“What are you looking at so intently?”

I glanced up at the guy working the café counter. “Cookies.”

“You want one? The chocolate chip are our best sellers.”

“No.” I took the coffee and set my change on the counter before turning and starting toward the door.

I walked home and let myself up into the apartment. The gray weather outside made it feel just as depressing inside. The floorboards I hadn’t noticed were starting to warp. The cheap cabinets reflecting back the light.

But the majority of my tiny one bedroom was dominated by boxes. A dozen of them, forming a cardboard fortress as high as my head.

And they might as well have been a fortress. Walls that felt like they were crushing me.

A truck had moved them here this morning from the retirement residence. The guy who’d dropped them off had no idea what they were. Just asked me to sign for them in a bored voice.

The last twenty-four hours had been a haze. A continuation of the numbness I’d felt since leaving early yesterday, asking Rose to cover for me with Avery. I’d managed an “I’m fine” to her concerned face as I stumbled out of the office.

I’d spent last night at the retirement home. And on the phone. In a blur of compassionate faces and questions I didn’t know how to answer.

The medical staff said it’d been sudden. A stroke sometime after lunch. The funeral home was cremating her according to her wishes. They said they’d let me know when she was ready to be released.

Released. Like they were holding her somewhere, and any minute she’d bust out, cackling “Gotcha, suckers!”

I knew there were things I should be doing. I’d even Googled “what to do when someone dies.” But I couldn’t bring myself to click through even the first result.

So when I’d gotten home at one this morning, I’d opened my freezer to get some waffles for dinner. Or lunch. Or whatever the meals I’d missed were.

I’d taken one look at the frozen cash and shut the door. Then padded to my bedroom and lay there staring at the ceiling.

Now it was nearly two in the afternoon. All I’d managed to do was look for coffee, realize I was out, and stumble down the street in my pajamas to get some at the café.

The phone made me jump. I glanced at it, letting it go to voicemail.

The caller tried back a minute later. I reached for the phone, sighing before I answered. “It’s Saturday.”

“You left early yesterday.” Avery’s irritated voice came down the line.

“It’s the weekend. We don’t do weekends, remember?”

He cursed. “Don’t hang up. I’m at your door.”

I dropped back onto the couch and felt my soul fold in with my body. Dammit.

I couldn’t deal with anyone else. “Avery…I can’t do this right now. We can talk Monday.”

I hung up and went back to staring at the boxes.

I’d spent the night before on the phone with my brothers, telling them the story. They’d offered to come and help, but I knew Jimmy was busy getting ready for the wedding and Matt was supposed to be taking his wife and two little girls on vacation next week. They asked if I wanted our parents to help, and I’d said a firm and immediate no.

A scratching at the window on the far side of the kitchen pulled my attention. I crossed the floor and opened the window.

“What the hell? The fire escape?”

“People do it in movies all the time,” Avery bit out from his position kneeling on the metal of the ledge outside my window. His expression was dark as the clouds. I pulled him in through the window.

Avery shoved a hand through hair that’d been messed up by sweat or the rain outside. He brushed off his chinos and polo shirt. The WASP wardrobe stood out against my faded pink shorts and purple off-the-shoulder t-shirt, threadbare from too many washes.

“Were you in bed?”

“No.”

He turned around, his gaze landing on the boxes. “What’s with the boxes?”

“Grams.”

His brows knit together, and to his credit he figured it out. “Fuck. I’m so sorry.”

“She was old. That’s what happens. No matter what we’ve done with our lives, whether we’ve fucked it all up or won a goddamned Oscar or run our own company, we’re all in the same place in the end. All that’s left is a box sitting in someone’s living room.”

He crossed to me, folding me in his arms without asking permission. I reached for his forearms to push him away, but he refused to let me go.

“Avery, we don’t do this.”

He stiffened. “I can’t tell you I’m sorry.”

“You can say it. But you can’t act like that matters.” I stepped back, reaching for my coffee on the counter. Cupping the paper cup protectively in my hands. The warmth didn’t reach my body.

“No?” he challenged. “You’ve got it all worked out, have you? Arrangements? Your feelings? Ready to go on with your life? Charlotte, I know what it’s like to have someone leave when you least expect it. To turn what you thought you knew upside down.”

I took a sip of the drink, staring past him at the boxes.

“I’m the executioner,” I mumbled finally.

