At seven fourteen in the morning, Heidi discovered that the cordless drill had two speeds.
Loud.
And divorce-inducing.
She had the manual spread open on top of a dryer, one knee braced against the bottom rung of a step ladder, and a screw clenched between her teeth like she was about to storm a castle. The laundromat smelled like sawdust, bleach, old quarters, and ambition. It was not a pleasant combination, but it was hers.
The shelf she was trying to hang over the folding table had come with instructions written in six languages and somehow understandable in none of them. The little bag of hardware had contained twelve screws, eight anchors, four mystery pegs, and one tiny wrench that looked like it had been designed by a sadist.
Heidi had already dropped the level twice.
She was not level emotionally, either.
“Okay,” she muttered around the screw in her mouth. “We are not being defeated by Swedish-adjacent shelving. Not today.”
She pressed the drill to the wall.
The drill screamed.
The wall fought back.
The screw spun sideways, chewed a crescent-shaped scar into the plaster, and launched itself behind the washing machines.
Heidi stared at the damage.
“Fucking fantastic.”
She climbed down, pulled another screw from the bag, and tried again.
This time, she really leaned into it.
The drill shrieked so loudly that one of the houseplants on the windowsill seemed to tremble in judgment.
The front door banged open behind her.
“What in the absolute fuck are you doing?”
Heidi jumped, lost her balance, and grabbed the edge of the shelf before it could fall. The drill clattered onto the folding table. She turned, one hand pressed against her chest, heart punching at her ribs.
A man stood in the doorway.
Not just stood.
Occupied.
He leaned against the frame as though it had been built for the privilege of holding him up. Tall. Dark-haired. Barefoot in loafers, somehow. Wearing linen trousers and an unbuttoned white shirt that suggested he had either just woken up or never gone to bed. His hair was loose around his face in soft waves, his jaw shadowed with stubble, his eyes half-lidded with the expression of someone deeply offended by noise before coffee.
He was beautiful in a way that annoyed her immediately.
Not pretty. Not polished.
Expensive-looking, but not clean. Like a painting that had survived a fire.
He looked around the laundromat, then at the drill, then at Heidi.
His eyes moved over her once.
Not rudely. Not exactly.
But thoroughly enough that she felt it.
Then his expression shifted.
The irritation did not disappear, but something else entered the room with it.
Interest.
Heidi, who was wearing cutoff shorts, an old tank top, safety goggles pushed up into her hair, and a fine dusting of plaster across one cheek, lifted her chin.
“I’m hanging a shelf.”
“You are murdering a wall.”
“I was doing both, actually. Multitasking.”
His mouth twitched.
The accent arrived before the smile did. French, warm, and lightly ruined by sleep.
“You are the American.”
Heidi narrowed her eyes. “That depends who’s asking.”
“The man who owns the other side of this wall.”
He tapped the plaster beside him with two fingers.
“Jacques Laurent.”
He said his own name like he expected it to be useful.
Heidi had heard it already, of course. The island had delivered his name to her in pieces before she had ever seen him. Jacques with the yacht. Jacques who threw parties under the stars. Jacques who knew which musicians would play until sunrise and which fishermen would bring fresh lobster with no questions asked. Jacques who could get champagne delivered during a storm. Jacques who hosted weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, affairs, and the kind of parties people swore they could not remember but never quite forgot.
His business occupied the narrow building attached to the laundromat. No sign hung above the door. Nothing announced itself from the street. Just dark green shutters, brass numbers, and a heavy wooden door that seemed to open only for people who knew what they wanted and had enough money to be dangerous about it.
Heidi had assumed it was an office.
Now, looking at Jacques, she understood it was more of a confession booth for bad decisions.
“Heidi,” she said.
“I know.”
“Small island?”
“Very small walls.”
He stepped inside without asking and walked toward the folding table. His eyes found the shelf, the manual, the hardware, the scarred plaster, and the tiny wrench.
He sighed.
“You used the wrong anchors.”
“I used the ones from the bag.”
“Yes. That is often how disaster begins.”
“I don’t remember inviting criticism into my morning.”
“I live next door. I was drafted.”
He picked up one of the plastic anchors and held it between two fingers like it was evidence in a murder trial.
“This is for drywall.”
“That is drywall.”
“That,” he said, pointing to the wall, “is old plaster over concrete block, patched by at least three generations of men who lied about knowing what they were doing.”
