Page 12 of The Man in the Cottage

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." She takes a bite of chili, chews, swallows. "I quit my job to write a book. Everyone thinks I'm crazy. Maybe I am. But I couldn't spend another year of my life optimizing click-through rates and pretending to care about quarterly projections."

"So you walked away."

"I walked away." She says it simply, but I can hear the weight underneath. "Scariest thing I've ever done. But also kind of the best? I don't know. Ask me again in six months when I'm broke and crawling back to corporate America."

"You won't."

She raises an eyebrow. "You sound pretty sure about that."

"I've seen you work." I think about her on the porch, that look on her face, completely lost in her own world. "You're not going back."

She doesn't say anything for a second. Just looks at me, really looks, like she's trying to figure out how I see so much when I say so little. I hold her gaze because I can't seem to make myself look away.

"You're not what I expected," she says quietly.

"What did you expect?"

"I don't know. Not this." She gestures vaguely at me, at the table, at the space between us. "My grandmother left a note saying you needed to be invisible. I thought you'd be... I don't know. Weirder. More damaged."

I almost laugh. "Who says I'm not damaged?"

"Oh, you're definitely damaged. But not in the way I thought." She's smiling now, just a little. "You're more like... a fixer-upper. Some cosmetic issues, but good bones."

"Did you just compare me to a house?"

"I've been spending a lot of time thinking about houses lately. It's affecting my metaphors."

I do laugh then, a real one, and her smile widens like she's won something. Maybe she has. I can't remember the last time someone made me laugh like that, unguarded and easy. It feels dangerous. It feels good.

"I should go," I say, even though I don't want to. "Let you get back to work."

"You keep saying that."

"You keep having work to get back to."

"The book will be there tomorrow." She leans back in her chair, and I notice she's finally eating, actually eating, not just pushing food around. "Tell me something about yourself. Something real."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Anything. Favorite movie. Worst job you ever had. Most embarrassing thing that happened to you in high school." She ticks them off on her fingers. "I'm not picky."

I think about it. Most of my stories involve hockey in some way—teammates, road trips, locker room disasters. I can't tell her any of those without giving myself away.

"I broke my collarbone when I was sixteen," I finally say. "Tried to impress a girl by jumping off a roof into a swimming pool. Missed."

Kelly's eyes go wide. "You missed the pool?"

"Clipped the edge. Landed half in, half out." I shrug. "Spent eight weeks in a sling. Girl didn't even visit me in the hospital."

"That's terrible."

"The collarbone or the girl?"

"Both." She's laughing now, it’s laugh that takes over her whole face. "Oh my god. That's the most teenage boy thing I've ever heard."

"I was very stupid at sixteen."