Read How to Knit a Love Song for Free Online Page A

I needed a new home anyway.”
    “You seriously want the cottage.”
    “Yes.”
    “I don’t think you understand what you’re in for.”
    “I don’t need a big house. The cottage will be perfect. Someday. I only need a space for me, my desk, and my fiber.”
    “Fiber?”
    “Fiber. Wool. Those sheep running around out there? I spin my own yarn, and dye it, and then I knit it up into sweaters, like this one,” she tugged at the hem of her pink sweater. “And then I write patterns and sell them in books.”
    “Same as Aunt Eliza.”
    “She taught me everything I know.”
    “Huh.” Cade couldn’t picture his great-aunt without sticks and string in her hands—she had always been knitting. And wanting to talk about it.
    He’d always been too busy to really listen.
    Even when he’d moved onto the property, when he had first tried to help her run the ranch, she had always been trying to talk to him about the crimp and health of the sheep’s wool. She wanted to dress them up in sweaters of their own, to keep the ends of the wool safe from sun damage.
    He’d laughed at her and talked about the price of meat.
    Cade took care of her when she got sick. The breast cancer knocked Eliza down, hard. He’d never seen her like that: weak and in pain. Cade ran the ranch when he wasn’t inside nursing her. He became fluent in doctor-speak and learned to make weak broth while still mostly asleep. Eliza recovered well, but when the cancer came back a second time a few years later, when he was twenty-seven, she made the decision to move south.
    He’d asked why. He’d been more hurt than he’d allowed himself to let on.
    Eliza had said, “The only thing that kept me on this land was Joshua. And then you. But I want to live in sight of the sea.”
    “Move west five miles, then. At least I’d be close. If you needed me.”
    “There’s a retirement village there. I have friends.”
    “More of the knitters?”
    “It’s knitting heaven, they tell me. There’s a yarn shop in the middle of the place, and they know me there already. They all want me.”
    By the letters she’d sent him, she’d been right to go. The nurses had been close by, but she’d been autonomous. She became the queen bee of her social circle, pulling in the younger knitters, too, if Abigail was anything to judge by.
    He’d missed Eliza every single day, but he’d never gone to visit her. He kept telling himself he would, that he’d take the time and go. Eliza came up to see him at least twice a year, and it had been too easy to let her do that, to rely on her visits. It hadn’t been anything but procrastination that kept him from driving south.
    He wouldn’t forgive himself for that now.
    No one had ever loved him as much as she had.
    He turned to face the sink so Abigail wouldn’t see his eyes.
    But Eliza had done this. Cade brought himself back to the present moment. He cleared his throat.
    A silence, thick and heavy. Cade didn’t quite know what to say next. He was nervous, a feeling he almost didn’t recognize.
    And he was still mad.
    That’s right. Focus.
    “We need to talk about how to share this house,” he said as he turned. “You have the room you’re staying in. I have my room. What I propose is this: I have the run of the downstairs living space until eight A.M. After that, I’ll be out on the ranch somewhere. You have the whole house all day until five P.M. I’ll then come in and make myself dinner, since we learned last night that I eat much earlier than you do. I’ll be cleaned up and out by six thirty, at which point I’ll have the parlor to myself while you cook for yourself. I’ll be out of the parlor by eight thirty, and then it’ll be yours, for watching TV or whatever it is you need to do. Laundry is in the back room off the porch, available any time, first come first serve.”
    She looked up at him. “Sounds complicated.”
    “But necessary.”
    She inclined her head a bit. “Do you have our bathing times