Chapter One: The Neighbour
The summer I turn thirty-four, I meet Noah Garrett over a broken fence.
It is not a romantic beginning. The fence between our yards in Millhaven, Connecticut, has been dying for two years, ever since Michael and I moved in, and in June it finally gives up. An eighteen-inch section folds into my hydrangeas after a storm that was not even particularly dramatic. I stand in the garden at seven in the morning with a mug of coffee going cold in my hands, surveying the damage with the weary competence that is, apparently, my signature.
Capable. Self-contained. Efficient. Those are the words people have always used about me. In the professional world they are compliments. In my own head, lately, they sound more like a diagnosis.
A door opens next door.
I do not look up at once. I am busy being efficient with a splintered panel. But the sound of boots on the flagstones makes me lift my head, and then I forget what I was doing with my hands entirely.
He is tall, that is the first thing. Tall in a way that suggests he spends his days lifting and carrying and pulling things into shape, with broad shoulders under a faded grey T-shirt and forearms the colour of someone who has been outdoors all summer. His hair is dark and rumpled, as if he has dragged his fingers through it on the way out of the door. He moves through his garden like a man who knows exactly where every stone is, and I have the ridiculous, unwelcome thought that I would like to see him move through a room.
Stop it, Elena. You are a married woman standing in your dressing gown with a dead fence.
"The fence," he says. His voice is low, a little rough at the edges, as though he hasn't spoken to anyone yet today.
"Yes." I tighten my grip on the mug. "The storm last night."
"It was already going." He crouches beside the fallen panel and runs one broad hand along the rotten post, and the whole standing section next to it shifts with a soft, defeated creak. "This one too. Look."
I look. I am, I realise, looking at his hand rather than the post.
"I'll need to replace it," I manage.
"The whole length, probably. It's all the same age." He glances up at me, and his eyes are a grey so pale and direct that something low in my stomach tightens in alarm. "Rotten at the posts. The panels are salvageable."
"I'll call someone."
"I can do it."
I blink. "You do fencing?"
"I build things." One corner of his mouth lifts, not quite a smile. "It's what I do."
He stands, and he is even taller on his feet, and the hydrangeas lean between us like nosy chaperones.
"Noah Garrett."
"Elena Rhodes."
"Your husband," he says, and nods towards the house, where Michael's car is conspicuously absent from the drive. "Is he around?"
"In the city. He commutes." I hear how it sounds, flat and rehearsed. "Most days he leaves before six."
"I can take a look at it Saturday. Walk the whole length, give you a figure for materials."
"I should pay you for the labour."
"Labour's the neighbourly thing." He shrugs, as though it costs him nothing. "The materials we'll split. It's my fence too."
"Your side is perfectly fine."
His eyes hold mine a beat longer than they should. "For now."
I do not know why that sentence makes my pulse skip. It is about timber. It is absolutely, categorically about timber.
"Saturday, then," I say.
"Saturday."
He goes back inside, and I stand with my cold coffee and my wrecked fence and my wildly misbehaving heart, and the only coherent thought I can find is a stupid, shining one.
That man knows exactly what he is looking at.
* * *
He arrives at eight on Saturday morning with a van, a proper set of tools in a battered leather roll, and a spirit level that looks older than I am. He walks the entire fence line before he touches anything, slowly, one palm skimming the panels as if he is listening to them.
I watch from the kitchen window, pretending to read the newspaper.
You are a grown woman. Go out there and be normal.
I make tea instead, which is what I do with every emotion I cannot name. I carry two mugs across the lawn, and he straightens from the fence and takes one from me. His fingers brush mine around the china. It is nothing. A fraction of a second of warm, calloused skin.
My whole arm hums.
"Eleven metres," he says, as if nothing has happened, and perhaps nothing has. "Four posts need to come out. The panels are tired, but you'll get another two seasons from them if the posts are sound."
"What would you do?"
"Posts now. Panels in two years." He sips his tea and looks at me over the rim. "Cheaper. Or practical. I never remember which."
"Is that a philosophical question?"
"It's a building question." He is almost smiling now, and the effect is devastating, a slow creasing at the corners of those grey eyes. "Sometimes cheap is practical. Sometimes cheap is just cheap, and you pay for it twice."
"Then we'll be practical."
"Good." He sets the mug on a fence post, flexes his shoulders, and picks up a spade. "Stay if you want. I don't mind an audience."
An audience. My cheeks warm. I tell myself it is the sun.
I sit on the garden bench with my notebook open on my knee, a gesture towards the book I am supposed to be writing, and I do not write a single word. I watch him dig. He works the way he moves, without any wasted effort, the spade biting down in a clean, rhythmic arc, his back flexing under the thin cotton as the morning heats up. When he pulls the T-shirt over his head and tosses it onto the grass, I look very hard at a hydrangea.
Oh, my.
The hydrangea is no help. It is a very ordinary hydrangea.
"They'll need to come back from the fence line," Noah says, nodding at the bush. "About thirty centimetres. To get the posts in."
"Will they survive?"
"They're well established. They'll bounce back." He wipes his forehead with his forearm. "My mother grew them."
