Free To Have and to Hold by Serena Bell

eyebrows drew together.
    Hunter shook his head. “It’s just a kid’s tree house.”
    “This is not
just
anything,” Nate said. Nate wasn’t going to drop it, obviously, so they headed out into the woods, and Nate made Jake and Griff climb up into Clara’s house. It was true; it wasn’t really a kid’s tree house. It had stairs instead of a ladder, for one thing, and a front door instead of a trapdoor or floor hatch. It looked a lot like a miniature house, only up in a tree. It was completely weatherproof, made of the highest-quality building materials he’d been able to lay hands on, and the one room inside had been meticulously finished—wide-plank flooring, baseboards, quarter-round crown molding.
    “This thing’s fucking amazing,” Jake said, putting a hand out to touch the Craftsman-style front door, with its brass knocker. “Is this a real doorbell?”
    “Yeah.” The attention embarrassed and pleased Hunter at the same time.
    He’d built the tree house this elaborately because he hadn’t want to lose touch with his finish-carpentry skills—once upon a time, finish carpentry had been all he’d wanted to do, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that the home-building market had crashed and burned right when he was old enough to start his own business, he would have done that instead of joining up.
    “Sam would love this.”
    Sam was Jake’s son. Jake hadn’t known Sam existed for the first seven years of his life but, according to Nate, he was now making up for lost fatherhood time with a vengeance. Jake had wanted to bring Sam on the bike trip, but his mom, Mira, had put her foot down, saying that he wasn’t ready either for such a long ride or for so much adult male conversation.
    “This is nicer than the rooms at R&R,” Jake said, as Hunter followed him inside.
    Holy crap, it was nice. At some point in his missing memory, someone had decorated the
hell
out of this room. The walls had been painted sky blue, and there was a simple but beautiful white silhouette of a tree on one wall. A white daybed against the opposite wall was covered with a girlish—but not girly, Clara wouldn’t have stood for
that
—quilt and matching throw pillows. There were white wood-slat blinds on the windows, a plushy rug on the floor whose colors matched the quilt on the bed, framed posters on the walls, and a clock on a pretty white bedside table. Two sky-blue beanbags squatted side by side on the floor, not far from the double-sided desk where two girls could work face-to-face, with a bulletin board, organizer, and whiteboard combo on the wall beside them, and cups filled with pencils and pens within reach.
    Even if he’d had the imagination to envision this as the perfect homework nook, he was pretty sure he’d never have thought of the details that made it look so cozy and serviceable. He was 100 percent certain he’d had nothing to do with the mural, the quilt, or the throw pillows. And his mother, as lovely a human being as she was, had never listed interior design among her talents. No, he was pretty sure Trina had done this.
    “Did you do all this? These built-ins?”
    There were secret nooks and crannies hidden throughout, just because it had been a fun challenge, and shelves tucked in every corner, crammed—he was pleased to see—with books. So the girls had been spending time up here. Not that he’d resent it if they hadn’t—he’d built it as much for his own reasons as for Clara—but there was something satisfying about knowing it was getting used.
    “All the finish, all the built-ins. But not the decorating.”
    “Trina—?” Nate asked, but when he saw the look on Hunter’s face, he quit mid-question. “Look at this,” he said instead, and pulled back two sliding bookshelves to reveal more storage, filled with games, puzzles, stuffed animals, and knickknacks. To keep the clutter away visually.
    “You could do this. Like, for a living.” Griff was examining the mechanism on which