modern and mounted on the wall with a cord attached to the
back. This house was the real deal. If the turret wasn’t enough
to declare it so, the woodwork, mantles, huge floorboards,
shutters and porch which were being rebuilt certainly made it
so.
Cassia was wearing a black t-shirt and a pair of plain blue
cotton pajama bottoms. She padded to the window in her bare
feet and looked out over the backyard. The crews started at
nine every morning, and since the sound of saws and hammers
had just woken her, she figured it wasn’t much past that time.
The sun was late, since it was January, but it wasn’t like
January in New York. The winter months in Vegas and in
South Carolina were as nice as any New York summer day.
Endless, lush green grass stretched away from the house as
far as the eye could see. Cassia thought the yard would look
better with some flowers, some bushes and shrubs, maybe
even a few fruit trees, but it wasn’t her yard, so she said
nothing.
She did walk over to the antique tallboy dresser and pull out
a pair of jeans and a hoodie. She didn’t have many clothes that
she could sacrifice. Most of her things were what she had
worn in Vegas, and a mini-skirt or a tight black dress was
hardly fitting for construction work. The hoodie was cropped,
but she wore it with a tight black tank top underneath. Her
jeans were old and worn in, the kind that felt buttery soft
because they’d been washed next to a million times.
She wondered what Adalynn would have her doing today.
Yesterday was the first day she’d been allowed to do anything
other than tidy up, which really wasn’t a job because Adalynn
kept the house so sparse that everything was tidy. Cassia had