Prologue
Northlight House
The first thing I noticed about Northlight House was that it looked like it had survived a hundred arguments with the weather and lost most of them.
The second thing I noticed was that I loved it anyway.
It stood at the corner of Briar Lane and Juniper Street, sagging slightly behind an iron fence that had gone rusty at the hinges. The old white paint had peeled back in long curling strips, exposing tired gray wood beneath. One upstairs shutter hung crooked, tapping softly in the breeze like a nervous finger. The porch dipped in the middle. The gutters looked offended by gravity. A vine had climbed halfway up the left side of the house and then apparently given up, as if even the plant had said, No, thank you, this is above my emotional capacity.
Beside me, Caleb Reed took one long look at the place and sighed.
Not a small sigh.
A full-body, church-organ sigh.
“Eliza,” he said, “this house looks like it coughs at night.”
I smiled without taking my eyes off it.
“It has character.”
“It has structural trauma.”
“It has history.”
“It has a raccoon in that window.”
I squinted toward the second floor. A small masked face stared back at us from behind a cracked pane of glass.
I waved.
The raccoon did not wave back.
Caleb folded his arms over his chest. He wore a navy jacket, dark jeans, and the expression of a man who had already calculated the cost of every bad decision I had ever made and was now updating the spreadsheet in his soul.
“Eliza Hart,” he said carefully, “please tell me you brought me here to admire this building from a safe emotional distance.”
I took a step closer to the fence. The cold metal brushed my fingers. Flakes of rust clung to my skin like cinnamon.
“I brought you here because I think this is it.”
He was quiet for half a second.
Then, “This is what?”
I turned to him, my heart climbing up my throat so fast I could barely breathe around it.
“The art center.”
Caleb blinked.
Behind him, a passing truck rattled over a pothole, sending a splash of muddy water over the curb. Somewhere down the block, a dog barked twice and then seemed to reconsider its commitment to the conversation.
“The art center,” Caleb repeated.
“Yes.”
“The one you talk about every time you drink more than one cup of coffee.”
“That is not fair. I talk about it sober too.”
“Eliza, last week you used a napkin dispenser to explain your ideal floor plan to a waitress.”
“She asked why I was arranging sugar packets into classrooms.”
“She asked because you were blocking the ketchup.”
I grinned. “And yet, she understood the vision.”
Caleb looked back at Northlight House. His mouth tightened, but not unkindly. He had that look he got when he wanted to protect me from myself, which was sweet, except I was usually very busy being myself and did not have time to be protected from it.
The wind lifted my hair and sent it across my mouth. I tucked it behind one ear and stared at the house again.
In my mind, the broken porch was swept clean and strung with warm lights. The front room, the one with the tall arched window, would be a gallery. Local paintings on white walls. Pottery on wooden shelves. Children’s drawings framed with just as much care as anything expensive and oil-painted. The old parlor could become a classroom with long tables scarred by glue and paint and honest use. The back room could hold open-mic nights, poetry readings, workshops, grief groups, after-school programs, community dinners, maybe even tiny concerts where someone’s uncle played the banjo with too much confidence.
I could almost hear it.
Laughter. Chairs scraping. Brushes swishing in jars of cloudy water. Someone saying, “I didn’t know I could make something like that.” Someone else saying, “Come back next week.”
My chest ached with it.
Not the bad kind of ache.
The kind that felt like being called by name.
Caleb nudged my shoulder with his. “There’s that face.”
“What face?”
“The face where your brain has already opened a small nonprofit and assigned everyone matching aprons.”
I glanced at him. “Not matching. Coordinating.”
“Worse.”
“They would have little embroidered suns on them.”
“Much worse.”
I laughed, but it came out softer than I expected. My fingers tightened around the fence.
“I know it looks rough.”
“Eliza.”
“I know.”
“Eliza, one of the porch steps is missing.”
“It’s not missing. It’s… making space.”
“For lawsuits?”
“For possibility.”
“For ankles to snap in half.”
I turned toward him fully. “Caleb.”
