Page 6 of The Goat Next Door

She has a massive halo of wild, unruly blonde curls that look like they’ve never met a comb. She’s wearing baggy denim overalls over a gray t-shirt, and there is a massive white paint stain splashed right across the left thigh.

She hops down from the high cab, lands on the loose gravel with a surprisingly confident thud, and immediately starts scanning the property with her hands on her hips.

She doesn’t even check the side of the truck. She doesn’t look down at the mangled heap of metal beneath her rear tire. Instead, she turns her gaze to me, eyes the hammer in my hand, and beams.

She struts over to the carnage of my mailbox, tilts her head like a curious bird, and lightly taps the bent metal with the toe of a sturdy leather boot. Then she looks up at me, her wide eyes dancing with an absolute, hyperactive energy that instantly makes the bridge of my nose ache.

“Hey!” she chirps, waving a hand. “I’m Ember. Well, Emmy. Literally nobody calls me Ember unless I’m in trouble, which, okay, technically I might be right now. Are you the local handyman? I think I might have had a very minor, slight altercation with the mail station here. Do you think you can fix it? I’m happy to pay for the parts, obviously. And the labor. I’m kinda rich.”

I blink at her.

“I know that’s a weird thing to say out loud,” she adds quickly. “My mom has been telling me to stop leading with it.”

I slowly lower my hammer, my knuckles turning a sharp shade of white against the grip.

She smiles wider. “So… are you a handyman?”

I take a slow, deep breath through my nose, trying to channel whatever patience I have left after a twenty-four-hour shift at the fire station.

“Handyman?” I repeat, my voice dry. “I’m not a handyman. I live right there.” I point a finger toward my house, easily visible through the thin line of trees. “And you aren’t on public property. This is my driveway.”

“Oh! Well, that explains why the GPS told me to make a sharp left into a bush. My bad!” She waves a dismissive hand toward the broken wood. “You clearly know how to use a hammer, and I clearly don’t know how to reverse a fifteen-foot commercial vehicle. Since you’re already here, you can help me unload, right? It’s a win-win scenario. I’m moving into the Gilded Goat. I just bought the place. I’m officially a woman of the soil.”

I stare at her in dead silence.

The words I just bought the place bounce around my skull like a pinball.

I look past her shoulder, toward the dilapidated, overgrown money pit that has been blessedly empty for seven years since Arthur—the previous owner—moved to a smaller, a much easier to manage house.

The roof is half-rotted. The plumbing is a myth. And now, apparently, it belongs to a girl who looks like a walking art project.

And she is going to live just a hundred yards from my front porch.

Fuck this, I think. Fuck the previous owner’s real estate agent, and fuck my luck.

“You bought it,” I say flatly.

She nods so hard her curls bounce wildly around her face.

“I did! Impulse control is apparently not one of my gifts.” She beams, crossing her arms over her chest. “Confetti fell down my screen and everything. It was very official. What’s your name? And more importantly, do you happen to have a Phillips-head screwdriver? I think I left my entire toolkit on my kitchen counter in the city, which is like hours away.”

“Brooks,” I say. “And no, I don’t have a screwdriver for you. I have a shift to schedule as the fire chief, a fence line to finish before the noon heat, and very little patience for people who use my infrastructure as a braking mechanism.”

She winces theatrically. “Ouch. You phrase things like a man who alphabetizes his canned goods.”

“I do alphabetize my canned goods.”

“That is somehow the least surprising thing I’ve heard all day.”

I sigh and turn back around, squaring my shoulders to the fence line and picking up a fresh cedar plank, hoping that if I ignore her with enough stoic intensity, she’ll simply evaporate back into whatever high-end boutique she crawled out of.

I can hear her boots crunching aggressively through the loose gravel.

She doesn’t take the hint.

Instead of backing her truck out, she marches back to the rear of the U-Haul, grabs the heavy metal roll-up door latch, and gives it a violent yank.

It doesn’t budge.