For two hours, it went on like that, all while he attempted to get some semblance of work done. With the office in Dallas closed after 5 o’clock and everyone home for the holiday here in Miller’s Point, he had no one to do business with, but he still found paperwork to read and files to sort through. About an hour into his mental torture, he’d shifted from a secretarial office to his uncle’s actual office, hoping to find more busywork there. It was eerie, being in a dead man’s office, almost as strange as being in a dead family’s house. Except for a few distant cousins, only Clark remained of the Woodward clan. He was the last of his kind, in a way. It made the wall of family photos lining his uncle’s office all the more difficult to bear. Burying his head in the nearest drawer to avoid looking at them, Clark picked up stacks of paper at random and began sorting them. Busywork though it was, at least it was distracting busywork. His uncle had been many things, but a brilliant organizational mind, he most certainly was not.

Clark stacked papers into piles by subject matter, then date. When he’d accomplished that, he sorted by last name of the signatory partner, then date. He shuffled and re-shuffled and tried to get it into an appropriate filing system until finally realizing the filing system wasn’t the problem.

He was worried about Kate. Not in the “she’s a woman in my house and I need to make sure she’s safe because that’s what a good host does” way. Not in a detached gentlemanly way.

The longer she remained out of sight, the more wrong he realized he was when he said “I don’t care about you.” He hardly knew her, but he cared about her. There was no getting around it or denying it.

Only one thing remained unclear: what to do about it. Caring meant investment. Caring meant friendship. For all he knew…if he spent more time here…caring could mean even more than friendship. Caring meant giving her things he didn’t know he could give.

No. No. He couldn’t do it. He’d just have to…lock himself in here until she gave up and abandoned him. It was the only way to move on. Maybe he was getting ill. Being sick always made him think crazy things. Maybe she bewitched him or something. Small towns usually had a witch, if made-for-TV movies had any truth to them. In any case, he couldn’t be allowed to care for her. He’d just have to hide himself away until she shrunk and took up less and less room in his small, used-up heart.