The Rival's Mistake

*Didn't realize I had an audience,* Felix says, and drives the second stake. He has been in Evelyn O'Shea's back garden since five, setting out the pergola's footprint while the light is still gray-green through the rhododendrons. Nobody told him about perennial borders, a gravel path, or a water feature by the old stone wall. Nobody told him about Luce Carver at all. Then Felix looks at the sketch and finds posts laid out across sixteen feet of flagstone that measures fourteen. *How much more of your sketch is wrong?* They settle on revised plans by eight that night and agree on nothing else. Felix Gallagher is the carpenter Evelyn calls the best in town, taught timber framing by his father from the age of twelve, handed a chisel and told to feel the grain before he cut it. Luce came up from Boston with award-winning photographs, an accent that does not belong in Port Orson, and a practiced smile, and this garden is supposed to be the job that proves he can work without his family's name attached. Evelyn knew precisely what she was doing when she sent Felix out there blind. She hired them both. She has a reason, and it is not a whim. It is a promise she made to her husband, and it is also the bottle she keeps behind the dried hydrangeas, the one she should have hidden better. Then there is the lumber bill that does not match the order Felix placed. Somebody upgraded it and paid the difference, and the name on the paperwork belongs to a man in Boston who runs a family firm and has nothing whatsoever to do with this project, except that he is Luce's older brother. What Felix has is a wince Evelyn cannot quite hide, a stonemason in Camden who owes him a favor, and a client who says she intends to finish this garden if it kills her. What Luce has is a phone he does not want to answer and a mother who uses words like worthless and disappointment. What they build, between the arguing, is a kitchen where a man who does not talk about his father starts talking, a copper fountain liner that arrives at noon, and a trellis of moonflowers that only open after dark. An MM small-town romance about craftsmanship, the cost of a family name, and a garden built to keep a dead man's promise. The romance is closed-door.