“Listing those things in order of importance? Charlie’s not quite ready for beer yet.”

“I didn’t forget the milk. And cereal and peanut butter and whatever else he eats. So you should start packing and get there before all that stuff passes its best-before date.”

“I don’t know what to say, Fin. I wasn’t expecting you to do anything like this.”

“Oh, and the place has wi-fi. Already had the tech guys there. Everything’s up and running. Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime, Paramount.”

“God forbid we should be without those.”

She got off the call and as soon as she was home she fired up the laptop in the kitchen and checked the link that Finnegan had emailed her.

It was a two-story Victorian-style home, built sometime around the 1930s, but had been updated over the decades so that there probably wasn’t much of the original house still around. Kind of like the Temptations and the Four Tops, Annie mused, whom she’d come to love, what with her mom playing them all the time when she was growing up. Still touring, but with all new singers. There were a couple dozen pictures to click through. The outside was painted powder-blue with white trim. A porch ran along the entire front of the house and about halfway down the left side. There were garden chairs placed on it with big flowery cushions, and Annie could already picture herself sitting in one of them, a tall glass of lemonade on the wicker table, the latest Ann Patchett on her lap.

“It does look wonderful,” she said under her breath, now viewing photos of the home’s interior. A large living room with overstuffed furniture and a fireplace. A big kitchen with everything she could possibly want. She zoomed in on one of the shots and spotted a Nespresso machine.

“Oh my,” she said.

There were four bedrooms on the second floor, one of which had been converted into a studio. No wonder Finnegan had liked this place. A caption on the photo said that the home had previously been occupied by husband-and-wife photographers, that they’d used this space as an office and for shoots.

Thoughtful, Annie supposed, but also sneaky. She was willing to bet that studio was as well stocked as the kitchen, but instead of food and drink, it would come equipped with paints and brushes and markers and pencils and Sharpies and pads of paper and a drafting table with multiple height adjustments. Fin’s motives were less than pure, but it was, she supposed, still a nice gesture. In the very unlikely event she might want to do some work, everything would be ready.

As she continued to look at the photos, another email from Finnegan landed in the inbox.

Just one extra pic. Wanted you to see there’s a room all set up for Charlie.