“Executor?”

“Whatever.”

His gaze raked across my living room, and the compassionate mode was gone, replaced by something else.

He crossed the room in a few short steps, hanging his jacket on the back of one of my wooden dining chairs. Then he approached the boxes. Laid a hand on one; tilted to inspect behind the first stack.

“Did your grandmother have a lot of assets?” he asked as he turned back to me.

I stared back blankly. “I don’t think so. It was her and my grandfather, but he died a few years earlier.”

“Did she keep good records?”

My heavy feet carried me toward him and the boxes. “If it’s black, that’s good, and if it’s red, that’s bad, right?”

Avery’s face grew more serious. “I can take a look at the financials.” I didn’t respond, and after a moment he added, “If you want.”

I crossed to the kitchen and lifted a shoebox stuffed with papers. A stack of envelopes was tied to it with an elastic band. “Plus six weeks’ worth of mail. Apparently she stopped opening it a while ago.”

Avery blew out a breath, his face a mask of concentration. “You’ll want to start with the will.”

I went to my desk and pulled out the envelope, handing it to him.

He glanced at the folded sheets of paper inside. “Everything went to you.”

“I don’t want it,” I said vehemently. “I don’t want any of it. We were supposed to go to New York.”

He watched silently. I was talking like a crazy person, but I couldn’t change it.

“Grab a chair,” he said at last.

“Why?”

“Because this—” he waved a hand at the boxes “—is going to take a while.”

* * *

One file after another was dumped on my dining table in what could have passed for the Mount Everest of paper.

I pulled myself together enough to help. Helping meant filing the things in the way Avery suggested.

When my stomach growled, I ran out to get dinner while Avery continued, his back straight as he sorted sheets into piles for savings, social security, debts, and investments, and entered numbers into the calculator app of his phone.

The “good thing,” said Avery, was that there was life insurance. He’d made the thirty-minute phone call while I’d sat in the next chair, staring at the documents spread out on the table and tidying them into neat rows.

I had a hard time processing…any of this.

What I could process was how much of a machine he was. How methodical. His ability to take over, to know what needed to be done… If I’d had the capacity to feel, I would’ve felt grateful.

By the end of the day we had a binder full of materials that were tagged and color-coded using swipes of the pink, purple, blue, and silver nail polishes I’d pulled out from the bathroom.

“We need this checked by a probate attorney. I’ll call a school friend.”

I shifted back in my chair, stretching one arm and then the other.

He shifted a hip against the table. The blue polo stretched across his chest and arms, and I wished I could appreciate it.

“You should get some rest,” he said finally. I trailed him to the door. “If you need a day or two off work, take it. I’m sure Rose can fill in.”

“Thanks.”

Avery’s gaze met mine, and the emotion in it was more than I was prepared for. Especially after what’d hit me for the last forty-eight hours.

“Something happened Friday. Before you walked out.”

I folded my hands in front of me. Studied the nail polish I’d been picking at last night and today.

“I had this idea.” The idea that we were more than fuck buddies. More than the rules we’d made. I swallowed the words as I lifted my gaze to his. “It was a stupid idea.”

“Was it.” He studied me levelly.

“Yes. I don’t want to be your cautionary tale, Avery. Not with your sister or anyone else. I know what it’s like to want more from someone who doesn’t feel the same.”

I didn’t want sex. I wanted him here. His sturdy, confident presence and the way it filled the room. The blue gaze that felt like he could see inside my head.

“Charlotte…”

“I’ll see you at work, boss.”

He nodded once and pulled the door after him.

I glanced at the phone I’d muted while we were working.

The voicemail blinked up at me. With a steadying breath, I checked the number.

The funeral home. To “release” her.

Emotion hit me like a wave.

When I jerked the door open, he was halfway down the stairs. “Avery.”

He turned back, laying a hand on the railing. His gaze filled with concern and questions.

“I know this isn’t what you signed on for.” My voice shook.

He took a step up the stairs.

“We said no feelings. No complications.”

Another step.

“But I can’t breathe.” My eyes filled, and I pressed my hand to my throat. “I can’t even…”

He reached the top step. Avery’s arms opened, and he pulled me into them as my legs gave out.

I crumbled against his body. I pressed my face against his shirt as we sank to the stairs. His hands found my hair, not playing, just holding, and my grief tore through me like a storm.