go, and we’ll get started on it ASAP.”
“Okay, that’s great!” she said, excited. “Follow me. We decided to have it be out of sight of the cottage, just so I can have some privacy. So instead of coming in the gate, customers will drive down the trail to the back of the property where the fence ends. It’s about two thousand feet back in the woods.”
They walked the property, and he staked out where the trailer would go, how far the trenching would have to go to reach her well, and where the solar would be installed in a clearing about twenty feet away from the trailer. His father was donating the trailer and foundation, but the utilities and other improvements like a road and fencing would be paid for by Maggie. The dream was coming together.
Following her plan, she painted the entire cottage in five days. The only mishap, Brulee slept under the ladder, and one day the brush Maggie was using fell on the dog, leaving a blue paint smear on her fur.
“Oh crap!” Maggie cried, climbing down the ladder. “Poor Brulee!”
She looked startled but didn’t really care. Maggie got as much of the paint out as she could and then painted a small table they used on the porch the same blue in case Justin noticed, and of course he noticed.
On Saturday morning when he got up and took his coffee out onto the porch, he just happened to look behind him and saw the beautiful blue paint.
“What the…?”
He walked around the front of the porch and saw that she’d painted to the dormers on the second floor, and then to the side, that she’d painted the entire cottage.
Slightly ticked off, he knew she’d be furious with him if he tried to admonish her, so he paced a little to calm himself down before he went back into the cottage. Maggie was just getting out of the shower when he came into the bedroom and sat on the made bed. Of course she wouldn’t leave it unmade. Suddenly little things like that annoyed Justin, and he wondered why, determined to be reasonable.
Coming out of the bathroom in jeans and sweatshirt and a towel wrapped around her head, she saw Justin sitting there, and like a lightning bolt going off, she remembered the cottage. She’d done such a good job keeping the paint job from him she’d forgotten completely about it, that he would surely notice someday.
“So! Do you have something to tell me?”
She tried not to make light of it, biting her tongue.
“What do you think?” she asked, playing coy, smiling.
She even attempted to sit on his lap, but he stiffened up like she was contagious.
“Justin?”
He stood up, squeezing past her. “I’m pissed! Do you have any idea how dangerous that could have been?”
“But it wasn’t. As you see, I’m fine.”
He quickly went down the stairs, and she followed him, trying to reassure him.
“Maggie, when we talked about you getting on a ladder alone before, I made it clear how I felt, how worried I’d be.”
“Which is precisely why I didn’t tell you. Justin, I’m a responsible adult. I had my phone with me. I used the roof harness hooks and had myself strapped to the roof. Go look at the hooks that someone put up here a hundred years ago. I tied a rope around my waist and looped it through the hook.”
Breathing heavily and clenching and unclenching his fists, Maggie guessed this was Justin angry. She’d seen him steaming before but never at her.
“I’d better leave,” he said, resolute, banging out the storm door back onto the porch.
“Justin, no way.”
“Yes way. I’m ready to fight, and the best thing for me to do is just walk away.”
“Well, walk away, but don’t leave me. We were going to decorate the cottage today. I have everything ready.”
“Go ahead, decorate,” he said. “I’m not in the mood now.”
“Justin—”
He left without kissing her, a big no-no, got into his truck, not looking at her or waving, and when he drove through the gate, he left it open, something he’d never done before.
Confused and numb, she walked down the driveway and locked it after he was out of sight.
“Wow, what a baby,” she shaking her head as she stared at the dust his truck had stirred up.
Was this his method of conflict resolution? She looked back at the cottage with the sun shining on her beautiful paint job, and realized he’d shamed her. He made her feel awful because she