweatshirt stiff with dried paint. For the first time in months I actually looked at her hands.
Little cuts crossed every knuckle. The skin around her fingertips was split and rough.
Not from a waiting room. From work.
Marcus walked over and put a thick envelope in my hands.
"Open it."
Inside was a deed.
The two names printed across the top were mine and Nora's.
I just stared at the paper.
"Your landlord was getting ready to sell the rental out from under you," Marcus said. "Nora came to me back in the winter asking for a job. She wanted to help buy a house before you got a thirty-day notice you couldn't do anything about."
My throat closed up.
"She asked me to teach her construction. Framing, drywall, paint, tile — all of it. She worked afternoons, weekends, every hour she could scrape together. Instead of cutting her a check every Friday, we rolled her share of the job straight into this property."
"The seventy thousand," I said.
"Her cut of the renovation profit. Every dollar of it went into that front door."
I looked at Nora. Her eyes were already wet.
"I thought if I could just hand you a house, it would fix everything," she said. "Instead I almost tore down the only home that ever mattered."
That was when I noticed her stomach was flat.
"The pregnancy."
Her shoulders dropped. "There was never a pregnancy." She unzipped the bag at her feet, pulled out the foam belly she'd been wearing for months, and held it up between us. "I should have told you the truth a long time before it got this far."
And all at once every piece slid into place.
May you like
The way she'd refused to let me come with her to a single appointment. The bone-deep exhaustion. The paint smell. She hadn't been hiding a clinic from me.
She'd been hiding this.
