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home. She felt safe here. Welcome. Wanted. Like the building had been abandoned for too long, and it needed them.
    “What do you think?” she asked Philip.
    “It’s good,” he said simply.
    “Wade?”
    He shook his head in frustration. “This is too big a decision to make right now. Shouldn’t we look at other places? Shouldn’t we take more time to consider?”
    Was he trying to convince himself or her? If she chose to, she could allow a little of her gift to seep out, to seduce him, to make him see she felt safe here so that he would do anything for her. But she wouldn’t do that. She wanted his true agreement.
    “I don’t want to go back to Seattle,” she confessed, deciding to try honesty. “I don’t want to go back to Maggie’s. I don’t want to look at any other places. This is the one, Wade.”
    He stepped closer, his white-blond hair falling forward into his eyes.
    “Eleisha . . . ?”
    “Don’t you miss Portland?” she asked. “Don’t you miss it here?”
    Why she should love Portland and not Seattle was nonsensical, and she knew it, but for weeks now, the pull to come back to Oregon had grown stronger. The wish to leave Maggie’s house had grown unbearable. That house held too many reminders. Maggie had existed there, decorated the place, made it her own. And William . . . he had died in that house. Eleisha tried, but she couldn’t live there.
    Philip walked across the sitting room and dropped down near the outlet of what appeared to be a cable hookup. The empty apartment still looked like something from 1902, but it had been updated.
    “If we aren’t going back,” he said, studying the hookup, “we’ll have to buy a new TV and DVD player. Wade, you can set the player up for me.”
    Wade blinked. “Not going back? Not ever? What about our stuff ?”
    Philip looked back at him. “What stuff? We brought most of our clothes along, and everything else was Maggie’s.”
    That was true, and Eleisha had been banking on at least one of them reasoning this. She mentally searched for an opening to drop the next bomb.
    Wade provided it.
    “Well, it’s not far to dawn,” he said, sighing. “We should at least call for a cab and find a hotel. Even if we decide to buy this place, it’s not like everything is going to happen overnight. We’ll have to negotiate an offer, get the church inspected, get it appraised, and set up a closing date to sign papers. Do you both want to live in a hotel for a month?”
    “No,” Eleisha answered quietly.
    His forehead wrinkled as he looked at her.
    She held up the keys. “I leased the building for thirty days.”
    “What?”
    “The deacons’ committee is so motivated to sell that they agreed to some unusual requests . . . and I paid them four thousand dollars to let us have the place for a month. I told them we’d need to see if it suited us, but that was a lie. I knew once when I got here, I wouldn’t want to leave.”
    Philip stood up, and even he appeared surprised by this announcement.
    “Come and look,” she said, letting Wade walk ahead of her through the archway toward the bedrooms. She showed him each room in turn. They were charming, with more white molding and slanted ceilings. All three of them contained new beds made up with new sheets, blankets, and pillows.
    “I’m using the same real estate agent who’s representing the deacons,” she said. “That means if she sells to us, she gets to keep both commission fees. So . . . she was willing to go slightly beyond the call of duty. We don’t need to go to a hotel.”
    Philip was waiting in the hallway. He glanced through a door at the nearest bed. “I’ll get our suitcases from upstairs. Wade will want his deodorant and toothpaste.”
    He turned around and left.
    Eleisha watched him go, waiting until he was up the stairs—keeping her back to Wade. “I’ll handle the negotiations,” she said. “We don’t need a loan. I can sell some stock and buy the place with cash.”
    She