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glass. He asked over his shoulder, “Do you want more?”
    “Make yourself at home, why don’t you? But yeah—bring the whole jug.” Even with the family gone, she still made tea in plastic milk jugs, a gallon at a time.
    She padded back to the table barefoot and stretched out her legs. It was nice to have somebody waiting on her for a change. “What was that supposed to mean, ‘Which ought to tell you something’?”
    He dropped three cubes of ice in her glass with one hand and poured tea with the other. “The fact that you fixed up those three rooms first implies they are all you really need. Here you are, wasting your precious time and your excellent mind—”
    She held up her glass in a mock salute. “Thank you, sir, for the compliment, even couched in insult.”
    “Come on, do you really enjoy spending days and days on such momentous decisions as—what? Stripes versus plaids?”
    She gave a short, unfunny laugh. “Most recently, peach versus blue. Of course not. We both know I hate shopping, so don’t make it any worse than it is. I’ve been doing it for weeks and weeks, and there’s no end in sight. But at least I’m getting a break starting tomorrow. A friend and I are going down to the beach for a few days.”
    “Bully for you.” He slid into the chair across from her again, slouched down in his seat, munched a cookie, and considered her with a thoughtful expression. “You know what your problem is?”
    “I have a destroyed home.”
    “No, that’s your situation. A problem is usually not the problem, it’s what you do with the problem. Your problem—” he waved the cookie in her direction for emphasis “—is that you don’t have a deadline. I see it all the time in my grad students. If they are running out of money or have to finish by a certain time—say they have a wife and kids to support, or there’s a postdoc program they want to apply for—they buckle down and finish. Otherwise, the process drags on ad infinitum . If you had to have this house finished by a specific time, you wouldn’t spend five hours buying lamps and you wouldn’t let Hollis bully you into traipsing all over town looking for stuff. Folks always work better with a deadline.” He picked up his tea like a man who has just had the last word.
    “We’re getting there,” she snapped, furious. “These things take time. How dare you show up after a three-week vacation and tell me I’m not working fast enough?” To her mortification, she burst into tears.
    Hasty left his seat and bent over her chair. “Oh, Katie-bell.” His breath was soft and warm in her hair and she felt the steady thump thump of his heart against her head. “I didn’t mean to beat up on you. I came to make it all better by taking your mind off things for a little while. But look what I’ve done.”
    “It’s not you.” She sniffed and tried to stop her tears. “It’s me. The whole time I’m shopping, I feel like I’m slogging through mud in cement boots. I don’t know what the heck I’m doing all this for. I don’t even know who cares. And I hate it!” She laid her head on her arms and sobbed.
    He gently pulled her up and toward him, cradling her head with one hand while the other rubbed her back in long, gentle strokes. She sobbed out weeks of frustration. Finally she gave a little hiccup. “I’m soaking your shirt.”
    “Good. It needed a wash. And you needed a hug.”
    It felt good to stand there with somebody else holding up the universe for a change.
    It felt too good.
    “Go get your bathing suit,” he whispered, dropping his arms to circle her waist. “Let’s swim.”
    She tingled all over.
    Summoning every ounce of willpower she possessed, she pulled away, turned her back, and looked at her watch. “I can’t. I’ve barely got time to dress before going out again.”
    “Nowhere you have to go would be better than this.”
    Behind her, Hasty put his hands on her shoulders and began squeezing gently. Outside, the