He softened then. That was one of the best and most inconvenient things about Caleb Reed. He knew when I was being ridiculous, and he loved me enough to say so. But he also knew when the ridiculous thing mattered so much that laughing at it too long would make something inside me bruise.
His arms loosened.
“How much?” he asked.
I looked down at my boots.
He groaned. “That is not a number-face. That is a crime-face.”
“It’s listed low.”
“How low?”
“Low for a building.”
“That means nothing. A castle with no roof can be low for a castle.”
I pulled a folded paper from my coat pocket and handed it to him. It was already soft at the creases because I had opened it approximately four hundred times since printing it from the real estate website.
Caleb took it. His eyes moved over the listing.
The silence that followed was not encouraging.
“Eliza,” he said at last, very slowly, “this is not low. This is lower than it should be because the house is trying to warn you.”
“It’s affordable.”
“It says cash preferred.”
“That’s just a preference.”
“It says sold as-is.”
“That’s honesty.”
“It says extensive repairs needed.”
“Lots of buildings need love.”
“It says potential foundation concerns.”
I winced. “That part is less whimsical.”
Caleb lowered the paper and looked at me over the top of it.
I clasped my hands together. “Before you begin your lecture—”
“Oh, there will be a lecture.”
“—I have a plan.”
“That sentence has been responsible for eighty percent of my migraines.”
“I have savings.”
“You have savings for emergencies.”
“This is an emergency.”
“This is a building.”
“A building emergency.”
“Eliza.”
“Caleb.”
“Eliza Joy Hart.”
I gasped. “You full-named me in public?”
“There is a raccoon witnessing this. This is barely public.”
The raccoon still watched from the upstairs window, looking somehow judgmental despite being an animal best known for eating garbage with tiny burglar hands.
I swallowed a smile and took the paper back from Caleb.
“I’m not saying it’ll be easy,” I said. “I’m not saying I can stroll in with a bucket of paint and a dream board and suddenly everything will be fine.”
“You do own three dream boards.”
“They’re categorized.”
“That is not a defense.”
“I’m saying this place could matter.” My voice dipped, and the joking feeling between us thinned. “Caleb, look at it.”
“I am looking at it, honey. That’s the problem.”
“No. Not at the rot and the peeling paint and the raccoon landlord. Look at what it could be.”
He exhaled and turned back to the house.
I pointed through the fence. “That room in front? Gallery space. Big windows, natural light. We keep the old fireplace, even if it doesn’t work. Maybe hang local art over the mantel. And the room beside it could be for kids’ classes. Messy classes. The kind where they get paint on their elbows and glitter in places glitter has no legal right to be.”
Caleb’s mouth twitched.
“And upstairs,” I said, warming as the vision rose inside me, bright and unstoppable, “studios. Little rented spaces for artists who can’t afford anything fancy. We could do sliding-scale workshops. Senior art mornings. Teen nights. Community murals. A wall where anyone can leave a note about something they’re grateful for.”
Caleb looked at me then.
I kept going because if I stopped, I was afraid I would feel how much I wanted it.
“We could have grief journaling. Art therapy partnerships, maybe. I know I’d need certifications and professionals and permission for some of that, but we could start with simple things. Safe things. Tables. Paper. Warm light. People sitting together. Nobody being asked to be impressive. Just… present.”
My throat tightened.
The wind moved through the dead weeds along the fence, making them whisper.
“When I was thirteen,” I said, “that after-school art room behind the library felt like the only place in town where I wasn’t too much. Too loud. Too messy. Too hopeful. Mrs. Bell never made me feel like my drawings were silly. She’d put them up like they belonged there.” I looked at the broken house. “Then they shut it down. Budget cuts. That was it. One day there were paint jars and crooked clay bowls and kids making things, and the next day the room was locked.”
Caleb’s face changed, gentle as a hand over a flame.
“I remember,” he said.
“I want this to be the room that doesn’t get locked.”
For a while, neither of us said anything.
A car rolled past slowly, tires hissing over damp pavement. Northlight House stood before us, creaking softly in the wind, shabby and stubborn and still somehow dignified.
