got me right here.”
The smile that played across Brooklyn’s face caught him like a sucker punch, and it hit him again how much trouble he was courting here, inviting her out of his daughter’s life and into his when he and Addy were settled and happy and he’d sworn he was done with upheavals. Brooklyn being more than Addy’s teacher would be a big one.
“I’ve really enjoyed teaching her,” she was saying, smoothing a hand over her helmet-mussed hair. “She’ll be one of my fondest memories from my last year in Hope Springs.”
Again with the sucker punch, this one making it hard for him to breathe. “What do you mean, your last year?”
The motion of her hand slowed. Her smile slowed, too. “I’m quitting,” she said, and he frowned.
“What do you mean, you’re quitting?”
She lowered her hand to her side, toying with her sweater’s hem; was he making her nervous? “I gave notice before school started.”
“What about Addy?” It was the only thing he could think about, his little girl and how much she adored her teacher.
“Adrianne will be in first grade next year. I wouldn’t be her teacher even if I were still here.”
“Oh, right.” Duh. He started thumbing through his keys again, not liking her news or his reaction. Because, you know, it makes perfect sense to hate her resigning when this is Addy’s only year with her, and you met her for the first time today. “What’re you gonna do?”
She lifted her gaze, tucked her hair behind her ear. “More than likely I’ll still be teaching, but I’ll be doing it in Italy. I’m going there in June.”
“What do you mean, you’re going to Italy?” And at that he was just about ready to strangle himself. Her meaning—all of her meanings—were obvious. For some reason, he was being particularly slow.
She watched him fumble with the keys until he finally found the one he wanted. “I used to be married. My husband’s family is there, and they’re really the only family I have anymore. He died two years ago. On the job. He was a firefighter. And as a wedding gift, as strange as it sounds, he’d taken out an insane amount of life insurance. Enough that I can afford to work with his cousin in an English language program she’s starting. If I’m a good fit.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “About your husband,” he added. Then he shoved the key into the lock while processing all she’d just told him. She wasn’t just unmarried. She was a widow. For some reason, that had him seeing her with more gravitas and less, well, lust.
“Thank you.”
It was a simple exchange—I’m sorry. Thank you.—and it covered the basics, but he felt as if the words conveyed nothing, as if he needed to offer something deeper, as if she deserved hearing something more.
But all he could come up with was, “Italy, huh. What part?”
“Cinque Terre. Vernazza, actually. It’s on the Italian Riviera.”
“Bet that’s gorgeous,” he said, gesturing for her to go inside. The back door opened into the shop’s shipping center and stockroom. The shelves running the length of the space held plain cardboard cartons, tape, packing peanuts, and Bliss’s custom-designed candy boxes, along with polycarbonate molds, paint rollers, bowls, peels, scrapers, and airbrushing supplies.
All these years later Callum still found himself awed by those personalized boxes: the particular shade of dark sepia matte he’d taken forever to choose, Bliss’s name and logo gold-foiled on the front, his signature printed inside each lid. The interior packaging that kept the chocolates secure.
Stupid, really, to be so proud of a box, but there it was. Proof positive that, bad choices or not and against all odds, he’d made this work.
A laptop and printer sat on a desk flush with one of the shorter walls, and flush to the opposite was a similar desk, though this one and its child-sized chair sat closer to the ground. The surface held Addy’s puzzles and glue sticks and sticker books and the set of bendable toy characters from the Disney movie Frozen his mother had insisted her granddaughter have.
It was that desk that drew Brooklyn’s attention. “Adrianne must love this. Her own space. Her favorite things.” She reached down and picked up the Olaf snowman figurine. “Does she still sleep with the plush version?”
He nodded, not quite sure what to think of her knowing his daughter that well. “I’ll put a platform beneath the desk as she gets older, raise it until she doesn’t need it anymore, though