So he stood there, waiting to see if Lois would turn around—and was nearly rammed from behind by an older gentleman who was trying to wheel an overloaded cart to his car.

“What’re you doing in the way?” the old guy snapped, his scruffy gray eyebrows knitting above a hawkish nose.

Seth didn’t respond, but he stepped to one side, and by the time he looked up again, Lois was gone.

When Seth got home, he grabbed the groceries from his back seat but hesitated before carrying them into the house. What was Tia Beckett doing? Had she already been over to feed Kiki?

He doubted it. It was only midafternoon. Judging from what she seemed to have been doing yesterday at this time, he guessed she was still sleeping. He had a feeling that was about all she’d been doing since the accident, which wasn’t a good sign.

He thought about going over to check on her but ultimately shrugged off his concern. They hadn’t bumped into each other that hard. And she wasn’t his responsibility. He was only in town to appease his mother, to teach at the school that’d brought him a family and to raise enough money to build a humanities center so that he could give back to the woman who’d given him so much. That was it—besides work, of course. He had deadlines to meet. Those deadlines were everything to him, what helped him keep going since he’d lost Shiloh.

Which was why it was odd that, after he put away the groceries and went up to the large office that comprised a large section of the top floor of Maxi’s house, he couldn’t seem to focus on what he was creating. He liked the sculpture. A contemporary piece commissioned for an office in the business district of San Francisco, it was a businessman hurrying to work with his briefcase falling open and pages and pages getting caught in the wind—to represent the change caused by the digital revolution and how the old ways were disappearing in the face of progress—and he felt a great deal of pressure to get it done. The attorney who’d commissioned it called almost every week, asking when it would be ready. But instead of seeing the finished piece in his mind’s eye, like he usually did when he set to work, he kept picturing Tia Beckett’s green eyes brimming with tears as she’d looked up at him last night.

Frustrated that he couldn’t let go of the distraction, he finally dropped his chisel and hammer and stalked over to the window. He could see the roof of the guesthouse from his vantage point—the front and back wall of the office was made of glass—but seeing her roof didn’t tell him anything.