They were getting somewhere. At least, Jonathan hoped they were getting somewhere. The renovation project was halfway done, and the kitchen was coming along faster than he would have expected. The Standishes had kept up with the electric and plumbing in their building, so very little core work had to be done to the apartment. Everything else was more or less cosmetic, and painting walls, installing new cabinets, and putting in appliances didn’t take heaps of time.

If only he could say the same for Calliope.

“Are you sure you’ve got it?” he asked, voice slightly strained, as the two of them lifted a slab of marble onto the side counter.

“Yeah,” she answered, face red with exertion.

“Linus could do this, you know.”

“I got it.”

The marble was way too heavy for her, but Calliope had insisted on lifting it with him anyhow. Her knuckles were white on the other end of the piece, and he watched for the moment when she popped a blood vessel in her head.

He couldn’t shake the fact that she was putting herself through straining physical work because, in spite of the conversation they’d had a week ago at the flower shop, in spite of the therapeutic sex they’d enjoyed after, and in spite of the extra effort he’d been making to leave work on time to be with her, the bug in her bonnet was still buzzing away. Which meant her problems ran deeper than wanting to spend more time with him. In fact, if he’d gleaned anything from the years of counseling he’d had on returning from active duty, he would be willing to guess that what was really bothering her was—

“Oh my gosh, this looks fantastic!” Kathy squealed as she burst into the room.

Calliope’s hands slipped on the other end of the slab. It crashed onto the counter’s top. Jonathan grunted as he gripped the other end harder, glad that they’d moved it far enough onto the counter that it didn’t crash to the floor. He had toes down there, after all, and he liked them whole.

“Hey, Kathy,” he said, sparing her a quick smile before pushing the slab into place.

Calliope scowled, her red face pinched into a troubled frown. Jonathan gave her an assessing look. Troubled was better than furious or bitchy. Maybe.

“Wow, this is exactly what I envisioned,” Kathy went on, breathless. “The grey marble looks so great against the accent wall. You guys are incredible.”

“Thanks.” Jonathan smiled, shifting to stand by Calliope’s side. He put a hand on the small of her back, not so much for her sake, but because the tension radiating from her was starting to play into his anxiety a little too much. “Calliope’s done a lot of work.”

Calliope glanced up at him with an expression he couldn’t read.

Kathy crossed to the sink under the window. “This is a great sink,” she gushed. “I’ve always wanted a farmhouse sink. Only one of the other teams put a farmhouse sink in the kitchen.”

“Huh.” Jonathan couldn’t think of anything else to say. He glanced to Calliope. Her lips were shut in a tight line as she watched Kathy.

“And I love these cupboards.” Kathy moved on, stroking a hand over one of the stylish cupboard doors they’d finished installing just the day before. She opened the door. “You could store so much in here.”

“That’s the point,” Calliope murmured.

He eyed her warily, not sure if she was genuine or being difficult.

“I really love what you’re doing here,” Kathy said, moving on to the counter with the slab of marble sitting crookedly on top. “I love how it’s against the far wall. All you need is a couple of bar stools, and this would be a perfect place to eat breakfast.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” Jonathan said.

He and Calliope were forced to split apart as Kathy wedged between them. “You know what would make this even better?” She brushed her hand against the wall. “A backsplash!” She turned to Calliope with a brilliant smile.

The red of exertion in Calliope’s face flared enough to make Jonathan wince. “We do not need a backsplash,” she said as though explaining it to a particularly difficult child.

“But it would look so fabulous,” Kathy insisted.

“It’s out of the budget. We’re dangerously close to the budget right now.”

“I’m sure Howie would approve.”

“You can’t keep spending Howie’s money like it’s—”

“A backsplash would be a wonderful idea,” Jonathan cut in, sensing a worse fight about to break out.

Both women turned to him, Kathy with a grateful smile and Calliope like she wanted to castrate him.

“And I’ve got the perfect idea for it,” Kathy went on, either not sensing the volcano with strawberry blonde curls standing beside her or deliberately ignoring it.

“What’s your idea?” Jonathan asked.

Calliope’s eyes widened, and even though she didn’t use words, he knew exactly what she was saying: stop humoring Kathy. For so many reasons, he couldn’t do that.

Kathy shifted the huge purse she carried on her shoulder and reached inside. She pulled out the antique box that housed Julia Standish’s time capsule. “I’ve been having so much fun looking at these through the past week. The letters from the children are just darling. And I feel like Julia could be a friend of mine.”

Calliope’s expression flinched to something more emotional than Jonathan would have expected.