Heidi looked at the wall.
The wall looked guilty.
Jacques held out his hand.
“Drill.”
“I don’t know you well enough to hand over power tools.”
“Chérie, you do not know the power tool well enough to keep it.”
Heidi should have been offended.
She was offended.
She was also tired, sweaty, and secretly relieved.
She handed him the drill.
His fingers brushed hers.
A small, stupid spark moved up her arm.
He noticed.
Of course he noticed.
Men like Jacques probably noticed when candle flames leaned toward them.
He said nothing.
Instead, he moved the ladder two inches to the left, marked the wall with a pencil, changed the bit, and began drilling with the calm authority of a surgeon. The sound was still awful, but under his hands it became purposeful instead of criminal.
Heidi stood beside him with her arms crossed.
“I had it under control.”
“Of course.”
“I did.”
“Nature was healing.”
“Are you always this condescending?”
“Only before breakfast.”
He glanced down at her.
“And when women wake me with machinery.”
“I didn’t know you lived there.”
“I did not know a sexy American had moved into a laundromat.”
The words landed in the room like someone had opened a window and let the heat in.
Heidi stared at him.
Jacques kept drilling.
Then, as though he had said nothing unusual at all, he switched off the drill and blew dust from the hole in the wall.
Heidi’s pulse did something deeply inconvenient.
“I’m not sure whether to be flattered or offended.”
“You are American. You can do both loudly.”
She laughed before she could stop herself.
That pleased him. Not in a smug way. In a quieter, more private way, as though he had tucked the sound away for later.
He fixed the first bracket, then the second. He worked beautifully. That was the only word for it. His hands were steady and capable, but there was elegance in the smallest movements. He did not rush. He did not fumble. He seemed to understand the old building the way a good musician understood a tired instrument.
Heidi watched despite herself.
“So,” she said, because silence felt too intimate, “you own the place next door?”
“Yes.”
“What is it exactly?”
He lifted the shelf into place. “A headquarters.”
“For what? A cult?”
“Worse. Events.”
“Ah.”
“Parties, weddings, celebrations, private dinners, terrible anniversaries, proposals that should not happen, divorces that should.”
Heidi helped him hold the other end of the shelf.
“And these all happen on your boat?”
“My yacht.”
“Of course it’s a yacht.”
“It would be rude of it to be anything else.”
Heidi rolled her eyes.
Jacques smiled.
“You will see her one day,” he said. “She is very beautiful.”
“Do you talk about all boats like women?”
“Only the ones that behave like them.”
“That sounds like something that should get you slapped.”
“I have been slapped for less.”
“I believe that.”
They stood close together, the shelf balanced between them, the smell of him cutting through the sawdust and bleach. Smoke, salt, expensive soap, and something darker beneath it. Scotch, maybe. Night air. Trouble with good posture.
He tightened the final screw.
“There,” he said.
He stepped back.
The shelf held.
Heidi looked at it in shock.
“Well, shit.”
“You doubted me?”
“I doubted the wall.”
“Wise.”
He handed the drill back to her.
This time, his fingers did not brush hers.
Somehow that felt more deliberate.
For the next month, Jacques became a fact of the laundromat.
Not constant. Never that. Jacques was not the kind of man who belonged to daylight, schedules, or anyone’s expectations. He appeared the way weather appeared. Suddenly. Completely. Sometimes with warning. Sometimes not.
He came through the back patio carrying invoices, extra towels, broken hinges, bottles of rum, fresh pastries wrapped in paper, or nothing at all. He helped Heidi fix the stubborn dryer door that kept popping open mid-cycle. He replaced a rusted lock. He showed her which alley flooded first during storms and which tourists would try to pay with wet cash tucked into bikini tops.
His business account came with laundry.
So much laundry.
The first delivery arrived in six enormous canvas bags marked with his company’s initials in navy thread. Inside were white towels, linen napkins, sheets soft enough to make Heidi question her moral standards, and silken tablecloths that slid through her fingers like water.
There were stains.
Lipstick in deep red half-moons. Wine shadows blooming across linen. Candle wax. Sand. Bronzer. Saltwater. Once, a black lace thong tangled in a fitted sheet like a tiny flag of surrender.
Heidi held it up with two fingers when Jacques walked in.
“Yours?”
He looked at it.
Then at her.
“Not my size.”
“Professional answer.”
“I am nothing if not professional.”
