Page 27 of The Goat Next Door

“Yeah,” I say under my breath, a slow, tight smile finally breaking through as the heat in my chest refuses to cool down. “We’ll see, Ember.”

My phone vibrates violently against my thigh. I pull it out, seeing the caller ID.

I hit accept immediately. “Hey. Everything okay?”

“Hey, Brooks!” Lauren’s voice comes through the speaker. “Yeah, everything is awesome! We just passed the world’s largest ball of twine and Mark almost ran into a ditch trying to take a selfie. Listen, I’m just calling because I realized I left Sophie’s little green dinosaur sweater at your house, not in her backpack. Can you make sure she has it for preschool on Monday? You know how she gets if her ‘dino-power’ isn’t fully charged.”

“I’ll look for the sweater on the couch when I get home, Lauren,” I say, a small, easy smile softening my face. “Have fun at the lake.”

“We will! Don’t let Soph eat too much sugar! Bye!”

I hang up the phone, sliding it back into my pocket. I turn back to Ember to tell her I need to pack up my tools, but the words freeze in my throat.

Ember is staring at me.

Her face has gone completely, starkly pale beneath her golden-brown curls. Her wide, dark eyes are fixed on my face with an expression of absolute, horrified shock.

“Ember?” I ask, pulling my brows together. “What’s wrong? You look like you saw a ghost.”

She swallows hard, her throat bobbing as she takes a step back from me on the porch, my house clearly visible just four hundred feet away, her hands gripping the wooden railing until her knuckles turn white.

“You… you have a wife,” she whispers, her voice completely stripped of its usual playful lilt.

I blink, thoroughly confused. “A what?”

“A wife,” she repeats, her voice rising slightly, laced with a sudden, sharp edge of panic. “Lauren. You were just talking to a Lauren. You told her—you had that whole domestic conversation about a lake and a sweater, and… oh my God.”

The horror on her face is immediate and absolute.

Like she’d rather fling herself directly into traffic than flirt with a married man.

She drops her head into her hands, a low, miserable groan escaping her chest. “Oh my God, I’ve been flirting with a married man. I’m a home-wrecker. I’m a city cliché. I came into this town and started batting my eyelashes at the local fire chief while his wife was somewhere. I’m going to hell.”

She says it with genuine devastation.

Which, irrationally, makes me like her even more.

I sit on the steps, staring at her as she paces back and forth on the narrow porch, her hands wildly gesturing in the air as she spirals into a panic attack.

“Ember,” I say, trying to cut through the noise.

“No, don’t speak to me, hot neighbor! No, Brooks! Whatever your name is!” she says. “I am so incredibly sorry. I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know. The truck was empty yesterday, and you were just… you were fixing my extension cord, and you have that whole rugged, stoic, single-dad-adjacent energy, and I just assumed—”

“Emmy, I am a single dad,” I say, my voice loud enough to finally break through her monologue.

She stops dead at the top of the steps, her breath catching in her throat. She slowly lowers her hands, squinting at me through her honeyed curls. “But… Lauren.”

“Lauren is my friend. And my ex,” I say flatly, leaning my elbows on my knees. “It was a brief thing years ago, it didn’t work out, but we ended up with Sophie. Sophie is my five-year-old daughter. She was sitting in my truck yesterday because she was riding home with me after I picked her up from kindergarten.”

Ember stands perfectly still for three long seconds, processing the data. Her pale cheeks transition from horrified white to a furious, burning shade of pink.

“She was in the truck?” she whispers.

“Yep. In the passenger seat. Having a juice box.”

“While I was calling you the hot neighbor?!” she shrieks, her hands flying to her face.

“She didn’t hear you, Ember. The windows were up and the alarm was loud enough to clear a riot,” I say, the corner of my mouth twitching violently as I try to suppress a massive grin. “But yes. She was there.”