Caleb rubbed a hand over his jaw. “You’d need inspections.”
“I know.”
“Contractors.”
“I know.”
“Permits, zoning approval, insurance, fundraising, a board eventually, probably a lawyer, definitely an accountant, and someone besides you who knows how to say no.”
“That’s why I have you.”
He pointed at me. “I am not becoming the unpaid accountant of your haunted craft mansion.”
“Community art center.”
“Haunted craft mansion.”
“It will be called Northlight Arts.”
“Oh, she has a name.”
“She’s always had a name.”
“She is a building with mold.”
“She is a lady.”
“She is a lawsuit in a cardigan.”
I laughed hard enough that my breath fogged white in front of me.
Then Caleb took my shoulders and turned me gently to face him.
His expression was serious now.
“I’m not trying to crush this,” he said. “You know that, right?”
“I know.”
“I believe in you. Annoyingly much. Like, to an extent that has inconvenienced my personality.”
“That’s beautiful.”
“But belief does not replace a roof. Or money. Or plumbing.”
I nodded.
“And Grant Calloway owns this place now, right?” Caleb asked.
My stomach dipped at the name.
Grant Calloway.
Even his name sounded like a closed door.
“I think so,” I said. “His family did, anyway. The listing says Calloway Property Holdings.”
Caleb made a thoughtful humming sound. “I’ve heard he’s difficult.”
“Everyone says that.”
“Everyone also says the diner meatloaf is edible, and we know what happened to my digestive system in March.”
“Grant is not meatloaf.”
“I’m saying reputations exist for a reason.”
I glanced back at the house. “Maybe difficult people are just people nobody has figured out how to talk to yet.”
Caleb stared at me.
“What?” I asked.
“That,” he said, “is exactly the kind of sentence that makes me worry you’re going to fall in love with a man who communicates exclusively through scowling and property taxes.”
Heat rushed into my cheeks. “I am not going to fall in love with him. I don’t even know him.”
“Excellent. Let’s keep that energy.”
“I just need him to sell me the building.”
“And if he says no?”
I pressed my lips together.
Northlight House groaned softly in the wind.
“Then I’ll ask again,” I said.
Caleb closed his eyes. “Of course you will.”
A sharp voice cut across the sidewalk behind us.
“Well. This explains the traffic hazard.”
I turned.
Serena Holt walked toward us like she expected the cracked pavement to apologize for existing beneath her shoes. She was dressed in a cream coat that probably cost more than my car, her dark hair glossy and smooth over one shoulder. Her lipstick was the color of expensive cherries. She looked polished enough to make the entire street seem underdressed.
She stopped beside us and let her gaze drift over Northlight House.
Her expression filled with delicate disgust.
“Eliza,” she said, smiling without warmth. “Caleb.”
Caleb smiled back in the way he did when he had mentally chosen violence but was waiting for a social invitation.
“Serena,” he said. “How lovely. The temperature just dropped.”
Her eyes flicked to him. “Still doing that little sarcasm thing?”
“Still doing that little villain-in-a-coat thing?”
I coughed into my sleeve because laughing would not help, even though it absolutely wanted to happen.
Serena ignored him and looked at me. “Please tell me you’re not seriously interested in this place.”
I lifted my chin. “I am.”
She blinked slowly, as if I had announced plans to marry a sinkhole.
“For what?”
“An art center.”
The words felt good aloud. Not just a dream in my head, but a thing released into the world. A thing with bones.
Serena stared at me.
Then she laughed.
It was a small, pretty sound. Mean enough to leave a mark.
“Oh, Eliza,” she said. “That is adorable.”
Caleb shifted beside me. “Careful. Last time someone called her adorable, she reorganized an entire charity auction and made six thousand dollars out of cupcakes and spite.”
“It was seven thousand,” I murmured.
“And spite,” Caleb repeated.
Serena’s smile thinned.
