“You, Elaine Davis…” He pointed at Gran. “Are a legend. That’s what’s happening.” Whitney shuffled an older woman into the room.
“Adverse possession claim,” he told the silver-haired woman in the taupe suit. Lainey had the distinct feeling that everyone was speaking in a foreign language. “They’ve squatted in this guy’s house for over twenty years. Openly. Exclusively. Continuously. They’ve paid taxes on it. They’re basically a real-life bar exam hypothetical.”
“What does that mean, Mark?” Bree asked.
“Was it hostile?” Dawn asked skeptically, ignoring Bree’s question.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Gran interjected, but Mark more quickly responded, “Yes—legally speaking—and it should be easy to prove they were better caretakers of the property, considering it’s not in the lake like half of Hodges’s cabins.”
Dawn let out a giddy clap and then quickly covered her mouth. “I’m sorry. This is unprofessional. We just never see an adverse possession case like this actually happen! What sane person would live in someone else’s house for twenty years? No offense.”
“Adverse possession…” Lainey repeated the words Dawn was absolutely delighting in at what Lainey guessed was her expense.
“It’s a legal doctrine derived from English common law in which a trespasser of a property can automatically obtain ownership so long as their possession satisfies certain elements,” Mark explained. “Technically, itcanapply to residences, but I’ve only ever seen it done successfully with property lines, fences, the occasional shed…”
“So these two accidentally stole a notorious piece of American architectural history?” Bree asked, her jaw nearly detached from the rest of her face.
“I didn’t steal anything. Hewantedme to have it,” Gran protested. “I’ll admit, we never got around to the legal parts of the arrangement.”
“There are some loose ends for me to address,” Mark responded, looking at Bree. Lainey could already hear her bank account take its last dying gasp at the idea of paying Mark’s attorney fees.
Maybe she’d build him a birdhouse in lieu of payment. Constitutionally, he seemed like a man who could handle little more than the thrills of birdwatching.
“So even though the surrounding land belongs to the Shore Thing, we can prove their ownership would no longer include the home itself.”
Lainey was no stranger to making things happen for herself. She periodically swiped rolls of toilet paper from public restrooms and, in pursuit of free dessert, turned twenty-seven so many times she was banned from three separate Applebee’s in the northern Wisconsin region. She was a gig worker on four different apps, flipped furniture she found on the curb, and once, in a particularly dark moment, had resorted to selling a lock of her hair to a person on the internet and suspected she was being framed for a crime in the Florida panhandle. She never trusted the universe to provide, because it never had before. Ever. Lainey could only trust herself.
But somehow—this time—it had. She’d started the day with nowhere to live, and against all reason, a solution to her problems had materialized on its own. Lainey Davis had finders-keepers-ed her way into home ownership, and no one, not even the weaselly little nephew of Gilbert Hodges, would be able to take it away from her. She was almost excited to watch him try.
Chapter 3
How Very Karen-y of You
67 Days until Busy Season
The next morning,like every morning, Lainey had woken up surveying her body for that intangible “off” feeling that told her whether it was worth swallowing one of her precious migraine pills.
She was supposed to be taking them daily—it was the only reliable way to prevent her symptoms—but at twenty-nine dollars a pill, she had to stretch them as far as she possibly could. She couldn’t afford not to. Her pain was a sleep-paralysis demon, always hovering above her. Some days, she could will it away with a dark room and powerful medication, but other days, it overtook her.
On this particular morning—while lying in her bed, in the house that blessedly was still hers—she’d found no immediate signs of looming pain. No increased sensitivity to light. No aura. No reason to waste a pill. A pill brought with it the pressure to make the most of every expensive pain-free moment. She couldn’t be creative under those conditions, even though she’d never been good at coordinating her good days with moments of artistic inspiration. Case in point, the fact that she was atpresent sitting on her heels atop a metal stool with no clue of what to do with the dead tree in front of her.
She had an order for one of her side hustles—selling live-edge carpentry on Facebook Marketplace—and while Lainey definitely lacked a passion for making bougie-ass tables, her experience sculpting had made her pretty good with an orbital sander and strangers seemed willing to pay a small fortune for something that took her less than an afternoon to complete. But today, instead of producing yet another coffee table for Jessica from Ironwood or an end table for Lisa in Spooner, Lainey wanted to make something for herself.
Lainey’s current artistic fixation was sculpting tree snags. She turned stumps into tiny wooden creatures and transformed dead oak trees into sculptures of witchy women rooted to the earth. Bree described Lainey’s work as “beautiful but terrifying,” which delighted Lainey, as that was almost exactly what she was going for.
Lainey’s work was an exercise in reanimating the dead. It provided nature with new life through hacking away at it, giving trees the appearance of something otherworldly.
Trees were interdependent organisms, sharing water and nutrients, but her snags were alone, cut off from their support system. Lainey saw what she did as more than art. It was care. She cared for the dead trees in a way the surrounding ecosystem no longer would.
Also, she liked sculpting with chainsaws.
Wind whistled through the branches as her eyes pleaded with her unfinished subject to tell her something. The half-carved trunk stared back with indifference. The figure in her head was without details, an animal trapped under a sheet of bark.Sculpting was noisy work, so she typically enjoyed the silence of the planning process, but when she had no vision for a piece, the quiet sounded a bit like a smug little asshole. Today, she tried a new strategy. Snapping her safety goggles to her face, Lainey cranked up the music on her noise-canceling headphones, raised her chainsaw to waist height, and let herself get lost.
Minutes or hours later, a tap at her shoulder.
Her core muscles absorbed the full-body jerk that was a natural, reflexive response to the reckless act of abruptly touching a person holding a chainsaw. She immediately powered the thing down and ripped off her safety goggles before turning to yell at whoever stood behind her with the apparent desire to leave her backyard with fewer limbs than they arrived with.
That’s when she saw who it was. The man from the other day. Olive Rain Jacket Guy. Elliot. He was dry this time, in a navy sweater that stretched across his broad shoulders. His glasses were no longer rain dappled, but his hair still had a gentle wave to it, like it was perpetually tousled in a light breeze directed only at him in a full-fledged conspiracy of irrepressible charm and casual sex appeal. The sight of him—here, behind her house—snatched the words right out of her throat. She set the chainsaw on the ground and lowered her headphones to her neck like a scarf.
