lips.
“Yes.” She rushed to her mini-fridge where she kept water and snacks for clients. She pulled out a water bottle and then an apple, and brought both to him. He drank the water in sips, his breathing still coming out in short gasps.
“Is it happening again?” she ventured to ask.
He gave a short nod.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Distract me.” His voice sounded raspy, barely there.
“Um, okay.” She wasn’t sure what she could say that would be a distraction to him. “So my grandma has this giant spider that she made—I’m talking ten-feet tall, and counting the legs, at least fifteen-feet wide. She made it out of wire and papier-mâché, and it takes up our entire garage when we pull it down. Anyway, the trolley drivers have added our house to their tours of the neighborhood, which made Grandma’s friend, Fern, jealous, so she made her own spider, only bigger and taller, and I’m not afraid to admit that I’m legit scared about where this spider war is going, because Grandma has a glint in her eye. A glint, Liam. That means a harebrained idea, and we don’t have room in our garage for anymore yard-sized arthropods.”
That got a little smile out of him, and he sipped some of his water. She felt encouraged with some of the pink back in his cheeks.
“I’ve got more of those,” she said, “but I can’t give up all my Grandma stories at once.”
He swallowed and finally sat in the client chair, leaning his head against the back of it and closing his eyes.
“How long has this been happening for?” It took everything in Viola to not sit in the chair beside him and stroke his forehead until the lines relaxed. Instead, she grabbed a paper towel, ran it under the sink, and wrung it out before bringing it to him. He wiped his face with it, then went back to his closed-eye, head-back position.
“The first time was at that board meeting,” he said. “My chest has been a little tight here and there, but I thought I was just fighting a cold or allergies or something.”
He sat up straight and drank the rest of the water, looking a lot better, although his cheeks were pink now as he looked at her. “Thanks for your help.”
“Anytime,” she said and then wished she could bite the words back. Although she’d helped him, they weren’t friends.
He looked around the room as if noticing it for the first time. “Is this your office?”
“It is.”
He stood and wandered over to the framed pictures along the wall. She’d had a professional photographer capture some of her best work as well as a few buildings she loved around Eureka Springs, buildings she’d love to work on.
“This is incredible.” He nodded to indicate the before and after of the Coke 5¢ sign that she’d restored just that summer. It was one of the first signs that people saw when they came into Eureka Springs, and she’d been dying to get her hands on it since she’d come back home after college. “In Hawaii, you mentioned that you did historical restorations, but I don’t think I understood what that meant.”
A zing ran through her at the realization that he’d remembered something she said, along with a buzzing that continued as he stared carefully at her pictures.
“What is this?” He’d paused at her picture of The Old Grand Theater. No one even knew who owned it at this point, probably some investor in New York, but she’d always been drawn to that building. Partly because of the faded hand lettering on the old, worn brick that she wished she could get her hands on. Partly because of the lone Victorian doll you could spot through the huge display window out front, propped in a seat as if awaiting the next movie showing. And partly because her one good memory of her father was in that theater, back when it was still open.
“One of my dream projects,” she said. She pointed out another one next to it, this one less personal. “The old toy store, too. The colors on both of these buildings are phenomenal, and they’re the reason I got into this line of work in the first place.” Janson Styles had hired her to restore the toy store last year, just before Viola gone to Hawaii, and it had been one of the most rewarding jobs so far.
He turned from her wall of pictures, a gleam of appreciation in his eye. “You