“Do I charge extra for mystery underwear?”
“You should.”
“I’m starting a policy.”
“Good. Build an empire, one thong at a time.”
Heidi laughed. Jacques leaned against the dryer and watched her fold towels as though watching her do laundry was a form of theater he had paid handsomely to attend.
That was the thing about Jacques.
He made ordinary rooms feel like they were waiting to become decadent.
The laundromat changed when he entered. The fluorescent lights seemed less ugly. The dryers sounded less mechanical. Even the old checkerboard floor, cracked near the back wall, looked briefly intentional beneath his feet.
He would come after nights on the water, when his yacht had returned bruised with music and secrets. The staff brought the contracted laundry, but Jacques brought his own clothes himself. Always in the early morning, when the island yawned awake and tourists were still sleeping off whatever version of paradise they had purchased the night before.
It was rare to see him then. Rarer still to see him quiet.
He would load his shirts into the washer with a cigarette tucked behind one ear and a newspaper under one arm. He folded jeans with the same elegance he brought to champagne glasses and hand-rolled cigars. He seemed incapable of doing anything without making it look faintly seductive, which Heidi found both unfair and suspicious.
One morning, the laundromat was empty except for the two of them. Rain tapped against the front windows, and a soft gray light settled over the machines. Jacques stood at the folding table, smoothing a dark shirt with long fingers.
Heidi watched him from behind the counter.
“Don’t you ever tire of the parties?”
He glanced up.
“Non, chérie.”
His voice was low, warm, easy.
“The night is where life tells the truth.”
“That sounds like something you say to women before making bad choices.”
“It works?”
“Probably.”
He chuckled. A soft, low sound that moved through the room like smoke.
“The day is full of performance,” he said. “People behave in daylight. They wear the right faces, say the right things, make grocery lists, answer emails, pretend they have forgiven their mothers.”
“That got specific.”
“The night removes the costume.”
He folded one sleeve, then the other.
“On the water, especially. People become honest when there is no street to run into, no bedroom to hide inside, no neighbor pretending not to listen through the wall.”
“Hey.”
He smiled.
“The ocean takes away the little lies first.”
“And the big ones?”
“She saves those. She likes to make a meal of them.”
Heidi leaned back against the counter.
“You talk about the ocean like she broke your heart.”
Jacques paused.
For a moment, something moved across his face. Not sadness exactly. Something older and better trained.
“Ah, oui, chérie,” he murmured. “The ocean—she’s never satisfied. Always pulling me back.”
His hands rested on the folded shirt.
“She is a lover with a hold I cannot break.”
The words were beautiful.
Too beautiful.
Heidi had learned to distrust beautiful words from men. They were often just curtains hung over broken windows.
Still, Jacques made it hard not to listen.
Heidi knew pieces of his story by then. Not because he volunteered them all at once. Jacques did not confess. He distributed facts like favors.
His father had been a preacher. French. Serious. Thin-faced. The kind of man who believed God spoke most clearly through discipline and silence. He preached the word of God in small churches and smaller rooms, with the same black Bible tucked under his arm, his collar too stiff and his eyes too tired.
His mother had been an heiress.
A drunk one, according to Jacques, though he said it without cruelty. Almost with admiration.
“She was born disappointed,” he told Heidi one evening while fixing the hinge on her back gate. “Some people are born crying. My mother was born looking around the room and finding it beneath her.”
She had come from old money, old manners, old bloodlines people whispered about with reverence and resentment. A purebred, Jacques called her once, his mouth twisted around the word. His father, by contrast, was a mutt in holy clothing. A man of God with rough hands and no invitation into the society his wife had been raised to believe was her inheritance.
His mother hated the smallness of their life.
Hated the church dinners.
Hated the women who brought casseroles and judgment.
Hated the way her husband gave more of himself to God than to her.
Hated that he gave her only one child.
Hated, perhaps most of all, that Jacques loved them both.
When Jacques was fifteen, his mother left.
Not quietly.
She packed three trunks, emptied the liquor cabinet into a suitcase wrapped in silk scarves, and took Jacques with her to the coast near the border of France and Spain, where the food was rich, the music was loud, and Catholic guilt could be drowned nightly in wine if one had the money for it.
“That was where I became terrible,” Jacques once said.
He said it fondly.
