Page 39 of Charmed by the Obsessive Boss

Charlotte wants to know if Roman got his cinnamon roll, says her mother.

"Tell her I ate it in the dye house," I say, "and nearly cried."

"Oh, I'll tell her." She types it, thumbs flying, sets the phone on her chest. We wait. It buzzes again and she holds it up with a snort.

She says "ok good." And "ew."

I'm laughing so hard I can barely breathe, she is too, her whole body shaking against mine, and when we're done we're both wiping our eyes.

She turns off the phone, tucks herself under my arm and spreads her hand over my heart, as if to keep it from going anywhere.

I lie in the dark in a narrow yellow house in a town I'd planned to leave on Friday evening, with a button in one fist and the woman I love in the other arm.

Out the window the maple's dropping its last leaves in the porch light, one by one. My phone is face down on the nightstand and for once I don't care what's on it.

I've been asked nothing and I've been asked everything. And somewhere between one breath and the next I notice that I've stopped counting, and that for the first time in my life I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.

Epilogue — Rosemary

Three Years Later

Roman has run out of things to fix and it's making him dangerous.

It started small. The fuse box in the basement is now labeled in a font I didn't know the label maker had.

The porch swing has been rehung twice, once because it sagged and once because it didn't, and the neighbor's gate no longer squeals though nobody asked him.

On Monday he alphabetized the spice rack. On Wednesday he re-alphabetized it by frequency of use, which put cumin ahead of cinnamon, and I had to sit him down at this very table and explain what a person is.

Last night I came upstairs and found him standing in the bathroom with a flashlight, staring at the grout.

He promised me on Tuesday, after the incident with the pantry shelves, that he'd learn to sit with an unfixed thing.

He's trying. I'll say that for him. Four days now of nothing breaking and he's started leveling picture frames, and I love him beyond sense, and this morning at twenty to six I took my father's wrench out of the basement toolbox while he was out running and swapped the new washer under the kitchen faucet for the old split one from the junk drawer.

It's a Saturday in the last warm week of October, the kind of morning that comes in gold through the yellow curtains and lies across the table.

The lanterns will go up on the Green by noon. Somewhere above me my daughter's asleep with her face in a pillow and one long sock-footed leg hanging off the bed, and the whole house smells of coffee and cedar and him.

I sit at the kitchen table in my green robe with my tea and my knees tucked up and I wait.

By seven the first drop falls.

Plink.

It's such a small sound. It lands in the basin like a coin in a well and I let it ring, then I lift my mug and hide my mouth behind it.

He comes in at 7:12 with his hair still damp from the shower, in a gray mill sweatshirt with the sleeves shoved to the elbow, indigo ground permanently into the creases of his knuckles.

He kisses the top of my head on his way past, a habit so old now I'd feel the lack of it like a missing stair. He fills the kettle without looking, sets the little blue dish on the table by my elbow with honey in it and the wooden dipper laid across the top.

I never have to ask for that one. Then he sits down across from me with his laptop open to the Harbor & Pine holiday numbers, rolls his shoulders, picks up a pen.

Plink.

His pen stops.

It's the smallest thing, a tiny hitch in the line of his hand. If I weren't looking I'd have missed it.