“What’s wrong with this picture?” Bea asked with amused exasperation. “You were married for twenty years, and you can’t tell when a man is interested in you? I’ve never been married, yet I see it?”

“See what?”

Bea took Clare by the shoulders and marched her into the tiny restroom in the back of the store. “Look,” she said, standing behind Clare.

“What am I looking at?”

“You’re a beautiful woman, Clare. You have all that luscious blonde hair and the most dazzling blue eyes I’ve ever seen in my life. If an old lady like me can see how gorgeous you are, don’t you think Aidan is going to notice it, too?”

Clare reached up to smooth her hair in a self-conscious gesture. “I’m not ready to be thinking about stuff like this. I have enough on my mind as it is.”

“Maybe ‘stuff like this’ is just what you need to get your mind off the rest, huh?”

“I think about that man, the one who hurt me,” Clare whispered. “I was able to be with my husband after because it was Jack, and my love for him was so much bigger than the fear. But I can’t imagine letting any other man touch me. The thought of it literally makes my skin crawl.”

“Maybe when the time comes, you’ll feel differently,” Bea said, squeezing Clare’s shoulders. “Don’t worry about that right now. One step at a time. Focus on the soup.”

Clare laughed and turned to hug Bea. “I can do that. Focus on the soup.”

“Keep saying it,” Bea said as she went out to greet a customer.

“Focus on the soup,” Clare whispered to herself in the mirror.

When Clare added two pieces of Diana’s homemade cheesecake to the soup order, she told herself it was because she wanted cheesecake, not because she thought he might enjoy it. You’re being such a ninny.

Clare took her time walking home. The sidewalk was carved out of the foot of snow that fell overnight. She was amused by the casual attitude in town toward what would’ve been a major snowstorm in Rhode Island. As she walked, she kept reminding herself that soup was soup, and despite what Bea said a bowl of soup did not constitute a date. Even someone who’d been out of the dating game for more than twenty years knew that.

But as she turned on to Maple Street, her heart began to beat faster when she spotted Aidan lounging on her front steps drinking a beer like it was seventy degrees outside rather than twenty. She couldn’t deny that he appeared to be waiting for her.

“Lying down on the job?” she asked with a raised eyebrow, making a supreme effort to be witty. Her heart almost stopped altogether when she was rewarded with a genuine smile. “You should do that more often.”