Page 8 of Dirty Fighter

He’d had plans.

“Rowan, there is zero chance in hell that Dad would have left this place to Marsha. She hated it. Came once, couldn’t get a signal to shop from her phone, and left two days into a ten-day trip.”

Initially, I’d felt genuinely bad for my dad that the woman he’d share the rest of his life with “didn’t care for the outdoors” the way she’d thought she would. But then, after everything that happened… I was grateful.

Grateful to have one place that was still ours. And while he’d never say it out loud, I knew he was too. Dad’s loyalty knew no bounds, so his wife would have been taken care of. No question.

But the cabin? No way.

And Lenard will confirm it tomorrow.

She takes a slow breath and asks, “Okay, but… I mean, you don’t have any legal documentation that shows he left it to you?”

“Not on me, Rowan,” I snap back.

“You’ve seen it, though?” she presses.

And here’s the rub. I haven’t seen it for myself, because when I lost my dad, the last thing on my mind was parsing out his estate. I didn’t need his money, hadn’t thought of his house— the house I grew up in —as mine since Marsha moved in. And the island never even made my radar as a question mark.

I didn’t want to read through his final will and testament because I didn’t care where his various assets were being distributed.

The only thing I cared about was that my dad was gone.

“No. I haven’t seen it.” I rake my hand through my hair. “My lawyers handled the estate interactions.” Then. “Stop looking at me like not seeing the words means they don’t exist.”

Rowan shouldn’t be buying into this bullshit.

Yeah, it’s been more than a decade since I could claim to know her at all. And even then, I’m not sure I was thinking straight about the beautiful girl I found alone in the rain that night. But still, how can she accept Marsha’s claim?

More than that, how can she be actively participating in something she knows is wrong? Asking me for proof I don’t have this minute, like without it, she’s just going to get on with packing the place up so her mom can sell it right out from under me. Challenging what I know to be true about my dad.

It makes me angry.

Angry because my dad loved Rowan like a daughter, and he deserves better.

Angry because this doesn’t fit with my stupid fantasy about her.

Angry that I care about what kind of person she is at all, when the only fucking thing I should be angry about is that her mom is trying to steal my family’s cabin.

“Jason, more than anything, I wish Ed was still here and we could ask him why. But he’s not and we can’t. All we can do is⁠—”

Ri-Ri-Ring, Ring…

She cuts off at the stuttering sound of her phone alerting her to what I’m guessing are multiple messages along with a call.

The signal’s spotty enough in town, but it’s even worse across the lake over here. So it’s not uncommon for a flurry of notifications to land all at once after a dead spell.

She leans over the counter where her phone is lighting up like the Fourth of July… and pales.

“Everything okay?” I step in for a closer look. “Marsha.”

My jaw clenches, and the temperature in the room goes up as a highlight reel of all the bullshit that woman has been behind rolls through my memory. The lies. The things she took from my family.

What she’s trying to take now.

Rowan casts me an uncertain look. “I-I’ll call her back.”

“Not up for a chat?” I reach for the phone. “How about I take a message?”