It was late as I put the finishing touches on it all. Luke had disappeared an hour before, but I’d barely noticed, my mind focused wholly on what I was doing. I stepped back to admire our work when I heard him approach.

“What do you think?” I asked without looking, still smiling at the installments, hands on my hips.

“Damn,” he breathed. “It really is impressive when you step back and look at it all together. I can’t wait to see it from the outside. Especially when we hang these.”

My brows quirked as I turned. He’d put his shirt back on when the sun went down and the shop cooled off, much to my disappointment. But he was dusted with sawdust, and little flecks of wood stood out like snowflakes against the dense black of his hair.

In his hands were two signs, and he held them up one at a time, as they were too long to display at once. In a gorgeous handwritten script were the words rain and shine, carved out of the wood, which he’d left raw.

My jaw hit the ground. “Luke, did you … you didn’t make these, did you?”

“Yeah,” he answered, inspecting rain. “Do you like them?”

“Like them?” I took rain from him, my eyes combing over it. “They’re … they’re gorgeous. How the hell?” I asked myself, turning it over like I’d find proof of magic.

He shrugged like it was no big deal, casual and confident, like this was just an everyday, regular thing. “I drew it out, used the scroll saw. Didn’t take long, thirty minutes for each, since they were just fonts, no borders or anything.”

I turned to meet his eyes, blinking at him stupidly. “You drew this?”

“I mean, I used a font as a template, but yeah.”

“And then you just … cut it out?”

“That’s how it usually works,” he said on a laugh. “I would have painted them, but I didn’t know what color you wanted to do.”

“Turquoise,” I said without hesitation. “To match the door.”

“Got it. Be right back.” And with a smirk and a wink, he was walking away again, leaving me in the quiet shop.

Luke Bennet, my hero.

It wasn’t even right.

I swallowed the bitter pill that I’d been wrong about him as I walked to the swing and sat, gripping the rope. But the aftertaste of that wasn’t something I could rid myself of so easily.

I liked him. And I liked him enough to do something about it.

This was a dangerous realization, my teenage self screaming Don’t do it! like I was willingly stepping in front of a goddamn freight train. Because I’d been down this road once before, and though we had just been teenagers at the time, in moments like this, the wound stung like it was fresh.

Luke Bennet had been my friend. He’d been my first crush, the first boy’s name I doodled in my notebook, the boy I rushed to work after school to see. Funny, charming, beautiful Luke Bennet, who had convinced me to come to the greenhouse that night, who listened to me cry about my dead mother with that heartbreaking look on his face. Who kissed me in the moonlight and then forgot me completely.