He hadn't blocked her because blocking her would mean choosing. And choosing meant being wrong, or being alone, or being something he hadn't defined yet. He hadn't blocked her because the silence felt like loss. But this morning in that kitchen, the silence had felt like something else entirely. It had felt like space, like a room with enough air in it to finally breathe.
He didn't know what Diane was to him. He didn't know what any of it meant. He was a 32-year-old man with sawdust in his truck and a 7-year-old who needed new cleats and a Monday deadline he hadn't finished yet. He had no business thinking about a woman he'd just met, but he thought about her anyway. About the way she drew rooms, the way he built them with intention.
About the fact that she had given him tea without asking and space without making it into a gift. Some things he was learning didn't announce themselves. They just opened a door and waited to see if you were brave enough to walk through. Some wounds don't heal with time. They heal the moment you stop returning to them out of habit and start choosing instead what you actually want to grow toward.
It started small, the way most things worth paying attention to do. Ethan came back to Linden Street the following Saturday with a toolbox because Maya had mentioned casually, the way she mentioned everything that the back gate was dragging, and her mother had been meaning to fix it for months. He told himself it was just a favor. One afternoon, maybe 2 hours, and he'd be done. He was there for 5 hours.
Diane brought him water and then lunch, and they talked the way they had at the kitchen table without agenda, without pressure, conversation moving like water finding its own level. He fixed the gate and also the loose hinge on the back door and a section of porch railing that had been soft for too long. He didn't announce any of it. He just noticed things and fixed them because that was how he understood care, not in words, but in the specific attention of hands that know what they're doing. When he left that evening, Diane stood at the top of the porch steps and said, "Same time next week."
And he had said yes before he even checked his schedule. That became the pattern. Saturdays at Linden Street, then sometimes a Wednesday evening, Diane bringing coffee to the shop once because she was passing through and thought he might want it. Marcus met her for the first time on a Sunday afternoon when Ethan's mother had a conflict and Diane had offered so naturally, "He can come along. I'm just going to the market." that Ethan hadn't found a reason to decline.
Marcus held Diane's hand in the produce aisle and told her very seriously that bananas should always be a little green. She agreed with equal seriousness. That was all it took for a 7-year-old. But underneath everything, the old weight was still there. Ethan felt it most in the moments between when he'd catch himself about to offer to fix something else and then stop second-guessing whether it looked like he was trying too hard, whether he was overstepping, whether a woman like Diane with her clean lines and her design commissions and her house that smelled like sandalwood actually wanted a 32-year-old woodworker threading himself into her Saturdays.