When He Walked In

The open house was going the way open houses go when the house is ugly. Three looky-loos, one inspector my agent paid to nod at things, and a guy who wanted to know if the septic tank was "original" like that was a selling point. I stood in the kitchen eating pistachios out of my jacket pocket because lunch had not happened and the vending machine at the office was two towns behind me.

The house sat on the beach road in a town that used to be somebody's summer dream and was now mostly bait shops and roof repair signs. Mid-century, flat roofed, salt-eaten. I bought it at auction in March because the lot was the best thing between the highway and the water, and because the price made my accountant laugh in a good way. The paint peeled in long curls. The garden out front had gone native and then some. The ocean, though, the ocean you could not cheapen. It filled every window like it had paid for the place.

Addison Vargas had the guest sign-in sheet balanced on her hip. She is thirty-eight and has worked with me five years, and she is the only person I know who can wear heels on a cracked driveway without becoming a liability.

"Nobody's biting," she said, checking her phone. "Lee Hobbs texted, which means he's circling."

"Lee Hobbs texts everybody. He texts newspaper boys."

"He wants to look at the north rooms without the public here."

"Then he can come when there's a public. He lowballs, I raise him, he sulks. We've done this dance on the Marsh deal and I know all his steps."

That was when the white truck pulled up the shoulder and a man got out of it in work boots and a faded green cap, and my chest did a thing I had not felt in about twenty years.

Garth Gill. I knew him at forty-five as fast as I'd known him at twenty-three. He was broader through the shoulders than the college version of him, gray coming in at the sides under the cap, same slow walk he always had, like he was never in a hurry because hurry never got anybody anything. He came up the cracked driveway past my sign-in table without signing anything, which irritated Addison on principle.

"Sign said this was open to the public," he said, holding up a hand like a peace sign that wasn't one. "I'm just here to look. And maybe talk. Depends on how welcome I am."

It took me a second to find my voice, which is not a thing that happens to me at work. "Garth Gill," I said. "I'll be damned."

He grinned and it was the same grin. "Sandra Phelps. You remembered."

"You don't forget a name like that attached to a face like that, not at twenty-one you don't." I said it before my better judgment caught up with my mouth. He did not blink at it, which somehow made it worse.

"Dev told me about the open house," he said. "My brother. He saw the auction listing and said, that's Sandra Phelps' name on the paperwork, you should go see what she's doing to that poor old house."

"Devon knew I bought it?"

"He checks auction listings the way other men check ball scores. He also said if I scared you off, don't come home."

Addison had drifted over with her clipboard and her professional smile. "You're here for the property?"

"Landscaper," he said. "Out of Bellhaven. I did the dune restoration on the Kellerman parcel last fall. This yard's got good bones under all that mess, is my professional opinion, for whatever it's worth to you."

"It's worth something," I said. "The mess took about forty years to accumulate, though. You'd have to quote me a number with a lot of zeros or none."

He laughed at that. Addison looked between us the way she looks at a listing she can't price, then her phone buzzed and she held it up. "That's the Corrigan couple. They want to see the waterfront on Cypress before it closes. Sandra, can you hold the fort? Nobody's coming at four o'clock on a humid Saturday anyway."

"Go," I said. "Take the pistachios."

She took the pistachios. She also gave me a look on her way out, one eyebrow up, the kind of look I pretended not to see. Then the door shut and it was Garth and me and the sound of the ocean coming through every bad window seal in the house.

We did a lap of the ground floor because it was the custom with a stranger in a house. Except he wasn't a stranger, and the entire problem sat there between us like a third guest.

"I haven't seen you since college," he said, stopping in the living room where the ocean filled the south wall. "That's a long time to leave a thing alone."

"You didn't leave it alone. You moved to Bellhaven and grew a business."

"You kept tabs on me."

"Devon kept tabs on you and Devon talks. There's a difference." I turned toward the window because looking at the water was easier than looking at him. The last time I'd been in this town was with his brother, twenty-one years old, broke, in love with the wrong Gill and too polite to say so to either of them. A Black girl from Baltimore at a college that was mostly cornfields and white boys like Garth, I'd decided early which doors weren't for me, and I never once checked whether that one was locked. "I had a crush on you the size of a barn, you know. In case that wasn't obvious at the time."

"It wasn't obvious. I was twenty-three and dumb and dating your roommate, which I've regretted in a general way for two decades."

"You and Cindy lasted one night, from what I heard."

"One night, and I spent it wishing I was at the other end of the dorm hall," he said it plainly, no drama on it, which is the way he always said hard things. "I figured you'd written me off, so I wrote myself off first. Saved time."

"Well," I said, and ate a pistachio because my hands wanted a job. "Here we are at an open house twenty years later and I'm showing you my peeling paint."

"It's good paint under the peel. Circa 1948 or thereabouts." He walked to the corner of the room and crouched, pressing his thumb along the baseboard where the floor dipped. "See this? Settling on the seaward corner. Somebody cheaped out on the footing repair in the nineties. It's fixable, but whoever you hire has to actually fix it