Wild Blood

Scarlett

CHAPTER 3

Scarlett Voss came back to Millbrook City on a Wednesday in October, eleven days before she ran into Roman at the farmers' market and exactly fourteen days before a man reached past her in a hardware store for the last box of deck screws she needed.

She arrived in her own car, alone, with four boxes in the trunk and a clarity of purpose that she would, in the months ahead, recognize as the first honest clarity she'd had in several years.

She was thirty years old. She had a master's degree in architecture, six years of practice in Chicago at a firm that had won three industry awards under her partial contribution and paid her well for it. She had a loft apartment in Chicago that she'd furnished carefully and in which she'd spent, she estimated, fewer than half the nights of the previous eighteen months because the work had required everything else. She had a former fiancé named James who was perfectly lovely and who she had looked at one night at two in the morning across the kitchen island of the loft she'd furnished carefully and understood, with the specific, vertiginous clarity that arrives at two in the morning, that she did not love him and possibly never had.

She had called off the engagement three months ago. James had been hurt, then understanding, then hurt again — the predictable sequence of a decent person processing an unwanted truth — and they had parted on terms that were as civilized as terms could be when one person has dismantled something the other person believed in.

She'd come back to Millbrook for two reasons. The first was that her mother, Diane Voss, was recovering from a hip replacement and needed assistance for the next six to eight weeks that she was not going to ask for and that Scarlett was going to provide anyway. The second was that Scarlett needed, with an urgency she felt in her bones, to be somewhere that was not the life she'd been performing.

Millbrook was imperfect for this purpose — it was the city she'd grown up in and grown out of and run from at seventeen — but it had the advantage of being real. She knew its seams and its inconveniences and its specific geography, and right now real and known felt more valuable than new and optimistic.

Her mother's house was a craftsman on Alder Street with potted herbs on the front steps and a wind chime made of driftwood and a porch railing that had been failing its structural mandate for at least a season. Scarlett moved into the guest room, unpacked her four boxes, set up a remote workstation at the desk in the corner, and spent the first three days relearning the rhythms of living with someone else after years of living alone.

On the fourth day she went to the farmers' market on Main Street because her mother was out of good bread and Scarlett had read once that the Millbrook market had a bakery stall worth the trip.

The market was crowded in the specific way of Saturday morning outdoor markets, warm and slightly too close, everyone carrying something. She found the bakery stall, bought a sourdough and a bag of coffee beans, and was navigating back toward the entrance when someone said her name.

"Scarlett Voss."

She stopped. Turned.

Roman Holloway was standing four feet away, looking at her the way a man looks at something that has exceeded his expectation — slowly, with visible revision happening behind his eyes.

She recognized him immediately, in the way you recognize someone you knew at seventeen when you encounter them at thirty: the bones of the younger version visible in the architecture of the older one, the original recognizable within the additions. He was — she searched for the accurate word and found it: devastating. Dark eyes, dark hair, jaw that required no assistance, dressed in a way that was entirely too considered for a Saturday farmers' market and that she suspected was simply how he looked at all times.

He had a smile that arrived the way certain expensive things arrive — slowly, with apparent deliberateness, in a way designed to make you aware that you were receiving something selected specifically for you.

"Roman," she said.

"You're back." He said it like the city had done something unexpectedly right.

"For a while. My mother needed—"

"I heard about her hip. I'm sorry." He moved closer. Not intrusive, just closing the conversational distance. "You look extraordinary."

"You look like you practice that."

He laughed. Genuine — she'd expected performed, and got genuine, which recalibrated something. "I don't, actually. That one just happened to be true."

She studied him for a moment. This was the boy who had been, at seventeen, the specific kind of beautiful that made the entire room reorganize itself around him, and who had understood this the way people understand things that have always been true about them — completely and with a certain carelessness that came from never having had to earn it.

"Are you staying long?" he asked.

"Six weeks. Maybe eight."

"Then I hope the city gives you a reason to stay longer." The smile again, slower. "It was good to see you, Scarlett."

He walked away through the market crowd with the ease of a man who had never once needed to negotiate with a room. She watched him go.

Trouble, she thought. Back eleven days.

She drove home with the sourdough and the coffee and the particular awareness of having been looked at, really looked at, for the first time in longer than she wanted to count.

CHAPTER 4

Hardware Store

She met Zane Holloway three days later, in the hardware store on Crane Street, over a box of deck screws.

The porch railing had given up entirely on the south end — she'd tested it Thursday morning and it had wobbled with the cheerful surrender of something that had made its decision — and a structural assessment had confirmed what she'd suspected from the visual: not just screws, the post anchors were corroded through. She'd made a list. She'd driven to Crane Street Hardware, which she remembered from childhood as the kind of store that had what you needed somewhere and required patience to find it.

She found the post anchors. She found the screws — or rather, she found the section where the screws she needed should have been, and found exactly one box remaining, and reached for it.

A large hand reached past her and took it first.

She turned with the expression she reserved for professional situations that required her to be direct without being unpleasant.

The man holding her deck screws was — she needed a moment to process this, which was unusual for her — not what she'd been prepared for. Tall, same height as Roman roughly, with the dark coloring and jaw that nagged at something she couldn't place. But where Roman was constructed — every element of him deliberate and tended — this man was rough in a way that was not carelessness but something else. Something tested. He wore a canvas jacket with actual work on it and boots that had walked real distances and his hands, the ones holding her screws, were the hands of someone who had used them for real things for a long time.

He had a smile that didn't arrive slowly. It arrived the way lightning did — there, complete, and then you were wondering if you'd actually seen it.

"Those are mine," she said.

"Last box," he said.

"Which I was reaching for."

He looked at her. The look was direct and unhurried and not rude, which was a combination she hadn't encountered in that configuration before. It was the look of someone who has learned to read a situation completely before responding to it.

"Split them," he said. "What's the job?"

"Porch railing. South end of the post anchors are gone."

He nodded — something professional in it. "You need the three-inch galvanized, not the two-and-a-half. These are two-and-a-half."

She looked at the box. He was right.

"I've got the three-inch in my truck," he said. "Plus the anchors. I can show you the fix if you want — it's not complicated once you've done it."

She assessed him in the way she assessed structures — looking for load points, for what the thing was actually built from underneath its surface presentation. He was not performing generosity. He was offering practical information because he had it and she needed it and that was the logical sequence.

"I'm an architect," she said. "I understand the structural principle. I'm less experienced with the physical execution."

"Then I'll show you the execution." He held out the box. "Half."

"I'm Scarlett."

"Zane." He split the screws into two piles on the shelf with a practiced efficiency. "Where's the porch?"

She told him. He followed in his truck — a beat-up F-250 with actual use on it — and she pulled up at her mother's house on Alder Street and he pulled in behind her and they spent the next two hours fixing the porch railing.

He was good with his hands in the way of someone for whom being good with their hands had been necessary rather than optional. He explained what he was doing without condescension — not talking at her but with her, adjusting his level of detail based on her responses, which she was precise enough to make informative. She handed him things when he needed them. She asked good questions. He answered completely.

Her mother appeared at the front door at some point.

"Handsome," Diane Voss said, to Scarlett, at a volume Zane could clearly hear.

"Mom."

"I'm noting it."

"He can hear you."

"I'm aware." She looked at Zane directly. "Thank you for helping. Would you like lemonade?"

"Yes ma'am," Zane said. "Thank you."

Diane disappeared. Scarlett made a face. Zane kept working.

"She's not wrong," Scarlett said, before she'd decided to.

He looked up from the post anchor. Said nothing. Went back to work.

She felt heat in her face that had nothing to do with the October afternoon.

When the railing was done he tested it with both hands — solid, no movement, the way things should be when they're done properly. He packed his tools without ceremony. He drank the lemonade Diane brought. He said goodbye to Diane by name, because Scarlett had introduced them, and drove away.

Scarlett stood on the repaired porch and thought about two men, encountered eleven days apart, who had both stopped the room in entirely different ways.

Trouble, she thought again. Different flavor. Same category.