Kathy blew on, setting the box on the loose countertop and reaching into her bag once more. “But the Cattleman Hotel said we should keep it in the family. So I started to wonder if there was some way to display them in this apartment, since this was Julia and Sam’s home. Well, it was when they first got married, anyway. I did a little studying up on family history and learned that they eventually moved into one of the houses in the south side of town.” She pulled several odd, glass rectangles out of her purse. “Of course, theirs was one of the houses that burnt down in the 1920s, but by that point, the Standishes had been fruitful and multiplied.” She laughed as she set the glass squares on the counter.

“What are these?” Calliope asked. Her face lost some of its tension as she studied them, touching one.

“Those are my idea,” Kathy said, brimming with enthusiasm. She hitched her purse back on her shoulder and reached to open the time capsule. “I was back over at Montrose Lumber with the team from Randy Gable’s barn, and I started looking at the mosaic pieces for the backsplash again.”

Calliope tensed and crossed her arms, her expression going flat.

“Chip Montrose was there,” Kathy went on, “and we got to talking about the renovations. That led to talking about the time capsule. Anyhow, he showed me these.” She tapped one of the glass squares. “They’re a little bit hollow so that you can put things in them when you’re tiling a wall. And instantly I thought about how great it would be to enclose the letters and photos from the time capsule and include them in the backsplash.” She grinned as though she had thought of a Nobel Prize-winning idea.

“No,” Calliope said, all but stomping her foot. “Absolutely not.”

Kathy’s face fell. “But it would be so cool. You could have breakfast with Julia, Sam, and their kids every morning.”

“No,” Calliope repeated.

The tension of anxiety that had been growing in Jonathan throughout the confrontation flared. “Why not?” he asked.

Calliope turned to him, her jaw hard. “We don’t have it in the budget,” she insisted. “And it would take so much extra work. The kitchen is almost finished.”

“And we still have three weeks in the competition,” he argued. “That’s plenty of time.”

Calliope shook her head. “What if something happened to the photos or letters? They could be destroyed.”

“They’ll be safe behind glass, won’t they?” Kathy’s joy had wilted to uncertainty. As much as he cared for Calliope, that stung him.

“They could be damaged in the installation,” Calliope said.

“We’ll be careful when we install them,” Jonathan said.

Her eyes flared. “Why are you taking her side? We have a plan. We should stick to it. We don’t need other people waltzing in and lousing up the plan.”

“I’m sorry,” Kathy said, her voice small and fragile. “I didn’t realize I’d cause so much trouble.”

Calliope let out an impatient breath. In spite of her best efforts, she couldn’t keep the hurt inside anymore. “You’ve been causing trouble since the day we started this project. No, longer than that. You’ve been causing me trouble since you stole Greg Meyers at the Templesmith’s pool party.”

Kathy’s mouth dropped open, but no sound came out. She stood there, gaping and blinking, for several painful seconds before saying, “I’m sorry, Cal. I’d say that Greg came on to me, but that’s still no excuse for flirting back. We were all young and stupid back then, right?”

The room grew eerily silent. Sounds of the radio and hammering from other rooms where the rest of the team worked suddenly seemed impossibly loud. The snake of anxiety in Jonathan’s gut began to crawl through him. He wanted to leave the confrontation, go outside and take a breath. But he forced himself to remember that this wasn’t a combat zone, and that Calliope needed him more than ever.

“We’ll install the backsplash,” he said as the two women stared at each other. “And we’ll include the photos and letters. It really is a cool idea.”

Calliope frowned at him. “But—”

He closed a hand around her elbow and tugged her out toward the hall. “You can leave those things here and we’ll take care of it,” he told Kathy. “And in the meantime, you should get Linus to give you a tour of all the work we’ve done so far.”

“Oh. Okay,” Kathy said uncertainly.

“See you.” He waved to Kathy and continued to tug Calliope down the hall to the back door. It was time they sorted this out once and for all, because he couldn’t carry on with a woman who was so trapped by her own insecurities that she ignited everything he’d worked so hard to get away from.

It was eighth grade all over again. The same feeling that everything was about to come crashing apart hit Calliope as Jonathan walked her out to the small yard in back of The Silver Dollar. And it sucked beyond sucking. She was a grown woman. She shouldn’t be held hostage by a decades-old hurt.

So she did the only thing her panic would let her do. She struck first.

“Why do you have to be such a people-pleaser all the time?” she demanded, shaking out of Jonathan’s grasp.

He flinched, as shocked by her question as the worst part of her had hoped he would be. “I’m sorry, what?”

“You’re handing Kathy everything she wants, even though it means more cost and work for us,” she snapped, in spite of how bitchy it made her sound. But a truckload of abandonment issues that had been building up since eighth grade had just crashed, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. “It’s coddling her, and it’s insulting. To me.”