"You know about gardens."
"I know enough about hers." A shadow crosses his face, there and gone. "She died four years ago. Dahlias and hydrangeas, mostly. Anything that needed attention. She was good at attention."
"I'm sorry."
"Thank you." He plants the spade in the earth and leans on it. "Same year I stopped seeing someone, so it was a bad one."
I should not ask. I ask. "What happened?"
"You're very direct, Mrs Rhodes."
"I'm curious. You can tell me to mind my own business."
"It's not not your business." He studies the ground. "She said the work meant more to me than she did. She wasn't wrong. When my mother was ill, I worked. I didn't know what else to do with myself. Work was the one thing I could control."
"And she needed you not to control it."
His head comes up. For a moment he simply looks at me, those pale eyes narrowing as though I have said something startling.
"She needed me to need her," he says quietly. "I didn't know how."
"Do you now?"
The air changes. It is a small thing, a shift in the pitch of the morning, the birdsong suddenly too loud, the sun on the back of my neck too warm.
"I'm working on it," he says.
I have to look away.
He works through the afternoon. I do not go inside. I tell myself I am being neighbourly, that I am enjoying the sunshine, that there is a chapter somewhere in the notebook that will eventually get written. Around two he asks what my husband does, and the question lands between us like a stone dropped into water.
"Mergers and acquisitions," I say. "Corporate law."
"Long hours."
"Very."
"And you?"
"I write." I turn the pen over in my fingers. "Literary fiction. Slowly. The current one is in its fourth year."
"Fourth year." He tries the words as though they are a kind of timber. "Slow can be right. Depending on what you're building."
"Or slow can mean the foundation isn't there."
"The foundation's always there if you laid it properly." His eyes find mine again. "After that, slow is just patience."
"Or avoidance," I say.
"That too." The almost-smile again. "I've done both."
I have the strangest feeling, I think, that this man is not talking about fences at all.
* * *
By three o'clock the first new post is set in concrete and Noah is packing his tools into the van when I hear the low growl of Michael's car turning into our drive.
Something sinks in my chest. It takes me a second to recognise what it is, and when I do, I do not like it. It is not guilt. I have done nothing to feel guilty about. It is the sensation of being caught, which is absurd, because there is nothing to catch.
Michael steps out in his weekend chinos and a pressed shirt, the briefcase he takes everywhere, even on Saturdays, swinging from one hand. He is handsome, my husband. He has always been handsome, in the clean-shaven, well-groomed manner of a man who has never once been late for anything. He crosses the lawn and kisses my cheek, and I smell the train on him, coffee and newsprint and faintly the city.
"Fence," he says, looking past me.
"It came down in the storm. Noah fixed it. This is Noah, from next door."
The two men shake hands. Michael's hand looks very white in Noah's brown one.
"Good work," Michael says, inspecting the post with a lawyer's thoroughness.
"Four more to go."
"What do we owe you?"
"Split the materials. Labour's the neighbourly thing."
"Decent of you."
"Good fences," Noah says, and his eyes flick, only once, to me, "make good neighbours."
He climbs into his van and rolls away, and I stand in the garden with my husband's hand resting at the small of my back, a familiar, polite weight, and I try to feel what I should feel.
"Solid chap," Michael says. "Good to have next door."
"Yes," I say.
Yes. I think of the spade, the sunlight on his bare back, the pale eyes that saw straight through my small talk. Very good to have next door.
We eat supper on the terrace, grilled salmon and a bottle of white, and Michael talks about a merger in Frankfurt while I watch the light fade behind the new post. Twice I catch myself glancing at the fence. Twice I look away so fast that my neck aches.
"You're quiet," Michael says, topping up my glass.
"Am I?"
"A bit flushed, too. Too much sun."
"I expect so," I say, and drink, and taste nothing.
That night Michael falls asleep at ten past eleven, one arm flung across his side of the bed, his breathing slow and even. I lie awake in the dark and listen to the old house tick as it cools. Through the open window I can hear the faint rustle of the hydrangeas, and beyond them, so close that it should not feel dangerous, a light still burning in Noah Garrett's kitchen.
I slide my hand down my own stomach beneath the sheet.
It is a thing I have not done in months. Years, if I am honest, and tonight I am trying to be honest. My skin is oversensitive, warm, as if the sun has not yet finished with me. I close my eyes and I do not think of Michael. I think of a pair of forearms braced against a spade. I think of a low voice saying for now. I think of fingers, calloused and sure, brushing mine around a china mug, and what they might feel like moving somewhere else entirely.
My breath catches. My body arches, helpless, towards a man who is asleep, or awake, or building something at midnight on the other side of a rotten wall.
It does not take long. It is humiliating how little it takes. I come with my teeth clamped over my lower lip and my husband's breathing steady beside me, and when it is over I lie there shaking, my heart pounding, the name I did not say echoing in my head like a struck bell.
Noah.
I stare at the ceiling for a very long time.
This, I think, is going to be a problem.
And then, because I have never in my life been able to leave a sentence unfinished, I add the rest.
A very good problem to have.
* * *