“I’m only being realistic,” she said. “This building is a disaster. Everyone knows it. The repairs alone would bury you. And an art center?” She glanced down the street, then back at me. “In this town? People like the idea of art until someone asks them to pay for it.”
“That’s why community support matters,” I said.
“Community support.” Serena’s eyes gleamed. “That’s sweet. Are you planning to fund the electrical rewiring with finger painting?”
“No,” I said. “Watercolors. They have better margins.”
Caleb made a choking sound and turned it into a cough.
Serena’s gaze sharpened. She did not like being met lightly. I could tell. Some people threw stones because they expected you to shatter. They got irritated when you bounced.
“Eliza, I’m trying to save you from embarrassment,” she said.
“No, you’re not.”
The words came out before I had time to soften them.
Caleb went very still beside me.
Serena’s eyebrows lifted.
I felt my heart thump once, hard.
But I did not take it back.
The old Eliza, the one who wanted everyone to like her, would have laughed awkwardly and pretended Serena meant well. She would have said, Maybe you’re right, even while something inside her folded itself smaller.
But Northlight House was behind me.
And I was tired of rooms being locked.
“You’re not trying to save me,” I said, quieter now. “You’re trying to make me feel foolish enough to stop.”
Serena’s face cooled.
For a second, I saw something unpleasant move behind her eyes. Not surprise exactly. More like annoyance that I had named the game before she had finished playing it.
“You give yourself too much credit,” she said.
“Maybe,” I replied. “But I’d rather give myself too much than spend my life waiting for people like you to hand me permission.”
Caleb muttered, “Put that on a mug.”
Serena’s gaze snapped to him.
He smiled pleasantly. “I’ll buy two.”
She turned back to me, her jaw tight beneath all that careful beauty.
“You have no idea what you’re getting into,” she said. “Grant Calloway is not going to hand this place over to some girl with paint in her hair and a fantasy.”
I resisted the urge to touch my hair.
There was, in fairness, probably paint in it.
There was often paint in it.
“I’m not asking him to hand it over,” I said. “I’m asking to buy it.”
“With what?” Serena asked. “Hope?”
“Partly,” I said. “But my bank prefers actual money, so I’m working on that too.”
Caleb nodded. “Very traditional institution.”
Serena stepped closer to the fence, looking up at the broken windows. “Grant doesn’t like being bothered.”
“Most men don’t,” Caleb said. “And yet civilization limps on.”
This time I did laugh, quickly and helplessly.
Serena’s cheeks colored.
“Laugh all you want,” she said. “But Grant knows better than to trust some glittery little dreamer with his family’s property.”
The words landed harder than I wanted them to.
His family’s property.
I looked back at the house. The crooked shutter. The sagging porch. The upstairs window where the raccoon had vanished, perhaps offended by the tension.
For the first time, I wondered what Grant saw when he looked at Northlight House.
Not possibility, maybe.
Maybe pain.
Maybe obligation.
Maybe nothing but bills and dust and memories he had nailed shut.
My hope wavered, but it did not fall.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said.
Serena’s mouth curved. “Good luck.”
It did not sound like a wish.
It sounded like a threat wearing perfume.
She looked me over once more, from my scuffed boots to my paint-speckled coat to the paper clenched in my hand.
“This place will break your heart,” she said.
I looked at Northlight House again.
The wind moved through it. Something loose knocked gently against the siding. The whole building seemed to be holding its breath.
“Maybe,” I said. “But a lot of good things start that way.”
For once, Serena had nothing immediate to say.
Caleb stepped in smoothly. “Well, this has been emotionally nourishing. We should do it again never.”
Serena gave him a flat look, then turned on one polished heel and walked away, her cream coat bright against the dull street. She did not look back, but I felt the weight of her disapproval lingering like smoke.
When she was far enough down the block, Caleb leaned toward me.
“I say this with love,” he said. “That woman needs a hobby that isn’t sucking oxygen out of people’s dreams.”
I let out a breath I had not realized I was holding.
“She likes Grant.”
“Oh, honey.” Caleb looked at me with pity. “She doesn’t like Grant. She wants to win Grant. There’s a difference.”
