“He is, actually,” Gus said. “Just—further away than the rest of us, so he’s hard to spot. He’s different, but I hope I can introduce the two of you someday soon. He’ll like you.”
“Will I like him?” Cara asked, and then, watching to see if it was safe to tease a little, “Am I going to think he’s handsomer than you? Is that why you’re keeping us apart?”
Gus gave a startled laugh and turned to kiss her. Cara felt her body rousing to him despite the thoroughly satisfying time they’d had on the roof.
“I don’t know, you might,” Gus said. “I’ll have to make sure you’re really attached to me before I let you see him.”
“I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled,” Cara told him.
Whatever Gus might have said to that was interrupted by a dog barking.
It sounded far away, but Gus turned his head toward the noise, and Cara was reminded again of how quiet the big house was—how empty.
“That’s Mouse,” Gus said. “We should go see what he’s gotten into.”
Cara nodded, and Gus led her downstairs and down and down again—the tower turned out to have its own staircase that let out on the far side of the porch from where they’d come out of the woods.
Mouse was sitting right there, and when they appeared he set down something he’d been carrying in his mouth. Gus leaned over and picked it up, wiping it on his pajama pants before he turned to Cara.
It was her phone—with a huge crack in the screen like a lightning strike.
“If this is yours,” Gus said, “I’ll be happy to buy you a new one.”
“I thought it was gone for good,” Cara said, switching the phone on—miraculously, despite the cracked screen, it actually lit up, showing her usual lock screen. She raised her eyes to Mouse, trying to picture how he’d gotten to wherever her phone had landed, and how he’d known to bring it to her.
“Did he—did Ilie send him to bring it back?”
Gus opened his mouth, closed it, and then nodded. “Yeah. Ilie also saw you fall and told me where to find you, actually.”
That was…a little bit weird, but also sweet. If Gus hadn’t known to come and find her she might still be sitting on that ledge under the scenic overlook. “Well, then when we do meet I probably owe him a big…”
Gus gave her a dark look and Cara grinned. “Hug. Of course.”
“Go home, Mouse,” Gus said, wrapping an arm around Cara’s waist. “And you—tell me you’ll stay?”
“I didn’t really dress for anything else,” Cara said, hooking one bare leg around Gus’s silky one, feeling the material slide against the inside of her thigh.
“Good,” Gus agreed, and that was the last thing either of them said for a while.
***
Cara woke up in the middle of the night, tucked under Gus’s arm in his enormous bed. He tried to hold on when she squirmed away.
“I’ll come back,” she whispered, “go back to sleep.”
He let her go, and she was able to visit the bathroom without him protesting.
When she was finished with that she felt restless. Instead of going back to the bed where Gus was sleeping in a loose, invitingly naked curl, she padded barefoot down the stairs.
She stopped in the empty room below, even though the open space made her more conscious of her nakedness than she’d ever been. She put her chin up and walked all the way across the room, just because she could. She was rewarded with the sight of the moon rising out the eastern windows, casting a cool light into the room.
She leaned her forehead against the glass and looked out, wondering what she was doing here.
She was pretty sure that when Gus said he wanted her to stay, he meant stay. He’d grown up surrounded by people, but they’d all gone away from him, leaving him alone in this huge house. He wanted her here. He wanted—
Cara looked around the empty room again, and it suddenly fell into place; the little cluster of lines she saw on the windowsill were only confirmation. She knelt to look closer, and sure enough, the lines were labeled in lovely cursive writing: Augustin, 2 years—Ilie, 2 years—Teodor, Radu, Sorin, Laurentiu. Childish writing had corrected that last to LAURENCE.
This empty room was the nursery. Gus’s children were meant to sleep here someday. Gus had filled up every other room of his house; he would want to fill this one too. He would want a family like the one he’d grown up in, a pack of kids to fill up this place.
Cara ran her fingers over the set of names and thought about her own family. She hadn’t lost her parents, really. She visited them twice a year, for a sweltering week in the summer and a weirdly snowless Christmas. They talked on the phone once in a while, told her about their friends and their golf trips and their life that had nothing to do with her—like once she had turned eighteen and left the house, they were finished with her. She had no one.
But she could have Gus. She could have a family here, complete with a weird brother who lived in the woods and four more scattered around the world. Mouse. Kids. A life and a future where she had people to belong to, things to keep her in one place. Something to hold her.
She felt the emptiness of the room around her all over again, and she shivered a little and wrapped her arms around herself, wanting Gus’s arms holding her more than she wanted clothes. When she turned and found him standing at the bottom of the stairs, quietly watching her, it wasn’t even a surprise.
She hurried over to him, and he hugged her tight and then swept her up into his arms.
“Back to bed?” he murmured.
Cara put her arms around her neck and rested her head on his shoulder. “Where else?”
***
Cara put on the day before’s clothes just long enough for Gus to take her down to get her car the next day. He turned out to drive a pretty basic SUV, several years old.
“What, no BMW? No…” Cara couldn’t even think of a car fancy enough.
“A car’s just a car,” Gus said, shrugging. “Uh, also the hills out here are no place for expensive cars, especially in the winter. The good cars are at the house in Monaco.”
“…Monaco,” Cara repeated. “Oh. Of course.”
Gus offered her a nervous smile, like he was the one who might be found wildly inadequate. “I almost never go there. Laurence and Teddy—Teo—mostly use that house. I like it here. This is home.”
Home. Cara nodded, and looked out the window into the woods for the couple of minutes it took to get to her car. She kept looking into the woods as she followed Gus back to the house, searching for a glimpse of Mouse—or Ilie.
But she spotted nothing but trees and Gus’s bumper, and then it was time to get dressed and go to town to buy a new cell phone. Gus drove them down to the valley in his SUV, and parked it behind a pretty old stone building that turned out to be the Town Hall, where of course Gus had a reserved parking space.
“Do you need to go to work?” Cara asked, abruptly reminded that not everyone in the world had quit their jobs and run away from their whole lives. Gus was the mayor here. He had responsibilities.
“Not really,” Gus said, smiling. “Work always finds me when it needs me.”
Cara quickly found out what he meant: they didn’t make it a hundred feet from Gus’s car before someone called out, “Mayor Gray!”
Gus held on firmly to Cara’s hand as he turned. “Hello, Mrs. McCullough. Everything all right at the shop?”
“The shop’s fine, dear,” said Mrs. McCullough, who was at least eighty years old and whose sharp eyes were scanning intently over Cara.
“But how are you? I don’t believe I’ve met your friend.”
Gus shot her an apologetic look and mouthed small town.
“This is Cara Linley,” Gus said. “She’s from Iowa, she’s been looking for a new place to settle down.”