Chapter Four
“Carmen,” I breathed. Begged. Pleaded with my eyes. “There—there has to be something—”
But Carmen was already shaking her head. “There isn’t,” she said. And then, almost low enough that it was just for me. “I’ve looked.”
I blinked away, not wanting eye contact with anyone. Not her. Not the worthless cousins. Not the guy pretending to be my husband that I wasn’t sure was even still in the room. If I were him, I’d be Googling the nearest bus station.
“Is there a problem?” Bryce asked, feigning concern. “I mean, if you two are really legit, what’s there to worry about?”
“Really?” I asked. “You could up and move to another state for three months with no issues?”
He kind of jutted his head in a tilt. Was that a nod? “Sure. I work out of my car, so—”
“Well, I don’t,” I said. “And neither does Nick.”
“I thought his name was Michael,” Alicia said from her perch at the edge of the couch. She glanced over at Bryce as if to check if that was okay.
Balls.
“My middle name is Nicholas,” Nick said. “People close to me call me Nick.”
Oh, thank God the dude was still back there. And that he could think on his feet better than me.
“The point is, who can uproot their lives like that?” I said, covering my face for a minute. I needed the solitude. “How could Aunt Ruby do this to me?” I whispered behind my fingers.
“Well,” Bryce said, standing in all his sweaty glory. “Let me know what we need to do or sign or whatever to take care of the house.”
“The house,” I said, dropping my hands. “Is my home.”
“And you just said you can’t do what it takes to keep it,” Bryce said, gesturing with a finger for his non-speaking wife to get up. “I assume you’ll be turning over your keys to Carmen?”
On my feet in under a second.
“I will most certainly not,” I said. “I’m—we’re staying there tonight.”
“I kind of have a problem with that,” he said.
“I kind of don’t care.”
“Okay—” Carmen began, probably seeing a fight to the death about to play out on her carpet.
“She’s already getting everything,” Bryce said to Carmen. No, he whined it. Like a six-year-old girl. “Who’s to say she won’t—”
“Take what’s already mine?” I asked. “What am I gonna do, Bryce, strap the house to the top of my car?”
“I’m just saying.”
“You want her wooden spool collection, Bryce?” I asked. “Is that what’s eating you?” Do you even know why she collected them?”
He sighed dramatically and wiped a hand over his sweaty neck.
“I assume she sewed,” he said, a bored tone to his voice.
“You assume,” I said. “You don’t know.” The tears came then and I didn’t try to stop them. “Yes, she sewed, but she didn’t give a rat’s ass about that. She kept the wooden spools so people would think she liked antiques, but in reality they would be kindling after the fucking Apocalypse while everyone else would be hunting for wood.”
Bryce blinked, and I saw Carmen bite her lower lip.
“Do you know her birthday?” I continued, swiping at my face. “No, scratch that, you could get that off her grave. Do you know Julius Caesar’s birthday?”
Bryce pulled a face. Yeah didn’t think so.
“July thirteenth,” Carmen and I said in unison. She met my gaze and gave a small smile. “If you actually knew Aunt Ruby, you’d know that,” I continued. “But you don’t know shit. And you think you deserve her house.”
“Wooden spools are antiques?” he asked.
I dropped my head and focused on the swirly pattern in the carpet. He was an idiot. He wasn’t worth murder. Orange was not the new black, and I looked awful in it.
“Hey, she wrote the damn will, not me,” he said, corralling his people who filed behind him like ducks.
“Yeah, well, she was a lunatic,” I threw over my shoulder, my voice shaking. “You would have known that too.”
The door closed behind Bryce after some muttered comments about being in touch, and then it was quiet.
“But she was my lunatic,” I whispered, sinking back into the chair.
“Lanie,” Carmen said after a pause. “I’m really sorry.”
I looked up from my misery. “You knew.”
“I was bound by law not to tell you,” she said, sounding for once like my old friend. “I already crossed like fifty lines of ethics telling you what I did.”
I just nodded and leaned back in the chair, feeling all the anxiety of the day drain out the soles of my feet.
“And now that it’s said and done and the Beverly Hillbillies are gone,” she said, bringing a weary giggle up from my chest. “You two should know that if you’re going to pull this off, you need more than a fake marriage license and a knock-off ring.”
* * *
The ride to Aunt Ruby’s house was eerily solemn, quiet except for Ralph’s breathing. Nick had grabbed the leash and took Ralph for a brisk walk the second we got to the car—probably to give me lose-my-shit time, and probably out of remorse for the bail he was about to do. I didn’t blame him.
So Ralph was panting heavily behind me, and my-close-friends-call-me-Nick was staring out the window again, a pensive look on his face and the ring safely back in his pocket.
It wasn’t the post-meeting ambiance I’d expected. Well, maybe it was before I stopped at that diner, but honestly once Nick entered the scenario, I thought we had it in the bag. It never crossed my mind that I had more to prove. It never occurred to me that Aunt Ruby would be the one to double-cross me.
Unbidden tears pricked the backs of my eyes as we passed the big Texas-shaped Welcome to Charmed sign, glowing white and yellow in the sun with painted flowers and bees in the corners. Home of the World Famous Honey Festival was scrolled across the middle in honey-colored glittery lettering.
