Page 18 of She's Like the Wind

“Why?” I asked, curious.

He tipped back slightly on his chair. “It’s who I am. I’m thirty-three years old, baby, I ain’t changing.”

“You don’t want to fall in love and have a family?”

“I have a family. My parents, my brother, my sister…aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews. I have everything I need and want.”

He had been implacable. “If that’s what you want, two and a half kids and all that, Naomi, we can walk away now, no harm, no foul.”

He didn’t mince his words; he was direct, and I appreciated him for it. He wasn’t bullshitting me like so many others tended to do.

But we’d been together for just a month then—how could I have known that I’d fall in love with him, and I’d let him break my heart despite all his warnings?

CHAPTER 7

Gage

Freedom is a funny thing.

You fight for it. Defend it. Wrap your whole life around, never giving it up—until you wake up one morning and realize not committing to a relationship doesn’t feel like freedom anymore.

It feels like being motherfuckingalone.

It had been three months since she let me go because I couldn’t be who she wanted me to be.

Ninety-some days since I had a good night’s sleep.

Over twenty-one hundred hours and then some since I got laid.

Was it any surprise that I was in a fucked-up mood?

I parked my truck on Chartres Street, just off Ursulines, the summer morning heat already pressing down like a wet towel.

My crew was unloading lumber, swearing inrhythm. Someone had cranked up the radio to WWOZ, letting old-school brass fill the air between hammer strikes and table saws.

We were restoring a Creole townhouse from 1838. Three stories, wrought-iron balcony, brick walls thick enough to withstand damn near anything except time and termites.

It had weathered two fires, a hundred hurricanes, and five separate owners who’d all loved it a little less than the one before.

Now, it was mine. Or at least, mine to bring back to life.

“Boss.” Delphi, my site foreman, nodded as he handed me the morning’s inspection log. “Wiring passed. Framing’s next.”

“Good.” I slung my duffel on one shoulder and began to flip through the screen of the tablet. “We’ll need to get the city out here for a visual on the joists before we close the ceiling.” I looked up at the exposed beams—beautiful, old cypress, worn and gray but still strong. “These might be original. If they are, we’re preserving them.”

Delphi smirked. “You’re the only guy I know who gets romantic about wood.”

“That’s because?—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Delphi groaned, cutting me off. “The wood tells the truth,” he added, doing a terrible impression of me, somewhere between a cowboy and a history professor.

Delphi and I had worked together for over a decade now, and he’d been with me since I started Walker Construction nearly eight years ago. He was steady, good at his job, and had no clue when to shut the hell up.

As a restorer, working in New Orleans was an honor and a gift. It also paid damn well.

We didn’t just build—we brought history back so it could live with us longer, so future generations could respect it as it was meant to be.

Restoring buildings here wasn’t just about wood and mortar—it was about memory, and these constructions had been rebuilt and restored through the years, tempered, literally, in fire.