Spanish food and French sarcasm raised the rest of him. That was how he described it. He learned to smoke too young, drink too well, dance close, lie beautifully, and kiss women who already had husbands. He learned which rooms mattered, which names opened doors, and which rich men confused cruelty with taste. He learned that pleasure could be a language, a weapon, an apology, and occasionally a place to sleep.
His mother introduced him to society as though presenting a blade.
She dressed him well. Taught him posture. Taught him wine. Taught him which fork to use and which secrets to keep. She told him love was a thing men invented when they could not afford loyalty.
He believed her for a while.
Maybe part of him still did.
Then, on his twenty-first birthday, his mother ended her own life.
He told Heidi this only once.
They were sitting on the back patio between their buildings, passing a bottle of rum back and forth because neither of them had bothered with glasses. The night smelled like wet stone and hibiscus. Somewhere nearby, music floated from a bar near the beach.
Jacques looked at the bottle in his hand and said, “She chose my birthday because she wanted to be remembered.”
He did not cry.
He did not look dramatic.
He only sounded tired.
“They buried her in France,” he said. “I left the same day.”
“Where did you go?”
He lifted one shoulder.
“Anywhere with water.”
Eventually, anywhere, became here.
He bought the boat first. Or so the island story went. A vessel too large for practicality and too beautiful for subtlety. Then he bought the building beside The Tiki Tumble and turned it into something nobody could quite define but everybody wanted access to.
Islanders and visitors slipped through Jacques’ doors to plan celebrations beneath the stars. Weddings with orchids and string lights. Engagement dinners with too much champagne. Birthday parties that ended with someone vomiting discreetly over the side. Secret corporate retreats. Private gatherings with guest lists nobody admitted seeing.
His yacht became infamous.
By day, she sat gleaming in the marina, white and graceful and untouchable.
By night, she carried music over the water like a spell.
Laughter. Glasses clinking. Bass notes. Women shrieking in delight. Men roaring at jokes that were probably not funny. Sometimes fireworks. Sometimes silence afterward, which was worse.
Jacques built an empire out of other people’s desire to feel briefly unobserved.
He knew how to capitalize on longing.
That, Heidi thought, was maybe the saddest thing about him.
Not that he buried himself in scotch and women and the endless theatre of night.
But that he had made it profitable.
Heidi liked him anyway.
She did not trust him exactly. Trust felt too clean a word for Jacques. But she liked the way he showed up when something broke. She liked the way he never asked questions too directly. She liked how he could make coffee in her upstairs apartment without needing to be shown where anything was after the first time.
She liked that he did not try to be her boyfriend.
He was her neighbor.
Her first male friend on the island.
A solid, reliable presence with unreliable eyes.
Also, she was fairly sure he wanted to fuck her.
That suspicion became less theoretical after the rum.
It was a Friday night, nearly a month after the shelf incident. The laundromat had closed early because a thunderstorm knocked out power on half the island. The machines sat silent, full of wet sheets and unfinished cycles. Rain hammered the roof. The emergency lights glowed red near the back door, making the whole place look like the inside of a warning.
Jacques came over with a lantern, a toolbox, and a bottle of dark rum.
“Prepared,” Heidi said, opening the door.
“For storms, yes.”
“And the rum?”
“For you.”
“That was smooth.”
“I practice.”
They checked the breakers. Swore at the breakers. Determined the problem was not the breakers. Then they gave up and sat on the floor between two rows of washers, the lantern between them, the bottle passing back and forth.
Heidi told him about America.
Not the postcard version. Not highways and baseball and flags flapping in front of schools. She told him about prices climbing like vines over everything. Groceries that cost more every week. Rent that ate people alive. Politics so loud it followed you into your dreams. Men who wore patriotism like a costume and treated women like unpaid territory. Jobs that wanted your whole life but still called you replaceable.
She told him about heartbreak too.
Not all of it. Enough.
Enough for him to understand there had been someone before the island. Someone who had made leaving feel less like adventure and more like survival.
Jacques listened.
That was another dangerous thing about him.
He knew how to listen without interrupting. He sat with one knee drawn up, his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows, the lantern turning his face gold and shadowed. He watched her like she was not rambling, not bitter, not half-drunk on rum and blackout honesty. Like she was telling him a story worth keeping.
“I hate it sometimes,” Heidi admitted. “Home. The whole thing. The noise. The ugliness. Everyone fighting over scraps while rich men set the table on fire.”
