The Debutante's Second Chance. Liz Flaherty

inside it for twenty years, but he remembered where the fireplace would be, flanked by built-in bookcases with glass doors. He knew the floor of the living room would be constructed of wide planks, with the imperfections and irregularities of age adding to its beauty. He knew, before he peered into the library or the formal dining room or the family room off the kitchen, before he walked up the curving front staircase or the crooked, narrow back one, that he’d come home.

      Halfway up the front stairs, he said, “I’ll take it.”

      Eli, following him, stopped. “You wouldn’t like to know how much it is?”

      He shrugged. “Are you going to screw me?”

      “No.”

      Micah gave him a sideways grin. “Then, no, I don’t need to know right now. When can I move in?”

      “Tomorrow.”

      He met Eli’s outstretched hand with his own. “Tomorrow? For all you know, I’m a con man looking for a respectable place to launder money.”

      Eli’s smile was enigmatic. “I was on the football field with you. I know better. Landis, you going to take care of this?”

      Micah had forgotten she was there, so enthralled had he been by the house. He looked down at where she stood, his gaze meeting hers in mute apology. But she was laughing, and her eyes were sparkling.

      How could he, for even one minute, have forgotten her presence?

      “Couldn’t you two at least talk this out a little more so I will have earned my commission?”

      Eli looked at his watch. “I don’t have time. I have to make sure the madding crowd over there doesn’t dismantle the dining room, and then I have to make myself look properly preacherly before the evening service. Call me in the morning, Micah, and we’ll finish this over breakfast.”

      He wrung Micah’s hand again, sketched a wave to Landy as he passed her, and was gone.

      “Preacherly?” said Micah.

      “Eli’s the minister at the Methodist Church.”

      “A minister?” But it fit, Micah realized after a moment—Eli was one of the good guys.

      His attention shifted back to Landy. “You never did have anything to eat,” he said suddenly. “Let me buy you dinner.”

      Chapter Two

      Window Over the Sink, Taft Tribune: April is such a beautiful month. Things start getting green again and there’s hope everywhere and baseball fields ring with the sounds of joy.

      But you have to watch for storms in April, have to listen to tornado warnings and watches and open your basement door and keep a bottle of water and a first-aid kit down there in case something bad happens. Sometimes the price we pay for spring is a heavy one.

      The fact that she wanted to have dinner with Micah surprised Landy. She hadn’t shared a meal alone with a man since the last time with Blake. Her husband had skimmed his meat across the table like a pebble on a pond and she’d said, “I’m sorry,” even though there had been nothing wrong with the pork chop—everything was wrong with the marriage, where terror and abuse had places at the dinner table.

      She hesitated, lost in memory, and was brought back to the present by Micah’s questioning gaze. “All right,” she said, “but come to my house. My cooking is the best example of mediocrity you’ll find this side of a fast-food place. But I have some chili I can heat up that’ll be perfect for a rainy night like this. We can get there in two minutes on the Walk.” And it was safe. Nothing could happen to her there in a house where Blake had never been, where pain had never lived.

      Micah nodded, a smile coming into his eyes. She locked the St. John house and handed him the key, and he pocketed it without comment. She realized that houses didn’t mean the same thing to men that they did to women. Men seemed to see them as investments, mere buildings to keep them out of the rain, while women saw them as safe havens, warmth against the cold and extensions of themselves. They wanted the decor to reflect their personalities and be welcoming; men wanted it to be cheap and not show dirt.

      “What are your plans for the paper?” she asked. “It’s become so political in recent years. Are you going to keep it that way?”

      “No.”

      He took her arm, and she knew he’d noticed her limp. People always did.

      “Remember when we were kids?” he asked. “The news was mostly local. Weddings, funerals, fiftieth anniversary parties. The columnists, even the political ones, wrote from the slant of living in a little river town. Kind of like the towns Tom Bodett and Garrison Keillor write about.”

      “I remember. Everyone in town took the paper then.”

      “Right. And if a paper boy or girl forgot to deliver it, the editor took a copy out to the subscriber the same night and gave him the next week free.”

      They were at her back steps now, and she tried not to lean on his arm as they walked up. Her leg wasn’t more painful when she climbed stairs, but lifting her foot repeatedly was awkward and tiring.

      “Is that what you’re going to do? Bring that back?” Keep him talking and he won’t ask you why you limp.

      “I’m going to try to,” he corrected her. “It was that kind of newspaper that made me want to be a journalist.”

      She led the way into the kitchen of her house, tossing her coat over the back of a chair to dry. “Let me take your coat.”

      She hung his raincoat in the laundry room and returned to find him standing at the cold fireplace in the kitchen. “Light a fire if you’d like,” she suggested. “I know it’s not that cold, but the chill from the rain gets into your bones.” Especially ones that have been broken. She longed to swallow some aspirin to ease the ache in her leg, but didn’t want to invite comment.

      He knelt before the fireplace, laying a fire carefully. “Was this kitchen like this when you moved in?”

      “Pretty much, though I refinished the old floor and put up wallpaper everywhere. Sam down at the paint store goes into ecstasy when he sees me coming. I’m pretty sure I’m putting his oldest daughter through medical school.” She turned a burner on low under a pot of chili and went to the windows that overlooked the river, turning the wands that closed the blinds. “Do you want to see the rest of the house?” She couldn’t keep the pride out of her voice.

      “Sure.” He straightened and looked around. “I’d like for the St. John house to feel like this one. Cozy, I guess, but not lacy or fussy.”

      She grinned at him. “The lace and fuss are upstairs. Come on.”

      Micah was a perfect house tourist; he liked everything, even the rose-strewn wallpaper in her bedroom and bathroom.

      “Did you have a decorator?” he asked.

      “I did it myself,” she said. “Well, me and Sam and Jessie and everyone I hired to do the things I was afraid I’d screw up.”

      They sat at the kitchen table with their dinner. “Blake had a designer do Grandmother’s house when we moved into it,” she said, “and it was beautiful, but Jessie said it felt like a hotel she couldn’t afford to stay in.”

      Landy watched Micah covertly while they ate, putting bits and pieces of what she saw into the safe place where she kept good memories.

      He was tall and broad-shouldered like her husband had been, but had maintained his muscled build in a way that Blake had not. Micah’s dark brown hair was well cut, but not particularly neat, looking as though he combed it with his fingers throughout the day. He squinted sometimes, and she pictured his lean face with reading glasses sliding down his nose. His eyes were the same gray as the pewter pitcher on the mantel, fringed by thick lashes. His smile was wide and lovely, and came seldom. His hand, when he’d held her arm,