I always scoffed at the whole world famous thing, but at that moment I was feeling so nostalgic and crushed that it nearly broke me. Aunt Ruby loved that stupid festival with its corny honey-themed everything.
The doomsday feeling must have caught because Nick pulled out his phone and pulled up a picture of the same girl he had a shrine to in his home.
What the hell were we doing? After what Carmen said, there was no point. I should have just left her office and drove straight back in the seven-hour direction I came, dropped him off with the five hundred dollars I’d just lost for nothing, and gone home to cry into a glass of Chianti and a tub of Blue Bell.
But I didn’t have another seven hours in me. I didn’t even have seven minutes. I needed out of that car and out of these clothes, slopping whatever cans of crap were still hanging around my aunt’s pantry into the microwave.
Nick blew out a breath and clicked the photo closed, resuming his thousand-yard stare.
“What’s up?” I asked, preferring anything to the running commentary in my head.
“Nothing,” he said softly.
“Didn’t look like nothing,” I said.
“Well, you don’t know what nothing looks like on me, so I guess you aren’t an expert.”
My jaw dropped and locked. Say what? I know he didn’t just—
“I’m sorry, what are you put out about right now?” I asked.
He rubbed at his eyes as if he’d rather be anywhere else in the world. I was about to oblige him with the side of the road.
“Sorry, I know you just had your nuts handed to you.” He cut a glance my way. “Rhetorically speaking. But now that acting school is over, I’m back to remembering I don’t have a job. And I need one. Fast.”
“I understand that,” I said. “I’ll get you home tomorrow.” God forbid I hold too long to someone who uses rhetorically in conversation.
“We should have just taken turns driving back today,” he said under his breath.
“What, the whole two hours to your place?” I said. “I have another five hours to mine. I’m cooked, Nick. I’m done.” I slid him a look. “You were nice earlier. Can we find that guy again?”
“Fine,” he said, wide-eyed, as if I was one of those females, having a moment. “I know you’re grouchy too.” Now I was grouchy. The day was getting better and better. “I’d be pissed if my friend sold me out like that.”
“Carmen didn’t sell me out,” I said. “She’s just doing her job.”
I didn’t harbor any bad feelings toward Carmen. She didn’t have to tell me about Bryce’s plans or point out that we were about as married as the dog she saw sitting in my rental car. She did that as a friend. To let me know we needed to step it up if stepping was in the plan. She was helping the only way she legally could. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. I was about to lose a shit-ton of money I never knew existed and a house I didn’t even know I wanted.
Unless I got married. For real.
What the living hell was Aunt Ruby thinking?
“And this aunt of yours was supposed to like you, right?” Nick added, just as I turned down Aunt Ruby’s winding road.
The burn clogged my throat as I approached the clearing and rounded it to see the big old house sitting there like a grand old dame.
“That’s the rumor,” I whispered past tears that I was doing my best to shove down.
* * *
I couldn’t get out. I just couldn’t. Every moment I’d lived there, every young moment I’d lied to friends about why we couldn’t hang out there, every time I was embarrassed by my goofy aunt and her eclectic house came rushing over in a flood of guilty waves.
“Lanie?” Nick said, his voice sounding like he was in a well. Or I was in a well. One of us had definitely left reality.
“This is my fault,” I choked. “I lied to her. I lied to a dying woman and now she’s calling me on it.”
“Yes, I think we established that,” Nick said. “But you did it to make her happy,” he added quickly, as I geared up to let loose. “Beating yourself up about it won’t change it.”
Ralph whined from the back seat, either agreeing with him or wanting the hell out of the car. I swiped under my eyes. Either way, we needed to head in that direction and get off the pity train.
“Okay, Ralph,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We got out, crunched across the gravel, and I let my gaze travel over the house I’d know if I were struck blind and had to identify it with my fingers. The big wrap-around porch with two giant oak rockers on either side of a stack of wooden egg crates. The roof that dipped down lower in front to protect from the afternoon sun. The upstairs windows, one of which used to feature me, looking out at nothing and wanting to be anywhere else but there.
I made it all the way to the porch banister—the wiggly one attached to the post with all my growth marks—before I lost it.
Ugly cry lost it.
Standing there, hugging a post, silently crying out the last vestiges of my sanity, while Ralph sniffed out the yard and Nick shouldered both our duffle bags, I officially hit bottom.
It was all going to be stripped bare, knocked down, ripped into splinters, and carted away. My life, my past, my touchstone. The leaky faucets and ornery plumbing and loose windows might be a pain in the ass, but they came with the hideaway closets, stained glass entryway, and memories soaked into every board.
The flood wouldn’t stop once I opened that portal, and Nick turned and sat on one of the steps. Waiting me out. Looking like the weight of the world had wrapped around his neck. Petting Ralph and probably praying he wouldn’t have to comfort me in some way.
That was okay. I didn’t need a stranger to comfort me. I’d only shared air with the man for a little over three hours, so there was nothing he could say or do at this point to make things better.
“Lanie, let’s get married.”