LITMIR.BIZ

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called his assistant. The handyman had already been dispensed to Jessica’s business. If he went and liked the guy’s work, he could surrender the list. It might minimize encounters like the one he had just had.

      He decided he liked the handyman, Jake, and he liked his work. Patty had provided him with the surveillance and security system she had found, and it was already installed when Kade arrived.

      “It’s really cool,” Jake said. “It’s motion activated, but you can program it to only send an image to your phone if a door or window is touched. Give me your phone number.”

      Kade had the fleeting thought it should be Jessica’s number that he gave him, but on the other hand, how could he trust her not to rush right down here if her phone alerted her to an intruder?

      He gave him his number, and they chortled like old friends as they experimented with setting the alarm and then touching the door, watching their images come up on Kade’s phone. Along with the alarm system, a new door was nearly installed, and Jake had matched the old one very closely and even gotten one with shatterproof glass. He was reinforcing the frame so that the dead bolt would not break away.

      But somehow when Kade left, the list for the fixes at the house he and Jessica shared was still in his pocket. He had not surrendered it to the obviously very capable handyman.

      Why? He suspected it was not because he had not got an answer from her about the floors.

      He mulled it over as he drove into the office. Somewhere between her house and there, he had decided he was doing the fixes himself.

      But why?

      He wasn’t particularly handy. The state of the kitchen cupboards over there and the fireplace that did not work were ample evidence of that.

      Then he knew. It was time to finish it. Not just the house, but all that house represented. It was time to finish his relationship with Jessica. She was absolutely 100 percent right about that.

      And as much as he wanted to, he could not hand those finishes off to someone else. It would be cowardly. And he sensed it would leave him with a sense of incompletion that he could never outdistance.

      He would go over there, and he would do all the fixes on the list in his pocket, and then they would get a real estate agent in to appraise the place, and then they would put a for-sale sign on it, and it would sell, and that last thing that held them together would be done.

      And how should he feel about that?

      “Happy, happy, happy,” he said.

      Though when Jessica had muttered that, obviously under the influence of whatever, she had looked about the furthest thing from happy! And he was aware that happy, happy, happy was about the furthest thing from how he was feeling, too.

      But that just showed him how true it was and how urgent. They needed to be done. He called his assistant and did something he had not done for a long, long time.

      He asked her to clear his weekend.

      It wasn’t until he hung up the phone that he was aware that, for someone who wanted to finish things, another motivation lurked just behind his need to fix the house.

      Was Jessica going to be okay after being mugged? Not her arm. That would heal. But her. She had always had that artistic temperament, ultrasensitive to the world.

      If he knew Jessica—and he did—she was not nearly as brave as she was trying to be.

      So, on Saturday morning, feeling a little foolish in his brand-new tool belt, Kade knocked on the door of the house he had shared with Jessica. He was certain she had said she would be at work, but she opened the door.

      He could see why she wasn’t at work. She would scare people away from her fledgling business in the getup she had on. She was wearing a crazy sleeveless dress that was at least four sizes too large for her.

      But, in truth, it was her face that worried him. Just as he suspected, her drawn features hinted she might not be doing well. There was the gaunt look of sleeplessness about her, as well as dark circles under her eyes.

      “It’s a maternity dress. I have three of them.” Her tone was defensive. “They’re easy to get on. See the buttons down the front? That is a very hard thing to find in a dress.”

      “I didn’t say anything.” Her arm was in the sling. At least she was following doctor’s orders.

      “But getting dressed was not that easy, even with the buttons. I’m running late.”

      He noticed her cast had been decorated with all kinds of signatures and drawings.

      In college, she had always been surrounded by friends. But then marriage had done something to her. Her world, increasingly, had become about him and their house. When the pregnancy quest had begun, Jessica had quit the job she’d had since earning her arts degree. Admittedly, it had not been the best job. She had barely made minimum wage at that funky, fledgling art gallery in east Calgary.

      At first, he’d liked it that Jessica was home, and doted on him. He’d liked it quite a lot, actually. Maybe he’d liked it enough he’d encouraged it. Who didn’t want to come home to fresh-baked bread, or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding or three dozen chocolate-chip cookies still warm out of the oven?

      Who didn’t want to come home to the most beautiful woman in the world waiting for him, with some newly inventive way of showing she loved him? Once it had been rose petals floating in a freshly drawn tub. Another time it had been a candlelit wine tasting in the back garden, a garden that she had single-handedly wrested from a weedy demise.

      But slowly, all her devotion had begun to grate on him. He was so aware that Jessica’s world was becoming smaller and smaller: paint colors for rooms rather than canvases. She was always trying new recipes. She discovered shopping online and was constantly discovering useless bric-a-brac that he was supposed to share her enthusiasm for.

      It had pierced even his colossal self-centeredness that she was becoming a shadow of the vibrant person she had once been. The obsession with the baby had just intensified the sense he didn’t know who she was anymore.

      She’d started buying things for a baby they didn’t have: little shoes just too adorable to pass up, hand-crocheted samplers for the walls of a nursery they didn’t have yet. The magazine racks—God forbid a magazine was left conveniently out—were stuffed with parenting magazines.

      She was forever showing him articles on the best baby bottles, and strollers, and car seats. She wanted him to go over fabric samples with her because she had found a seamstress to custom make the crib bedding. But it didn’t matter which one he picked. The next day she had more for him to look at. She was acquiring a collection of stuffed animals that would soon need a room of their own, not to mention require them to take out a second mortgage to pay for them all.

      “Jessica,” he remembered shouting at her, “nobody pays three hundred dollars for a teddy bear.”

      She had looked crushed, and then unrepentant.

      The anger, he knew in retrospect, though he had no idea at the time, had nothing to do with the teddy bear. It had to do with the fact he felt responsible for the awful metamorphosis taking place in her. It had to do with the fact that he was aware, in her eyes, he was not enough for her.

      She brought him back to the present. “You didn’t have to say anything about the dress. I can see in your face how you feel about it.”

      He was fairly certain it was the memory of the three-hundred-dollar-teddy-bear fight that had been in his face, so he tried to banish those thoughts and stay in the moment. “I’m not sure why you would wear something so...er...unflattering.”

      “Because I don’t care what you think, that’s why!”

      Or, he thought looking at her, she was trying very, very hard to make it appear that she didn’t care what he thought.

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