Instead of continuing toward the city center, Ronan takes a sharp left, bringing me to an area of the city I’ve yet to explore. Each cottage is larger and grander than the one before it—so grand, I’m not sure they can be called cottages at all. The roofs morph from thatch to slate, the windows growing and growing until they become walls of glass overlooking gardens so magnificent, they belong in a storybook.

“Where are we going?”

He pats my knuckles with his warm, smooth hand. “Do you recall me confessing my secret passion in the garden?”

The garden where he almost kissed me.

Is he going to try to kiss me again?

“Of course I do.”

His blue eyes glitter with his blinding smile. “I want to show you what I’ve been building.”

We cut through a side street, emerging across from the treehouse I saw the day I first arrived. Lilacs tremble from bushes on either side of a wide staircase that climbs to a porch encircling the trunk. The door has been built into the bark, with the scrolled iron hinges painted black. Each of the thick upper limbs holds another level, the pitched roofs made not of slate or thatch, but of woven branches.

“That is the loveliest house I’ve ever seen.” When I was a little girl, there was an apple tree in one of our fields that I claimed as my own. In the years after my mother passed, I spent more time in that tree than on solid ground.

“The inside is even more remarkable.”

“Do you know the owner?” I’d love a chance to see it someday.

Ronan unlatches the gate. “Kerris, I am the owner.”

This place is his? When he said he liked building things, I assumed he made toys or little wooden figures, not houses. “You built this?”

“No, but I designed it as a summer house.”

A summer house twice as big as the cottage I grew up in by the looks of it. The sanded oak banister slips beneath my fingers, glossy and smooth with fresh lacquer. Up the stairs we climb, my excitement doubling with each step toward the intricate facade.

The main door leads to a modest foyer that opens into a larger living room with a black stove and a kitchen boasting deep green cabinets. Every detail has been carefully thought out, even down to the brass knobs shaped like twigs.

“Ronan, this is… It’s remarkable.” One room flows into the next, with small staircases leading to bedrooms and a bathing room perched at the end of a branch all by itself, overlooking Rosehill.

Ronan watches me with a shoulder propped against the doorframe. “Do you really like it?”

Who wouldn’t? I trace my fingers along the carved headboard in the largest bedroom, marveling over each divot. “It’s unlike any home I’ve ever seen.”