“Oh.” She furrowed her brow and looked around. John had a small sofa and just the one bed. Of course there wasn’t room for two in here. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t picked out that detail immediately. “John, you don’t have to do that. I could sleep on the sofa—”

“Mary.” He frowned. “That thing is only three feet long. Just take the bed. The neighbors have let me sleep over before. They like me. I gave some free legal advice to their boy a few years back.”

She glanced uneasily toward the bed, uncomfortable with booting him out of his own home. But he was thumbing through his cell phone, either oblivious to or ignoring her reaction.

He entered into a phone call, which surprised Mary a bit. He never made calls or texted when the two of them were together. She realized then how much she usually had his entire attention. The sudden loss of it threw into sharp relief the heady electric zing of having his full focus.

“Christo?” he said after a second. “Hey, it’s John. Yeah. Right. Good to hear your voice too. How’s Candy? No way, already? Hunter’s a good school. Definitely. She gonna live at home? Probably for the best.” He took a bite of food while he listened to the other man on the line for a minute, swallowing down half his water at once. “Listen, I called to see if there was a chance you’d break your no-work-on-Saturdays rule. Friend of mine got her house broken into last night and I was hoping to get her apartment secured by tomorrow. Nah, tomorrow is soon enough. With me, actually.”

John’s eyes met Mary’s for a moment before they flicked away.

His cheeks went pink. “Yeah. No. It’s not—Jesus, Christo.”

Mary could hear laughter coming through the line loud and clear. John abandoned his dinner and rose up to stalk over to the kitchen window, looking out into the world. “Yeah, that should work. All right. I’ll text you the address. Thanks, man.”

John sat back down, digging into his food again, the tips of his ears and his cheeks still slightly pink.

“You just...handled that,” Mary mused, setting her fork down.

“Oh. Right.” John cleared his throat. “Sorry, I should have told you that my old friend is a locksmith and a carpenter, and he’ll definitely get you fixed up.”

“No apology necessary.” Her eyes fell to the candle that sat between them. “I can’t remember the last time someone just handled something like that for me.”

“You’ve been running the shop on your own for a long time?”

Mary’s eyes rose to his. This she could talk about, the history of the shop, not the way it was now, in shambles. “Almost six years. I inherited it, actually.”

“Really?”