I walked over, absorbing it all. “What in the world are you doing?”

He grinned, flipping down a pair of safety goggles, but not before I saw him wink. “I’ve been put to work by Lily.”

“I had no idea you were a handyman,” I said, astonished at how much I still had to learn about Adam, the new things I kept discovering, like turning a corner in a city I thought I knew only to find a delicious-smelling bakery or a cozy bookstore.

“Ah, I come from a long line of woodworkers. Almost all of the furniture in my parents’ house was made by my dad.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “You can make our new coffee table then.” I still hadn’t found the right one. We’d been using an old brass monstrosity that my mother had picked up at a discount furniture store decades ago, and I wanted it gone.

I watched Adam line up a board and press through it with the high-pitched saw. His movements were precise and confident. Which was the way he did everything, including his job. The job he deserved.

“Let him work,” Lily called. She was trying to untangle a long string of orange lights I’d never seen before. Perhaps they’d been Adam’s at some point. “He’s making me a stage for the grave robber.”

I shook my head as I sauntered back over. “I don’t even want to know.”

“You know what else you don’t want to know?” Lily asked. “We have a ghost.”

“What?” I took one end of the lights and tried to make sense of them.

Lily snatched them from me and began stretching the strand along the sidewalk. “In the woods. By that lake down there. Ellen’s going to show me.”

Ellen again. I was grateful Lily had made a friend so fast, but was she the right friend? At her old school, Lily hadn’t exactly been popular, but she’d had a core group. Here, though, the last thing I wanted was for Lily to be branded as strange before she even had a chance to blossom at her new school. Once you were labeled one way or the other in high school, it was impossible to shake it. I knew that from experience.

“I don’t know that I like the sound of that,” I said.

“A girl ghost.” I could hear the smile in my daughter’s voice. “She haunts this creepy railroad bridge down there.”

“Great,” I said. “Is this that urban legend you’ve been going on about?”

“Yeah. She’s a bride, too. Plunged to her death in her wedding gown.”

“Probably because the appetizers weren’t hot enough,” Adam called from the driveway, an old joke from our wedding where his mom wouldn’t stop complaining that the mushroom puffs were cold as ice.

“Sounds morbid,” I said. “Just don’t hang around railroad tracks. I don’t like that idea.”