Jacques took the bottle from her hand.
“And yet you miss it.”
She looked away.
“Yeah.”
“Of course.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It makes all the sense. We are allowed to hate the places that made us. We are not allowed to pretend they did not make us.”
He drank.
The rain softened.
Heidi stared at him.
“You say shit like that and then expect me to believe you’re just some party guy with a boat?”
Jacques smiled, but it did not reach all the way.
“It is an excellent boat.”
“I bet.”
“You will come out one night.”
“Maybe.”
“You should.”
“Is that an invitation?”
“It has always been an invitation.”
There it was again.
The heat.
Not sudden. Not forced. Something that had been gathering between them in the corners of ordinary days. In borrowed tools. In folded linens. In glances over invoices. In the brush of fingers over a dropped clothespin. In the way he said chérie like the word had texture.
Heidi looked at him across the lantern.
“Jacques.”
“Yes?”
“We’re neighbors.”
“I am painfully aware.”
“That can get messy.”
He nodded gravely.
“We do not shit where we eat.”
Heidi burst out laughing.
The laugh broke whatever careful thing had been holding them apart.
Jacques smiled then. Fully. A flash of teeth, relief and want in equal measure.
“Very elegant,” she said.
“It is an important philosophy.”
“Did your French society mother teach you that?”
“No. She mostly taught me how to ruin dinner parties.”
“Useful skill.”
“Very.”
Silence settled again.
Not empty.
Charged.
Heidi felt the rum in her blood, warm and reckless. She felt the storm pressing against the windows. She felt the island around them, wet and breathing, the laundromat full of sleeping machines and trapped water.
Jacques leaned back against a washer.
“I have avoided this,” he said.
“This?”
“You.”
That did something to her.
A small, humiliating flutter beneath her ribs.
“Why?”
He looked toward the wall they shared.
“Because you are next door.”
“And American?”
“That too.”
“Scary stuff.”
“You joke.”
“I deflect. There’s a difference.”
His gaze returned to her.
“The women who come through my life usually leave before breakfast or after the week they paid for ends. They are not on the other side of my wall holding power tools at sunrise.”
“I’m very sorry for being inconveniently real.”
“You are forgiven.”
Heidi swallowed.
“What else?”
Jacques tilted his head.
“What else?”
“Why avoid me?”
For the first time since she had known him, he seemed almost nervous.
It looked strange on him.
Not unattractive. Just unfamiliar. A crack in the lacquer.
“Because I like you,” he said.
The words were plain.
No French. No metaphor. No ocean turning into a lover. No night revealing truth.
Just that.
Because I like you.
Heidi looked down at the bottle between them.
“Oh.”
“Yes,” he said softly. “Oh.”
She should have stood up. Should have made a joke. Should have said something practical about walls and neighbors and the inevitable awkwardness of passing each other with trash bags and coffee.
Instead, she reached for the bottle.
Jacques reached at the same time.
Their hands met.
Neither moved.
The lantern hummed.
Rain dripped steadily from the awning outside.
Somewhere in the dark laundromat, a washer settled with a soft metallic sigh.
Heidi looked up.
Jacques was watching her mouth.
“Bad idea,” she whispered.
“Terrible.”
“Really terrible.”
“Catastrophic.”
Then he kissed her.
Not like a man trying to prove something.
Like a man finally giving in to an argument he had been losing privately for weeks.
The kiss was warm with rum and rain and restraint failing all at once. His hand came to the side of her face, careful at first, then less careful when she leaned into him. Heidi gripped the front of his shirt and pulled him closer because apparently she had also been losing an argument privately and was tired of pretending otherwise.
The power came back on with a violent hum.
Every fluorescent light in the laundromat snapped awake.
They broke apart.
Heidi blinked against the sudden brightness.
Jacques looked up at the ceiling, breathing hard.
“Even God objects,” he said.
Heidi laughed against his shoulder.
After that, the relationship became a thing with no name.
Names made demands. Names needed definitions. Names asked where this was going, what it meant, who knew, who cared.
Heidi and Jacques avoided all of that with the skill of two people who had survived enough heartbreak to distrust paperwork of the heart.
They were not boyfriend and girlfriend.
They were neighbors who shared coffee, rum, tools, and occasional shared orgasm.
They were two people who could sit together on the patio in the bruised blue hour before dawn while Jacques smoked a cigar and read the island paper, and Heidi pretended not to read over his shoulder.
