“Five.” Funny how he remembered that.
“And you can play nearly any instrument. I used to sit out here on the deck at night, hoping you’d make an appearance on the dock with your guitar. Sometimes I’d take out my harmonica and play along.”
“You should play with me sometime.”
Now he gave a humorless laugh. Shook his head.
“Why not? You could join the band—”
“The minute I’m done, I’m leaving.”
The harshness of his tone stilled her. He must have noticed because he looked at her.
“I just . . . I thought you loved it here,” she said softly. Tears burned her eyes again. She turned away from him, faced the water. “You told me once that you couldn’t wait to live here. Said you planned to come back after law school, open a practice, save the world.”
“That’s before I needed saving.”
Right. She swallowed the knot in her chest.
“Yeah, I wanted to live here, once. But now . . .” He shrugged. “I like the idea of Hawaii.”
She didn’t match his smile. “It’s hot there.”
From the kitchen, the oven buzzed. Claire tore herself away and retrieved the pizza, slid it onto a wooden cutting board, returned to the patio table.
Jensen pulled up a wrought-iron chair, lighting the electric lantern. She set down plates and pulled up her own chair.
“Yum.” He reached for a piece and grinned as if trying hard to brush off the horror of the day. He caught the dangling cheese, piled it on the pizza.
Oh, he was a handsome man. He’d changed out of his ripped shirt into a blue button-up, a pair of low jeans, flip-flops. Dressed like this, he looked every inch the rich city kid he’d become.
The lawyer he’d wanted to be.
Hard to think of him like that, especially when he rolled up his sleeves, wore his faded Huskies cap backward, clomped around in those boots.
“I downloaded the clemency application.” She pulled a piece of pizza onto her plate. “It looks simple.”
“I read it over.” He took a sip from his glass. “I don’t think it’ll work, Claire. It asks for letters of reference. And after today in town . . .”
“Not everyone agrees with Darek. Not everyone sees you as a villain.”
He considered his lemonade. “When are your parents going to be here?”
She watched him, not sure why he’d changed the subject. “They said a couple weeks. I don’t know. With luck, they won’t come.”
“You don’t mean that.”
She drew her legs up in the chair. “They’ll just start making me feel like a failure. Remind me of how I didn’t do anything with my life.”
“If you could do anything, what would it be?”
“I don’t know. Be a professional gardener, maybe.”
“Not play music?”
“No. I don’t have a passion for it like Kyle and Emma.”
“But flowers you love.”
“I love working the soil, seeing the seeds come to life, watching them bloom. I love the weeding and pruning.”
“You keep the Deep Haven roses, right?”
She nodded.
“They’re beautiful.”
“Resilient. Every year, we have a debate about when to take off the covers. This year, I . . . well, I nearly killed them. I was afraid of a late-season frost—we get them almost every year. But it never came, and they nearly suffocated.”
“But you coaxed them back to life.” He studied her, a strange look in his eyes. “You do that, Claire. Coax things back to life.”
She couldn’t move, not sure about his words, the texture of emotion in his eyes.
From across the lake, a loon called, and the sound of it echoed off the water.
“I owe you an apology,” she said quietly.
He frowned.
“I thought you had an affair with Felicity.” Claire felt him tense in the small intake of breath. “Felicity . . . She told me about how you came over and helped her construct that play set for Tiger. And she was talking about you like . . . like she had feelings for you. Then that night . . .” She winced, not sure if she should tell him. “Well, I think Darek might have thought so too.”
He had closed his eyes as if he’d just received a blow.
“I’m so sorry—”
“I didn’t, Claire.” He opened his eyes, met hers. “I swear to you, I didn’t.”
“I believe you,” she said, perhaps too quickly. But then she offered a smile. “I believe you.”
“So if you could do anything, it would be grow gardens?” His words rushed out fast.
“Yes. I think so. I would love to open a nursery in town, maybe do private landscaping. I know it’s not as glorious as my parents’ work, but . . .” She let her words fall off, realizing that no, actually, it wasn’t glorious at all.