I watched Serena disappear around the corner.
“She seemed pretty sure he won’t sell to me.”
“She seemed pretty sure her cheekbones entitled her to municipal authority. I wouldn’t panic yet.”
I laughed, but my hand was trembling around the listing paper.
Caleb noticed. Of course he did.
He reached over and gently took the paper from me before I could wrinkle it beyond recognition.
“Hey,” he said.
I looked at him.
His voice softened. “Did she get to you?”
“No.”
He waited.
I sighed. “A little.”
“That’s allowed.”
“I hate that it’s allowed.”
“Most feelings have terrible policies.”
I rubbed my hands over my face and turned back to Northlight House. The building looked worse now that Serena had said every ugly thing aloud. The broken windows seemed more broken. The porch sagged lower. The whole place had the air of something abandoned because everyone sensible had agreed to abandon it.
But beneath that, I still saw it.
A boy carrying a lopsided clay dragon to show his mother.
An old man painting sunflowers after losing his wife.
Teenagers laughing too loudly in the back room because they had finally found somewhere they were not being chased away from.
Caleb arranging chairs while complaining about my inability to label storage bins properly.
Me, unlocking the front door in the morning.
Warm light spilling across the floor.
Northlight Arts.
I pressed my palm to the cold iron fence.
“I’m scared,” I admitted.
Caleb stood beside me, shoulder warm against mine. “Good.”
I frowned at him. “Good?”
“Fear means you understand there are consequences.”
“That is very annoying and mature.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“I could fail.”
“You could.”
“I could lose money.”
“You probably will.”
“Caleb.”
“I’m not going to lie to you in front of a haunted craft mansion.”
I breathed out a shaky laugh.
He nudged me gently. “But you could also build something beautiful. And not in the vague greeting-card way. I mean actually beautiful. Useful. Alive.”
The ache returned to my chest.
“You think so?”
“I think,” he said, “that you need an inspection before you make any offers. I think you need to find out who actually controls the sale. I think you need to talk to Grant Calloway without assuming his emotional damage is a puzzle God assigned specifically to you.”
“Caleb.”
“I said what I said.” He held up one finger. “And I think you need a real budget. Not a vibes budget.”
“My vibes budget is generous.”
“Your vibes budget is bankrupt.”
I smiled.
He handed the listing back to me. “But yes. I think this could be something.”
I looked at him, my eyes stinging.
Caleb immediately pointed at me. “Do not cry. If you cry, I will cry, and if I cry in this wind, my face will chap. I am too handsome to be weather-damaged.”
“You are ridiculous.”
“And correct.”
I folded the listing carefully and tucked it back into my pocket.
Across the street, Northlight House stood in all its peeling, crooked, weather-beaten glory. A wreck. A warning. A dare.
Maybe Serena was right. Maybe Grant Calloway would slam the door in my face. Maybe the foundation was cracked. Maybe the roof leaked. Maybe the town would laugh. Maybe I was too young, too hopeful, too underfunded, too much of everything people had always told me to be less of.
But the house was still standing.
So was I.
I reached through the iron bars and touched one finger to a peeling flake of white paint on the gatepost.
“Hello, Northlight,” I whispered.
Caleb glanced at me. “Did you just greet the building?”
“It felt rude not to.”
“Of course it did.”
“I’m going to buy it,” I said.
Caleb tilted his head back and looked at the gray sky as if requesting patience from whatever department handled Eliza Hart.
Then he sighed.
“Fine,” he said. “But before you buy the emotionally significant death trap, we are getting coffee, making a list, and pretending for one full hour that math can save us.”
I slipped my arm through his.
“Math and hope,” I said.
“Math first.”
“Hope second?”
“Hope can sit quietly in the passenger seat wearing a seat belt.”
I laughed, and this time it did not shake.
Together, we walked away from the fence and down the uneven sidewalk, leaving Northlight House behind us.
But only for now.
Because some places looked abandoned when really they were waiting.
And I had always been terrible at leaving lonely things alone.
