Page 34 of The Grump I Got Stuck With

Kenna was still sleeping off their attempts at building a snowman and I found Madison in the library staring at the Voyages app.

“If you’re looking for another road to get stuck on, you might want to wait until your car is repaired,” I said, making her jump.

“Stalker much?” she grumbled, not bothering to lift her head. Her finger had paused and I knew she was pretending to ignore me.

I dropped into the chair next to her and stretched my legs out toward the fire and caught her gaze following my movements. “You forget, Maddy Poppins, this is my house and you’re in a public area. If you want privacy, go to your room and shut the door.”

She cringed at the nanny joke. “Still not funny.”

“It’s a little funny.” I gestured to her phone. “You never did say what brought you to Scotland other than you aren’t a tourist.”

Madison didn’t have to tell me anything and it was unfair of me to prod, but she’d been so cryptic about it and Alfie hadn’t found anything out, which meant, I was far too curious. The longer I waited for her to respond, the more I assumed she’d tell me it was none of my business.

She sighed. “This past summer, I found out I was adopted. Turns out my birth mother was Scottish. I only found out because she passed away, and I was notified as part of her will.”

I could tell by the look on her face that the news had hurt. “Your parents never said anything?”

Madison shook her head. “I guess they’d been on an adoption list for ages. One day, they were visiting cousins in Scotland when they met my birth mother and learned she was planning to give up her child. She decided they were the kind of people who should be parents.”

“And she wasn’t?”

“According to my parents, she was a bit of a free spirit. She wanted me to have a good life, and she believed that would be with people who were more secure. So my parents took me home shortly after I was born. It was an open adoption because she knew where I was and who was raising me, but my birth mom agreed not to reach out.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Probably thought it would make the process harder for me.” Madison stared at the fire in front of us. “I wish she knew how wrong she was about that. I spent my whole life feeling like I didn’t fit in. That I was somehow born into the wrong family. But whenever I tried to explain that to my parents, they always acted like I was being absurd or overdramatic.” She laughed sharply. “They could have just told me the truth, but I guess they were invested in acting like everything was fine.”

“Your parents are lawyers?” I knew the answer through the background check and she’d said she was a paralegal, so I wondered why she felt like she didn’t fit in.

“They’re law professors. Serious academics who were always bewildered by how rambunctious I was. How artsy. How⁠—”

“Free spirited?” I supplied envisioning exactly where this was going.

She snorted. “They had the nerve to act so surprised by it, saying they didn’t understand why I’d be so impulsive, or why I had such weird tastes or strange hobbies.”

“Strange hobbies?”

“In high school, I joined the improv troupe instead of the chess team.”

“That’s not weird,” I said, bewildered. It’s not what I would’ve chosen, but from what I knew of her, it was more appropriate than a strategy game with zero room for creativity.

“Yes! Thank you!” she exclaimed. “But it was weird to my parents. I tried so hard to be the daughter they wanted me to be, but it never worked. When I found out about the adoption, I wondered if Scotland had been where I belonged all along. At the very least, I wanted to see what I could find out about my mother—whether I could feel that kind of connection to her I never managed to feel for my adoptive parents. So I took a leave of absence from my job and hopped on the first flight here.”

Now, I knew why she left. “What have you found so far?” I asked. Maybe I could help.

Madison looked sheepish. “I went to the town where my mom was living when she died, hoping to get a sense of what her life was like, but she hadn’t lived there very long, and I wasn’t able to find anyone who knew her.”

“Is that it then?”

Madison lifted her shoulder. “My mom left me a few things as part of her estate. Not much. A little money, which I used to buy the van. Some blown-glass pieces. I guess she was a glass artist and was good enough to make a living at it. She used to travel around to different craft fairs selling her pieces. I found her on some old social media posts, where the fairs would list who’d be in attendance. She also left me an old photo album. I’ve gone through the pictures, trying to figure out where they were taken. I want to visit all the places where she spent time over the years to see if one of them feels more like home than Connecticut ever has.”

I nodded. What whiplash it must have been to learn about her birth mother and lose her all in the same breath. “So you’ve been using Voyages to travel to the places in the photos?”

“I can’t identify all the locations,” she admitted. “Some have writing on the back, but not all of them. And I tried using an image search, but the pictures look like too many different places and I couldn’t narrow them down.”

I understood now why she didn’t take me up on my offer for VIP treatment through the app. Madison wasn’t looking for luxury travel experiences. She wanted to go to small towns, quiet beaches, pubs without social media accounts. The kinds of unassuming places locals would venture to, not the overly hyped tourist attractions.

“You know, that’s what I always wanted Voyages to be from the start,” I said. “Something that not only helped people figure out where they were going, but that captured the experience they were looking for. Something that made them feel connected to the places they visited. That’s why the app highlights not just how to get from Point A to Point B but all the things that are really worth seeing in between.”