Page 28 of Love Songs

I didn’t have to try hard at all to imagine living here with Jaylin. A different life than the one I’d led to this point, for sure, but one I knew I wanted from now on.

“Shall we?” Nolan asked with what sounded like forced eagerness. I knew he’d rather be showing me any house other than this one, but he didn’t yet know that he’d already made the sale.

I gazed up at the house. It had two storeys plus an attic. Most of the paint had peeled off the wood siding, leaving me to guess what color it had been. Yellow, maybe? The bottom floor windows were all boarded up, and the cracked and peeling window casings on the second and attic floors would need to be replaced. The diamond-pane glass in the second-floor bay windows looked worth keeping. Hopefully, the same glass was still under the boards on the ground floor bay window.

Four steps led to a large, covered porch that stretched the width of the house, where I could see Jaylin and I sitting on a warm afternoon sipping iced tea. The portico sheltered a faded yellow front door, with a glass pane in its upper half. Or I assumed the glass was still there because someone had boarded it over.

“Yeah,” Nolan said, correctly gauging my train of thought. “We’ve had to cover the windows and the glass in the door because people have broken them too many times.”

Set back and to the right of the house, the detached garage looked large enough for two cars—or a recording studio—but the roof had caved in, and one door hung cockeyed off the hinges. The interior hid in shadow.

“Why was it left abandoned for so long?” I asked as we climbed the steps and onto the veranda. The floorboards complained under our weight but held.

“That’s a long story,” Nolan said as he stuck a key into the front door lock and struggled to get it open. “A railway tycoon originally built as a wedding gift his new wife. Unfortunately, the wife died during childbirth a couple of years later, and the husband was so distraught with the loss that he couldn’t bear to stay here without her.”

The lock gave and, with a grunt and a bit of shoulder, Nolan pushed the door open. It creaked and groaned from disuse. Going by Nolan’s reluctance to show me the house, I wouldn’t be surprised if I were the first person he’d brought to see it in years.

“He left the country. Went back to Europe,” Nolan continued his retelling of the house’s history as we stepped inside the foyer. “He eventually sold the home to a millionaire, who owned it for a handful of years before he lost everything when the markets crashed in 1929. The house sat empty until a wealthy widow, Abigail Ferguson, purchased it in the early 1940s. She lived here until she passed and bequeathed the home to her daughter and her family.”

I surveyed the foyer as Nolan spoke. The hardwood floors were beat up and thick with dust and rodent tracks, but hopefully some TLC would bring them back to their original glory.

“They, in turn, lost it to a loan shark because of the husband’s gambling problem, and the shark ended up in prison, where he died,” Nolan continued. “After several years clearing probate, the bank took ownership and has held it since.”

“That’s quite the history,” I said quietly, distracted by the curved wooden staircase with ornate spindles. Broken or missing spindles marred the staircase, while sunlight poureddown from and above bleached each tread to a flat gold. Dust motes danced like merry little sprites in the sun’s rays.

Only two feet inside, and the house felt like a welcoming embrace.

“I wouldn’t go up the stairs, if I were you,” Nolan warned. “In fact, we should leave the upstairs until a home inspector can confirm whether they’re safe. This way.”

To the right of the entry, through a wide archway, we entered the living room with high ceilings and the boarded bay windows I’d seen from outside. I pictured Jaylin there, curled up with a blanket on a window bench, reading a book. Luckily, the diamond-pane glass was intact, and I couldn’t wait to see the light spill into the room when the boards were gone.

Another wide archway led us into the kitchen and dining area.

“I can’t believe no one has bought this place,” I said, brushing cobwebs away from a drop light over a dust-covered island. I swiped at the island to reveal a granite surface that had seen better days. The space was good, but needed to be gutted and rebuilt from the studs up.

“There’s been the occasional offer,” Nolan said as he opened a door off the kitchen to reveal a large brick patio. “But they never went further than building inspections, when the potential buyers realized the cost of either restoring the home or tearing it down to build new. Nothing in here is to code anymore.”

“What do you figure it will cost to update?” I asked, following him outside into the warm sunshine.

Nolan stopped and eyed me for a second. “Some would say more than it’s worth.”

I didn’t know about that. I saw something here worth any cost.

Like how the overgrown shrubbery and rose bushes surrounding the patio gave it a relaxing, oasis-like vibe. And how the weeds and grass and dandelions growing between the bricks didn’t detract from the beautiful herringbone pattern we stood on.

A mental movie played alongside everywhere I looked: Jaylin and I baking cookies together in the kitchen. Jaylin sitting at the island doing her homework while I made us dinner. Relaxing in the living room in front of the fire on a cold winter’s night with a special someone who looked an awful lot like Conor. Barbecues with friends on this very patio, sharing drinks and laughter. Jamming with a band in the garage-turned-studio. Running to the end of the dock and jumping into the lake. Skinny dipping with Conor.

Whoa. How was it that a man I’d only met a few days ago was taking up so much space in my head?

“What’s that?” I pointed to another falling down building about a hundred yards from the house as we stepped off the patio and walked toward the lake.

“A barn,” Nolan said.

“For horses?”

“At one time, yes.” Nolan nodded. “There’s a fenced acre, but most of the fencing is in disrepair.”

I imagined how excited Jaylin was going to be when I told her there was room for a horse here. I took my new cell phone out of my pocket—that I had priority shipped to the inn after the good lieutenant destroyed my previous one—and opened the video app so I could show her everything later.

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