Roman Voss, 62, spent 38 years as a forensic accountant digging through embezzlement schemes and falsified tax returns before retiring to Traverse City, where he fixes vintage fishing reels out of his garage for extra cash and avoids small town drama like it’s a bad batch of homebrew. His biggest flaw, the one his late wife used to nag him about nonstop, is that he’d rather hole up with a screwdriver and a 1960s Penn Spinfisher than make small talk with anyone who isn’t a regular at his favorite bait shop. He’d only dragged himself to the downtown summer beer festival because his neighbor left a free ticket on his porch, and the blueberry ale from the local microbrew was worth putting up with 2000 drunk tourists for an hour.
He was leaning against a pine tree at the edge of the crowd, picking at the dried reel grease under his thumbnail, when a shoulder slammed into his bicep hard enough to slosh half his ale over the rim of the cup. He was ready to snap a retort before he looked down, and realized it was Elara Moore, 48, the newly elected county prosecutor everyone in town called the Ice Queen. She’d just wrapped the high-profile road commission corruption case last month, the one Roman had spent three months compiling spreadsheets for, turning 17 boxes of messy receipts into an airtight paper trail that put three guys in jail. He’d avoided her like the plague since, not wanting his name attached to any more news stories.
He teased her that the woman who put three corrupt public officials behind bars couldn’t navigate a beer festival without taking out a bystander, and she laughed, loud and unguarded, throwing her head back so he could see the streaks of silver threaded through her dark curly hair, the faint scar on her jaw from a high school soccer collision he’d heard about at a family Thanksgiving 12 years prior. It hit him then that she was his late wife’s second cousin, the kid who’d sat at the kids’ table eating mashed potatoes straight from the bowl, not the unapproachable public figure everyone in town whispered about. The thought made him shift back a half step, suddenly hyper aware of the group of county workers staring at them from across the beer tent, the faint hum of gossip that would start before they even finished their drinks.
She noticed the shift, and rolled her eyes, nodding toward the exit. “I rent a cottage up on the peninsula, no neighbors, no prying eyes. I’ve got my dad’s old 1958 Pflueger reel I’ve been trying to fix for six months, and I can’t even get the side plate off. You could come take a look, if you don’t want to deal with the crowd.” The invitation hung between them for three long beats, and Roman fought the warring instincts in his chest: the part of him that had locked himself away after his wife died, that thought even talking to another woman that way was a betrayal, that the vague family tie made the whole thing feel cheap and wrong, and the other part, the part that hadn’t felt a spark of anything other than quiet contentment in seven years, that wanted to stop being the grieving widower everyone tiptoed around for one night.
He said yes. They left 10 minutes apart, to avoid the gossip mill, and he pulled up to her cottage 20 minutes later, his toolbox rolling around in the passenger seat of his beat up Ford F150, the lake wind whipping through the open window. She was on the porch waiting for him, barefoot, wearing cutoff jeans and a faded Michigan State hoodie, no blazer, no sharp makeup, no face she put on for press conferences. He fixed the reel in 11 minutes flat, tightening a loose spring and replacing a rusted bearing, and she clapped like he’d just solved a murder, leaning over his shoulder so her hair brushed his neck.
They sat on the porch swing after that, watching the sun dip below Lake Michigan, painting the sky pink and tangerine. She told him she hated being the Ice Queen, that no one ever asked her what she liked, they only saw the woman who sent people to jail. He told her he hadn’t let anyone sit this close to him since his wife died, that he’d forgotten what it felt like to talk to someone who didn’t look at him like he was one step away from breaking. She leaned her head on his shoulder for half a second, then pulled back like she’d crossed a line, but he reached over, lacing his calloused, grease-stained fingers through hers, and she didn’t pull away.
They ordered a pepperoni pizza from the little place up the road, ate it off paper plates on the floor of her living room, laughing at the bad 90s action movie playing on her TV. When she leaned in to kiss him, he tasted the cherry hard seltzer on her tongue, and for the first time in seven years, he didn’t feel guilty for wanting something that was just for him.
