“Georgina,” Hugh said hesitantly. I looked at him. “There’s something else . . . just a heads up. You know this as well as I do. When upright people screw up like this . . . they do try to rebound in their way. The guilt’s got to be eating him. People like that try to do things to make up for it. Rash things. Something tells me he’ll be like that.”

“Thanks for the warning,” I said. “Though I can’t imagine he’d do something that could make this any worse.”

The imp cut me a look. “Sweetie, he’s human. Don’t underestimate him.”

Hugh was right.

The next day, I went to the condo builder’s office and talked more in-depth with the real estate agent that handled their sales. We chatted for a while and talked numbers, though I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I was doing this without thinking it through. The pictures were nice, the floor plan was nice, and the options were nice. Yet, I didn’t know if this was just some impulsive reaction to the ups and downs in my life.

Then, when he took me to the unit itself and showed me the balcony, I knew. It was a beautiful day, one that wasn’t true summer yet but could give us enough hope that winter was just about finished. Puget Sound was deep blue, and the downtown skyline gleamed in the sun against a cloudless sky. To the west, the Olympic Mountains were visible for the first time in over a month, their peaks still heavy with snow. As often happened with this kind of weather, people turned out in droves, treating it like it was high summer. Families came out, shorts came out. This part of Alki didn’t have a true beach—that was at a park a little farther down—but the water was still just a stone’s throw away from my building, separated only by the small road and narrow strip of grass. I watched the waves break against the shore and realized this was where I needed to be.

“I want to make an offer,” I told him.

I knew Maddie would want to know, so I made sure she was the first one I told when I ended up back in Queen Anne later that night. It was early evening, my last day before returning to a real full-time schedule, and I swung by the store to catch her and tell her. Only, she sought me out first, with news of her own.

“Georgina!”

I’d barely entered when she grabbed my arm and pulled me off into the cookbooks. “Hey,” I laughed. “Glad you’re in a good mood. I’ve got news.”

“Me too!”

Her face was radiant, and after all that had happened, it made me happy to see her like this. I couldn’t help a return grin. “What’s up?”