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“You’re welcome.” I took another sip of my coffee, and finding it cool enough to drink, slammed it back while Emilia watched in amusement.
“Feel better?” she asked as I got up to throw away my garbage.
“Yeah.”
We walked companionably outside, and I fumbled for the sunglasses that I’d stuck in the neck of my T-shirt. It was an overcast day and was clearly going to rain again any minute, but it was still too bright for comfort.
“Thanks again for bringing me breakfast,” I said, knocking my arm into hers as we headed toward the forecourt where we’d parked.
“Welcome.” She grinned at me. “It gave me an excuse to get out of the house and get my own coffee.”
I laughed and waved as she headed toward her car. Me and Emilia had always gotten along, but I’d had a serious chip on my shoulder when she’d taken off for parts unknown and left Micky without a word. When she’d come back, I’d been pissed. Theaudacity.
Then, while I’d been watching out for her and Rhett, her old boss had somehow snuck into Micky’s house. Seeing her at the business end of some asshole’s pistol had put things into perspective, to say the least. After that whole situation, we’d gotten a lot closer. Putting it mildly, she mothered me, and I allowed it. She’d never had siblings and it kind of felt like she was making up for lost time with us.
I rode home, letting the wind blow away the cobwebs left over from the shitty rest I’d gotten on the couch.
As always, the sight of my house brightened me up a bit. My dad had given each of the adult kids the opportunity to buy one of his project houses if we wanted to. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t have even thought of it except for the fact that he’d had to buy Emilia’s old house for Mick after my brother had trashed it. The situation had actually worked out well, so Dad had offered the same deal to Rumi a couple years later. I’d seenthe writing on the wall and by the time he’d made the offer to me, I’d known exactly which house I wanted.
He’d had the old farmhouse for a couple of years by then because it hadn’t been like his usual fix-and-sell properties. For one thing, it actuallyhadproperty and all of the other flip houses were in neighborhoods. The house sat on ten acres of forest overgrown with blackberries that needed to be cleared. For another, it was smaller than he usually messed with and he’d known that in order for it to make the kind of money he’d wanted, there would have to be some major fucking work done.
I’d had the place for almost a year and it was nearly unrecognizable from the house it had been before. After spending a solid month of summer nights and weekends on my uncle’s tractor, there wasn’t a blackberry in sight. There was new gravel on the driveway, I’d replaced the siding and painted the outside of the house and detached garage a pale yellow, and just in time for the rain, I’d fixed the roof.
“Still need a garage door opener,” I mumbled to myself as I hopped off my bike and went to roll up the garage door. The inside was dark as I pulled in and I reached out to pat the cover on my Mustang. “You stay out of the rain.”
I laughed at myself as I jogged toward the back door of the house. I needed to get a dog or something before I started talking to all the inanimate objects in my place and not just the car.
The back door didn’t have an overhang and the rain started pouring as I fumbled to unlock the door. By the time I got inside, I was soaking wet.
Cursing, I toed off my boots in the doorway and padded into the kitchen in my socks, stripping off my jacket as I went. I kept the house pretty cool when I wasn’t there, but it felt a whole lot colder than it should’ve been.
“Fuck,” I barked, knocking on the old thermostat with my knuckles. It was stuck at seventy degrees and I knew it sure as hell wasn’t that warm inside.
I fucking loved my house. I did. But I sometimes wondered if I’d bitten off more than I could chew when I’d picked it. Some day it was going to be awesome and I knew it, but so far the siding had started peeling away from the walls and once that was fixed the roof had begun to leak. Then a pipe to the septic tank had gotten clogged and backed up nasty ass water into my bathroom tub—I’d almost sold the place then becausefuck that shit—then the kitchen faucet had needed to be replaced. I’d spent two months trying to get rid of mice in the walls after I’d fucked with their habitat by clearing the property and they’d swarmed inside looking for shelter.
Cursing, I put my boots back on and headed down to the basement to see if I could figure out what was wrong with the furnace. As I passed the back wall of the kitchen, I reached out and unconsciously touched the bottom of one of the picture frames hanging there. Inside was a photo of my grandparents when they were young. Grandma was holding a newborn—my dad—and sitting on Grandpa’s lap. When Gram had seen the photo, she’d looked at it for a moment and then turned to me.I like your house. This’ll be a good place for a family.
I couldn’t really imagine having a family or even a steady girlfriend at that point, but I’d still felt a little something in my gut when she’d said it. Itdidfeel like a place you’d put down roots. Not once since I’d bought the place from my dad had it felt like a starter home or something I’d ever actually sell—even if itwasa major pain in the ass most of the time.
“Okay,” I said, pulling on the little cord hanging from the ceiling to turn on the single light bulb that lit the room. I looked at the furnace. “What the fuck is your problem, now?”
Kneeling down to pull off the little door on the side, something in the way the light hit my back and tossed my shadow across the floor made me freeze.
For a second, I was standing at the hood of the Mustang, firelight at my back, while beautiful brown eyes stared up at me in the dark.
I fell back on my heels as a sharp pain shot through the base of my skull. I’d been dealing with migraines my entire life and I was usually able to stop them before they knocked me out, but between the hangover and the memory of the way Esther had looked at me before she’d realized I was an asshole—it was game over.
I barely made it up the stairs and out the back door before puking up everything Emilia had brought me for breakfast.
Chapter 3
Esther
Unsurprisingly, a personcan get used to almost anything given enough time. Even a cabin with no electricity or running water in the middle of nowhere.
The first night was the worst. I’d panicked once I realized that I had no light, my heart racing, too scared to leave the couch, afraid that if I got up I’d somehow get lost in the tiny room. As the night grew colder, I’d stayed on the couch, pulling clothes out of my suitcase to layer on top of what I was wearing. I’d stared out the window, watching the trees sway in the wind and listening for sounds of wild animals or serial killers.
The next day hadn’t gone much better. That was when I’d finally looked into the bathroom to find that it was nothing but a minuscule room built on to the back of the cabin, a crude wooden seat open to a hole in the ground. There was no sink or shower, for obvious reasons, and the thought of never being able to clean myself somehow seemed worse than spending another night in the dark.