They were two people who sometimes did laundry at the same time in comfortable silence.
They were two people who, after a few shots and a look held too long, found their way upstairs or next door and did not discuss the softness that came after.
Jacques was attentive but never clingy. He brought pastries but not flowers. Fixed leaks but did not ask where she had been. Remembered how she took her coffee but never called her mine.
Heidi appreciated that.
Mostly.
Sometimes she caught him watching her like he was trying to solve a problem he had created for himself.
Other times he vanished into his work for days, swallowed by the yacht, the night, the champagne-soaked machinery of pleasure. Then his linens arrived in canvas bags, smelling like perfume, salt, and other people’s hands, and Heidi would feel something ugly and stupid twist in her stomach.
Not jealousy.
Absolutely not.
Jealousy required claims.
She had made none.
Still, lipstick on linen was annoying.
One morning, Jacques came in after a wedding party that had apparently tried to baptize itself in champagne. He looked wrecked. Beautifully wrecked, which was also annoying. His shirt was wrinkled, his hair tied back badly, eyes shadowed from no sleep.
He carried a small basket of his personal laundry and set it on the counter.
“You look like death,” Heidi said.
“Death wishes she looked like me.”
“Modest.”
“I am French.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“I have been told.”
He walked behind the counter without asking, poured himself coffee from her pot, and drank it black.
Heidi watched him.
“You okay?”
He lowered the cup.
For one second, there it was again.
The sadness.
That old, deep undertow he usually kept dressed in linen and charm.
Then it disappeared.
“The bride cried before the ceremony, during the ceremony, after the ceremony, and again when she lost one shoe.”
“Sounds emotional.”
“The groom kissed a bridesmaid.”
“Oh.”
“The bride’s mother threw shrimp.”
“At him?”
“At everyone. She had range.”
Heidi laughed.
Jacques smiled into his coffee.
“And you?” he asked. “How is your empire of soap?”
“Currently held together by duct tape and spite.”
“Very American.”
“Careful.”
“I adore duct tape.”
He moved to the folding table and began sorting his clothes.
This was the version of Jacques she was fondest of, though she would never tell him. Not the yacht man. Not the gatekeeper of the island’s nightlife. Not the beautiful host with a cigar and a thousand secrets.
This one.
The man in the quiet morning, folding shirts and jeans in the corner of her laundromat while the world had not yet demanded anything from either of them.
Heidi watched his hands.
“Do you ever miss France?”
He did not answer immediately.
Outside, the island stirred awake. A scooter whined past. Someone shouted near the bakery. The ocean breathed beyond the buildings, always there, even when unseen.
“No,” he said finally.
Then, “Yes.”
He folded a shirt with unnecessary precision.
“I miss food at midnight. I miss old women insulting you with poetry. I miss the way people argue as if language is a sport. I miss the coast near the border. I miss being young enough to believe consequences were for other people.”
“And your father?”
His hands paused.
Heidi regretted asking.
But Jacques only looked down at the shirt.
“My father prayed for me,” he said. “That was how he loved. I did not understand it then.”
“Do you now?”
He smiled faintly.
“No.”
He folded the shirt and placed it in the basket.
“But I understand that he tried.”
That stayed with her.
The idea of love as an effort that could still fail.
When he gathered his things, Jacques lingered near the door. His presence filled the laundromat the way perfume lingered in fabric. Calm. Magnetic. Impossible to fully remove.
He gave Heidi one last look.
A small, knowing smile that seemed to carry too many secrets for one mouth.
Then he stepped outside to the patio, lit a cigar, and opened the island paper.
Heidi watched him through the glass.
The morning light caught the side of his face, turning him briefly golden. Smoke curled around him. Beyond him, the narrow strip of sea visible between the buildings flashed silver.
Some men, Heidi thought, were simply born to carry the night with them.
No matter where they went.
Jacques turned the page of the newspaper.
Then, without looking up, he said loudly enough for her to hear through the open door, “Stop staring, chérie. It is bad for discipline.”
Heidi rolled her eyes.
But she was smiling.
And Jacques, who had spent his life turning hunger into business, loneliness into glamour, and grief into something people paid to dance around, smiled too.
Not because he was happy.
Jacques did not trust happiness.
But because the American next door had turned on her lights one morning, attacked a wall with a drill, and somehow become the first thing in years he was nervous to want.
