Natalie glanced at Peach, and somehow knew. “I’ll take the strawberry and we’ll give your dad the vanilla one. Guess that leaves the rainbow unicorn for you.”

11

While working on restoration jobs and repairs, Peach often found himself privy to bits and pieces of people’s lives. Something about the work he did tended to make him invisible to clients. At various stages of a job, he’d encountered closets full of hoarded things, priceless artifacts on display, careless messes not meant to be noticed. He’d overheard heated arguments and inane, rambling conversations, silly jokes and words of kindness, kids being scolded, music blaring, disasters being navigated, tragedies playing out: people living their lives.

Many projects took weeks or months, and he became a fixture, like part of the woodwork or a tool left lying out. People didn’t forget he was there, but as they acclimated to his presence, pretenses were dropped and they became more like themselves around him. A silent observer, he didn’t want to intrude, but sometimes it couldn’t be avoided. For the most part, people’s day-to-day lives revolved around mundane matters, yet there were occasional flares of drama, humor, or poignancy. Sometimes bits of his observations made their way into the songs Peach wrote. He once composed an entire ballad about a woman putting her late husband’s shoes into a charity box.

You never knew what would spark inspiration.

He suspected he would probably write a song about Natalie Harper. She was stressed to the max, in the middle of a multiact shit show, inheriting the shop as well as old Andrew, who was clearly having serious memory problems. Based on the calls he overheard, she’d also inherited a load of money troubles, not to mention a building that was dying of neglect.

Something about her touched him in a soft spot. It had been a surprise to run into her in the park the other day, but San Francisco was like that, a big city made up of small towns where people knew each other. With her old granddad, she’d been as sweet as those cupcakes. With customers, unfailingly polite. With Peach—hard to read.

And she was so damned pretty—small and graceful, with tender-looking skin and enormous eyes that hid nothing. She was a mixture of delicate and fierce. Dainty hands that flew over the keyboard, particularly when calculating spreadsheets. She dressed plain, like in a navy skirt and sweater and flat shoes—a sexy librarian. He could watch her all day.

She seemed like a nice woman. Nice, but troubled. Suzzy—his always-opinionated housemate and cowriter—would call that a red flag. But it wasn’t Natalie’s fault her mother had died and she had moved to the city to help her grandfather and was somehow trying to have a life.