“Well, that’s some compensation. Come on, I’ll show you around.” And get a look at the way he moved. “My apartment’s upstairs.”

“From the looks of that ceiling, your apartment may be downstairs any minute.”

“It’s perfectly sound,” she said with a wave of the hand. “Just ugly at the moment. But I have plans.”

“You’ve always had plans.”

But he walked with her, favoring his right leg, through the room and into a nasty little hallway with cracked plaster and exposed brick. Up a creaking set of stairs and into a sprawling space that appeared to be occupied by mice, spiders and assorted vermin he didn’t want to think about.

“Kate, this place—”

“Has potential,” she said firmly. “And history. It’s pre-Civil War.”

“It’s pre-Stone Age.” He was a man who preferred things already ordered, and in an understandable pattern. Like a ballpark. “Have you any clue what it’s going to cost you to make this place livable?”

“I have a clue. And I’ll firm that up when I talk to the contractor. It’s mine, Brand. Do you remember when we were kids and you and Freddie and I would walk by this old place?”

“Sure, used to be a bar, then it was a craft shop or something, then—”

“It used to be a lot of things,” Kate interrupted. “Started out as a tavern in the 1800s. Nobody’s really made a go of it. But I used to look at it when we were kids and think how much I’d like to live here, and look out these tall windows, and rattle around in all the rooms.”

The faintest flush bloomed on her cheeks, and her eyes went deep and dark. A sure sign, Brandon thought, that she had dug in.

“Thinking like that when you’re eight’s a lot different than buying a heap of a building when you’re a grown-up.”

“Yes, it is. It is different. Last spring, when I came home to visit, it was up for sale. Again. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

She circled the room. She could see it, as it would be. Wood gleaming, walls sturdy and clean. “I went back to New York, went back to work, but I couldn’t stop thinking about this old place.”

“You get the screwiest things in your head.”

She shrugged that off. “It’s mine. I was sure of it the minute I came inside. Haven’t you ever felt that?”

He had, the first time he’d walked into a ballpark. He supposed, when it came down to it, most sensible people would have told him that playing ball for a living was a kid’s dream. His family never had, he remembered. Any more than they’d discouraged Kate from her dreams of ballet.

“Yeah, I guess I have. It just seems so fast. I’m used to you doing things in deliberate steps.”

“That hasn’t changed,” she told him with a grin. “When I decided to retire from performing, I knew I wanted to teach dance. I knew I wanted to make this place a school. My school. Most of all, I wanted to be home.”