“Suit yourself. It’s well water. Yum.” He grinned and replaced the cap.
This not liking him, not letting him inside to nudge her memories, might be harder than she thought.
He picked up a board.
She got up. “So what will this look like when you’re finished?”
“Well, any single run of a handicap access ramp can’t rise more than thirty inches. The back door is too high, so we’ll have to make two. The maximum slope ratio is one-to-twelve, so I’ll make them both twenty feet long with a landing in the middle.” He held the board at the angle from the house. “Like this.”
“That’s a big ramp.”
“Your grandfather loves his yard.”
Yes, he did. Claire found herself smiling.
“Once we finish this, we’ll have to move inside and adopt some universal design elements. Nonbarrier showers, and I might have to widen the entry doors, lower the handles.”
“But I’ll be living here with him.”
“What if he needs to get out on his own? You don’t want him to depend on you for his freedom, do you?”
“Where did you learn all this?”
He had put the board down and picked up a shovel. “Learn what?”
“Building. Handicapped access rules.”
Jensen walked over to the corner of where he’d sprayed an orange square. Planted his shovel in the ground. “I worked at the senior center a year ago for my community service doing some repairs.”
Right. “What are you doing?”
“We have to pour footers for the landing.”
“So you have to dig holes?”
He was already making a dent in the earth. “It won’t take long. I’ll pour the footers tonight, then tomorrow start working on a deck base.”
“How long do you think it’ll take?”
He glanced at her. “We’ll get it done before your parents come home, if I have to work day and night.”
Her throat tightened. Wow.
She picked up the paper plates, then went to the cold campfire pit and dropped them in. Stood looking at the charred black wood.
“What about your community service hours?” She winced when she said it, but . . . well, all this time working with her couldn’t be good for his sentence.
He was moving dirt behind her; she could hear him grunt. But he said nothing. So she turned, stuck her hands in her back pockets. “Jensen? What about your community service hours? Or are you all done?”
He had created a substantial pile and now sank the shovel in deep, letting his foot rest on it. “I’m not going to make it.”
Huh? “I don’t understand.”
“I have too many hours to complete by the end of the month. I’m not going to make it.” He began to shovel again. “I was kinda stupid when I was first sentenced. Angry, even. So I didn’t have my heart in it and I pretty much wasted my first year. Thankfully Mitch got ahold of me and made me see the light, made me turn my hours in every week, even though the court didn’t mandate it, but . . .” He dumped out another spadeful of dirt. “I have too many left.”
“What does that mean?”
He didn’t stop shoveling. “It means that in a few weeks, I’ll be in violation of my probation and they’ll send me to jail.”
Jail.
She didn’t know why the word took her like a fist in the chest, squeezing out her breath. It wasn’t like she hadn’t thought about that after the accident, but she’d nearly cried with a sort of tangled relief when he’d only been sentenced to community service. Because despite his sins, he suffered too. People just didn’t see it.
She hadn’t really seen it. Not until the other night when he’d been willing to leave the concert because he was bothering her. Bothering Deep Haven.
Maybe . . . maybe he had changed. She watched him work, his strong muscles rippling across his back, down his arms, and remembered the boy who had made her laugh with his stupid jokes or occasionally ventured out to his deck and serenaded the night with his harmonica. Who had asked her to prom her senior year when he discovered she didn’t have a date and returned from his sophomore year in college to take her.
Maybe he wasn’t the man who’d had an affair with Felicity Christiansen, who had broken her heart and gotten her killed.
No. Felicity wouldn’t have lied about that, would she?
Claire blinked back the strangest rush of tears and headed toward the side of the house.
Jensen didn’t look up, just kept digging as the hole grew deeper.
One person at a time, Ivy would quietly enact justice in Deep Haven.
Like working out a plea agreement for Devon Ford on his juvenile petty offense—aka underage drinking—charge. He was a good kid, just needed a wake-up call, so she’d offered probation with a deferred sentence. As long as he kept his nose clean for a year, the charges wouldn’t appear on his record.