Her eyes widened. “Are you kidding me? I always wanted a secret clubhouse. My dad built a playhouse one year and put it up in the backyard, but there was nothing secret about it. Either Lila or Dawn or, most of the time, one of Dawn’s boyfriends, was holed up inside. God, they used to smoke so much pot in there.”

Harrison’s chuckle was impossible to subdue that time. “Sounds a lot more exciting than this place.”

She returned her attention to the small bookcase that contained most of his reading materials. “What is it, exactly?”

Even though she couldn’t see him, he shrugged. There was something comforting in making that gesture, as if he was robbing this place of its significance. “At first? A place to crash. I started working here when I was really young, just fourteen, so having a bed that wasn’t under my dad’s roof was everything to me. I’d sleep here whenever we had a fight. Which, to be honest, was pretty much every day.”

As usual, Sophie cut straight to the heart of the matter. “Do you still use it?”

He shrugged again, but it was less comforting this time. “Yeah. It’s stupid, but I like it. There aren’t…” He paused. As usual, finding the right words to express himself was a challenge. This is where he’d usually give up and close off, finding it easier to retreat than to keep struggling. It still would be easier, but he wanted to try. Sophie deserved nothing less. “I don’t have many places that are just mine.”

She nodded her understanding. Now that she’d lived inside his house, she knew. For decades, it had been a cold place, a dead place, a place no rational person would choose to be.

Until you walked through the door.

“Oscar gave me this place as a kind of present,” Harrison said, his voice thick. “He knew I needed to get away and clear my head sometimes, so he gave me a key to the building and made sure everyone knows this place is off-limits.”

She whirled, her lips parted in surprise. “You mean to tell me that no one else has been up here in sixteen years?”

He nodded.

“Yet you brought me?”

He nodded again.

“But…” Her eyes remained wide, a question burning inside them. It would have been easy to wave that question away—to pull her into his arms and distract her with how comfortable and warm that mattress could be—but she needed to hear this. She needed to know.

“You’ve been trying to push past my walls since the day you met me,” he said and extended his arms wide. “Well, this is what I’ve been hiding. It’s a little stark and a lot underwhelming, but it’s all I’ve got.”