“Minnie. Sweetheart.” He lifted my hand and kissed it. “The former owners were friends of friends of my parents. They’d bought it to renovate but soon lost interest because grandkids started arriving. I picked it up for a very low price. And renovation costs, because of the barter work I’ve been doing, have been next to nothing. The student loan payments you were making? Change the name on the payments to the bank that holds the mortgage, and we’ll be splitting costs almost exactly. Although I’m thinking we should combine accounts and not worry about who pays for what.”

“But . . .” So many thoughts were in my brain that they got jammed up and nothing came out. I shook my head to loosen them up and said, “Why did it take you so long to tell me this?”

He shrugged. “Thought I did.”

My annoyance soared into the red range. Seriously? Seriously? Then, because honestly, there wasn’t any point in being angry, I started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Rafe asked.

“Life with you,” I said, “is never going to be boring.”

With the sun on our faces, we walked hand in hand, down the waterfront. The sparkling water of Janay Lake was on one side, the town of Chilson on the other. Our town, the town where I’d summered as a child and later been lucky enough to find a permanent place, the town where my fiancé and I would be married, and where we’d grow old together.

Back home, Rafe headed to the basement to start painting drywall and I sat at the dining table with my laptop to update the financial spreadsheet.

Eddie immediately decided that his needs were more important than anything I was doing, so he jumped from the floor to my lap to the computer keyboard. In a few seemingly random paw steps, he managed to close the banking website, shut down the spreadsheet, and launch the photos of the infant twins I’d taken a few hours ago.

I snuggled my cat. “You know what? I have to go back to Pam’s. One child-sized wicker rocker won’t work when there are two children. Looks like I’m going to buy that rocking horse after all.”

“Mrr,” he said and, since he’d had five full seconds of snuggledom, struggled to get free.

Since the cat always wins in the end, I put up only a token resistance before letting him go. He oozed to the floor and pranced over to the closest bookshelf.

“Eddie, don’t you dare—”

My words, of course, had no effect on his actions. He jumped three shelves high, clambered over the top of our collection of natural history books, and disappeared behind a copy of the Field Manual of Michigan Flora.

And then I remembered. Last night. The tree branch that had fallen. The branch that turned out so very handy for me to pick up and use.