Chapter 5
Nora couldn't move. Her heart hammered against her sternum like a trapped sparrow. "Did I?"
"Yeah." His thumb didn't retreat immediately. His knuckle lingered against the hollow beneath her ear for one beat, two, before he let his hand drop back to the timber joist. His eyes darkened, an agony of self-restraint tightening the muscles in his jaw. "Half-inch spade bit, Davies. Before I change my mind about letting you supervise."
Nora handed him the steel bit. Her fingers were trembling so hard she nearly dropped it into the pit.
***
By the second week, the hearth was level, anchored by twin steel brackets that Silas had forged in his own metal shop across the alley.
The bakery’s bones were finally standing square, but the front of house remained a disaster of peeling laminate and water-stained glass. In the center of the showroom sat Clara’s prized vintage display counter: a ten-foot, quarter-sawn white oak centerpiece with a curved glass front and a heavy mahogany service top that had bowed from twenty years of coastal humidity.
On a Tuesday afternoon, a summer squall broke over Oakhaven.
Rain lashed against the front plate glass in torrential sheets, turning Main Street into a blurred, gray river. The wind moaned down the brick alleyways, rattling the tin downspouts and pitching the Atlantic into a frothing, white-capped churn two blocks away.
Inside Honeycomb Hearth, it was safe, dry, and warm.
Silas had set up three halogen work lights, casting long, honey-colored pools across the bare floor. A small cast-iron radiator clanked rhythmically in the corner, filling the room with dry heat while the storm beat against the world outside.
Nora sat on an overturned crate, the green clothbound ledger resting open on her knees, while Silas worked on the underside of the mahogany counter with a heavy cast-iron hand plane.
*Shhk. Shhk. Shhk.*
The steel blade took gossamer shavings of old mahogany, curling them like cinnamon bark across his boots. Silas moved with mesmerizing, rhythmic economy—his broad back flexing through his faded gray henley, his forearm muscles shifting beneath the dust with every clean pass.
"Listen to this," Nora said, turning a heavy page of the ledger. The paper rustled with a crisp, dry whisper.
Silas didn't stop planing, but his ears twitched. "What did she say now?"
"Section Seven: The Front Counter and Silas’s Blind Spots," Nora read aloud, a fond smile curving her lips.
Silas’s plane hitched. The blade caught on the grain with a sharp *clack*. He froze, his broad shoulders locking into rigid tension.
"Read it," he said, not turning around. His voice was strange—taut, flattened by a sudden, protective guard.
Nora cleared her throat, imitating Clara’s sharp, no-nonsense cadence. *"‘The curve on the counter frame was steamed and bent in 1938 by a shipwright from Camden. It will try to spring flat every time the barometric pressure drops below twenty-nine inches. When Silas tries to clamp it, he will use three bar clamps and swear at the middle mortise. Tell him to use the French strap clamps from the wall rack behind his drill press. He won't want to because his grandfather built them, and he thinks using old tools is sentimental nonsense. Remind him that sentiment is just physics with better manners.’"*
Nora looked up, expecting Silas to laugh or grumble a sarcastic denial.
He hadn't moved.
Silas stood bent over the mahogany counter, both hands resting flat against the warm, freshly planed wood. His head was bowed, dark strands of hair falling over his forehead, completely concealing his face. His knuckles were bone-white against the dark grain.
The only sound in the bakery was the violent drumming of rain against the glass and the muffled groan of the sea wind.
"Silas?" Nora asked softly, the humor fading from her voice.
He took a slow, shuddering breath. When he finally straightened and turned toward her, the expression on his face made Nora’s breath catch in her throat.
There was no cynicism in his features. No dry carpenter’s wit. His gray eyes were bloodshot at the rims, shining with an intensity of grief and reverence so profound, so devastatingly raw, that it felt like looking at an open wound. He looked at the green book in her hands as if it were a reliquary carved from his own flesh.
"Did she... did she really write that?" he whispered. His voice broke on the final syllable, scraping through his throat like cracked glass.
Nora felt an ache bloom behind her own ribs. She rose from the crate, holding the open book toward him. "Right here. In her usual handwriting. Slashing Ts, no patience for loops."
Silas didn't take the book. He took half a step backward, his boots hitting the edge of the sawhorses, his throat working as he swallowed down something massive and jagged.
"She remembered the strap clamps," he murmured. It sounded like an apology offered to the empty air.
"Of course she remembered," Nora said gently, stepping closer until she was standing just across the counter from him. "Silas, she loved you. It’s all over these pages. Every time she writes about you, it’s like... she was making sure someone would take care of you after she was gone. Just like she was making sure someone took care of me."
A strange, tortured shadow flickered across his face. Silas looked down at the floor, his jaw working violently as a muscle jumped beneath his stubble. For a second, Nora thought he might break down—his broad chest heaved, his hand coming up to pinch the bridge of his nose right where the pale scar dipped toward his eyebrow.
"She was something else," he said, his voice dropping to a gravelly rasp. "Your grandmother."
"She was a matchmaking mastermind," Nora said with a faint, tender laugh, trying to ease the suffocating pressure in the room. "She probably planned this whole renovation just to force us into the same room. She knew I was too stubborn to stay in Boston, and she knew you were too stubborn to leave this block."
Silas looked up. His gray eyes locked onto hers with a sudden, startling gravity that pinned her in place. The distance between them across the counter felt impossibly thin, charged with an unspoken confession that seemed to vibrate through the cedar-scented air.
"Is that what you think?" he asked quietly. "A matchmaking coup?"
"Look at the evidence, Vance," Nora murmured, her heart picking up speed as his gaze held hers. "She gave me your coffee order. She told me not to mention your scar. She gave me a map to your front door."
Silas stared at her. His eyes traveled from her gaze down to the hollow of her throat, where her pulse was visibly hammering against her skin.
"Clara didn't give you a map, Nora," he said, his voice barely louder than the storm outside. "She gave you an escape hatch. She wanted you to have a life where your hands actually made things that matter."
He reached across the counter. His fingers didn't hesitate this time; his warm, rough palm cupped the side of her neck, his thumb tracing the curve of her jawline with a reverent, trembling slowness that made Nora’s knees go soft.