Jonathan blinked and shifted to stand directly in front of her. The way he crossed his arms, his lips pressed in a tight line, hinted at something more than frustration with her. He was miserable. She’d made him miserable. What was her problem?

“The whole point of this project is to foster teamwork,” he said as if putting all of his effort into being patient.

Calliope huffed. “Are you sure the point isn’t giving Kathy whatever she wants, no matter who else—” She stopped herself and looked away. She didn’t like who she was becoming, right there in front of her own eyes, helpless to prevent the wreck.

“This ends now.”

Jonathan’s words were like an ax dropping. A chill swept down Calliope’s back. She glanced up at him slowly.

“I don’t know what’s going on inside your head,” he went on, “but I can take a guess. Because I know exactly what it’s like to have bad memories sneak up on you and hold you hostage. And I’m not going to tell you that the carnage I witnessed in Afghanistan is worse than being left behind by a friend as a kid.”

Deep shame heated Calliope’s face. He had every right to say exactly that, and he’d be right. But she’d never experienced Afghanistan, and the wound from her childhood had grown and spread until it was so big she didn’t know what do to about it.

“We all hurt, Calliope. We all hurt for different reasons. It’s not the circumstances of the hurt that wreck us, it’s how intensely we feel it.”

“I know,” she whispered, wanting to look away, but unable to tear her eyes from him. The usual cheer and light that lived in his eyes had turned to an intense glow.

“You want to know why I’m such a people-pleaser, as you call it? Because I’ve caused more misery in my life than anyone ever should,” he answered himself without pause. “I’ve seen poverty like you couldn’t imagine, like I don’t want you to imagine. I’ve seen men, women, and children killed without a second thought because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or worse, because someone saw them as less than human, expendable. I’ve been a part of things I would have instantly condemned if I’d heard stories of other people doing them. And believe me, knowing that you’re following orders and doing your duty does nothing to make you sleep better at night when those memories come back to you.”

He took a deep breath, rubbing a hand over his face. Calliope wanted to wrap her arms around him and hug him until both of them felt better, but she was frozen fast to her spot.

“When I got back home after those years abroad, I promised myself that I would balance the scale. I’ve done things that no one should ever do, so now I’m determined to do the things that will restore balance to the world. I want to build things, create things.” He nodded past her to the Silver Dollar. “I want to make people smile, make them feel better. I want to increase the happiness in this world, because God knows I played a part in taking far too much of it away.

“So what does it matter if Kathy gets a backsplash or not?” he went on. “What point is there in finding her irritating or her requests demanding? She’s happy, and we’ve made her happy. At least, we should be making her happy. Because happy people make the world a better place.”

“You’re right,” Calliope whispered, her voice even smaller this time. Every ounce of her anger was quickly converting to shame in her gut, but underneath that, something was struggling to break free.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but Kathy really wants to fix whatever happened between the two of you when you were kids. The look in her eyes when she talks to you should be proof enough of that.”

He shifted his weight, letting his arms drop to his sides. “I’m sorry that you were blindsided by your sister and so many of your friends going off in their own directions all at the same time. I don’t know what that feels like, but I do know what it’s like to have the world as you know it disappear in the blink of an eye and a whole new world that you never wanted show up in its place. But survival depends on how you react to that. This is not a good reaction.” He spread his arms wide.

“I know it’s not,” Calliope whispered. “I don’t know why I’ve turned into such a bitch.”

“You’re not a bitch,” he said with a frown. “It’s like that old saying goes. ‘Hurt people hurt people’. But I also hope you can see that your life is actually pretty good.”

“It is. I know.”

“And believe me, it could be even better if you would let go of what’s eating you and do the work to change the way you react to the world instead of letting it tie you up in knots, like it’s doing now.”

Calliope was silent. Everything he was saying was right. And even though she still felt the thrashing, strangling fight of all those things that had built up inside of her, another voice had joined the fray.

Jonathan let out a breath and rubbed his hands over his face. “Look, I hate to do this to you, but I need to take a walk and shake this off, or else I’ll turn into a basket case for the rest of the day. I don’t want that, you don’t want that, and the people who are depending on me for this project really don’t want that. So are you okay if I leave?”

Calliope swallowed. “Actually, I think that might be a good idea,” she said, her voice little more than a hoarse whisper. “I think I need to be alone for a while to think things over myself.”

He raised one eyebrow, looking at her intently. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Because it sounds like it could be either.”

She shrugged. “I won’t know until I start thinking.”

She could see clearly that it wasn’t the answer he was looking for, but he didn’t harp on her, didn’t press her for more than she could give.

“Okay. I’ll see you later, then,” he said. He stepped forward and kissed her, warm and tense. Then he turned to go.