Page 29 of The Man in the Cottage

I stare at the screen, frustrated. He's sorry. He's been lying to me for weeks and he's sorry. That's supposed to make it okay?

This isn't over, I type back.

I don't wait for a response. I shove my phone in my pocket and go back inside, where three of my closest friends are sitting in my grandmother's kitchen looking at me like I might shatter.

"So," Nicole says. "That was something."

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Kelly—"

"I mean it. Not tonight." I grab my wine glass from the counter and take a long drink. "This is Galentine's Day. We're supposed to be celebrating friendship and sisterhood and all that crap. Not dissecting my—whatever he is."

"Your whatever he is is a professional hockey player who beat up a photographer," Brit says. She's got her phone out again, scrolling. "There's a video, Kelly. Do you want to see it?"

"No."

"Are you sure? Because it's pretty—"

"Brit." Nicole cuts her off with a look. "She said no."

Brit puts her phone down, but I can tell she wants to keep going. She's always been like this—a dog with a bone, unable to let anything drop until she's turned it over from every angle.

"I'm just saying," she mutters. "If I had a man living in my backyard, I'd want to know if he had a history of violence."

"It was one incident," Mona says quietly. She's been scrolling on her own phone, reading something. "According to this article, anyway. He'd never been in trouble before. And it was outside a hospice."

"A hospice?" I look at her.

"That's what it says. He was visiting someone and the photographer followed him there. Asked him some questions and..." She trails off, shrugging. "Doesn't say what the questions were. Just that Howe attacked him."

A hospice. He was visiting someone dying, and a photographer followed him there.

Something in my chest shifts.

"I still think it's messed up that he didn't tell you," Brit says. "You've been living next to him for weeks. He should have said something."

"Yeah." I take another sip of wine. "He should have."

But I'm thinking about the note my grandmother left. He just needs somewhere to be invisible for a while. I'm thinking about all the times he almost told me something, all the times I saw him holding back, choosing his words carefully. I'm thinking about the way he looked at me right before he admitted it—tired and resigned and braced for impact.

He knew this was coming. He'd been waiting for it.

And he stayed anyway.

I think about the past few weeks. All those mornings he came by for coffee. All those conversations at the kitchen table. The way he helped me with my book, the way he looked at me when he thought I wasn't paying attention. Was any of that real? Or was he just playing a part, pretending to be someone he wasn't?

But that doesn't make sense either. He didn't have to come over. He didn't have to fix things or help me or spend hours unpacking boxes and listening to Motown. He could have stayed in the cottage and kept his distance and waited for me to sell the house and move on. Instead he kept showing up, kept finding reasons to be near me.

Why would he do that if he was just trying to hide?

"Can we please talk about something else?" I ask. "Anything else. Tell me about your jobs. Tell me about your love lives. Tell me about that weird rash Mona had last month."

"It wasn't a rash, it was an allergic reaction," Mona says. "And I'd really rather not."

"Too bad. We're talking about it. Nicole, you start."

Nicole gives me a long look, the kind that says we're going to discuss this later whether you like it or not. But she lets it go for now, launching into a story about a coworker who's been stealing her lunch from the office fridge.