My Stepbrother's Regret novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: Lake Cottage

I took the keys to my shop out of my pocket and looked at them.

Nine keys. Forty-four years of somebody else's mornings.

Then I locked my own front door from the inside, for the first time, and went out the back with him.

We drove north on Sheridan in the dark.

Past Lake Forest, past the turn to his father's house, where neither of us looked.

Past Waukegan, and a strip mall with a nail salon, a vape store and a pawn shop between them, its sign still lit.

"Want to stop?" Roarke said. "See if they've got anything of yours?"

"Drive, Gibbons."

He drove.

Winthrop Harbor was the last town before Wisconsin.

The cottage sat at the end of a gravel lane, on the edge of the bluff, with nothing behind it but the lake.

It was white clapboard with green shutters, and one shutter was still the old peeling color, waiting.

A porch ran all the way across the front, with two chairs on it that didn't match.

"I know," he said. "The shutter."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to."

Inside, it smelled like sawdust and new paint and the lake.

The floors were old pine he'd sanded himself. You could tell, because they were perfect in the middle and a little wavy at the walls.

The kitchen was new. White cabinets. A deep sink under the window.

There was one mug on the drying rack.

Then he turned on the lamp in the front room, and I stopped walking.

There was a bench in the window.

A real one. Oak, the right height, with a raised top and a little lip at the front edge so parts couldn't roll off.

Under the window that faced north, where the light would be clean and even all day and never hit the work directly.

A green-shaded lamp stood on it.

A green rubber mat.

A parts tray, new, with no crack in it.

I walked over and put my hand flat on the oak.

"You built this."

"In August." He stayed in the doorway, like he had in the back room the first night. "Nights, after the store. I measured yours. I asked your boss what the height was for. He told me if I got it wrong you'd have a bad neck by thirty."

"Did you get it wrong?"

"Sit down and tell me."

I sat down.

It was right.

My elbows landed where they were supposed to.

My eye went to the mat at the exact distance it had gone for four years on Wabash.

← Chapter 29 · All chapters · Chapter 31 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend