“What?” my mom asks.
“Oh, nothing. I think it’s my old copy from when I was a kid,” I mutter.
“Aww. No kidding!” She takes it back off the shelf and flips through it.
I cringe, waiting to see if she notices the pen scrawls. She does.
“D and B?” She squints, saying the letters in a painfully slow drawl. “Oh! Is that about Declan? That’s too cute!” she squeals, back to her normal self.
“Haha.” I take the book from her and put it back on the shelf.
“You know.” She shakes her finger. “You could ask Declan for help checking this place out. I don’t know anything about houses, obviously, and this one is pretty old. You could get some good advice from him.”
“Oh, no. I wouldn’t want to bother him with that.” I brush past her, moving into the kitchen, which is two wooden steps up and out of the sunken living room.
“I know you think that boy hates you, but I’m telling you, con. Ask that boy to jump for you and he’d ask how far.”
“The saying is ‘how high,’ Mom.”
“Whatever. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
I fiddle with the sink, turning on the tap just to do something with my hands.
“Oh my gosh?” I turn around at the sound of my mom’s surprise. “Is that…?” She’s pointing through the front window.
My heart drops into my stomach. It’s like my Declan radar never learned to turn off.
“Con, oh my goodness, it is! It’s like God heard us!”
I run through the living room to peer over my mother’sshoulder, and look through the window. Sure enough, Declan is walking down the driveway of the house directly across the street. Retrieving an empty trash can from the curb in low-waist jeans and a fitted black tee.
“He doesn’t live there, does he?” I ask, voice betraying how much weight I’m putting in the answer. For some reason I pictured him still living with his parents, in the house I basically grew up in.
“Uhhh,” she starts, a knowing smirk on her face. “Unless he’s dog-sitting, I think that boy lives there.”
I sigh.
“September can’t come fast enough,” I mumble.
My mom gives me a scathing side-eye, but I don’t miss the corner of her mouth pulling up as she looks at Declan, walking back inside his house.
Allegedly, his house.
Chapter 14
Many things had come as a surprise in the past month. But enjoying the quiet mundanity of making lattes was a welcome one. It forced me to take each day five minutes at a time: looking the customer in the eyes as I took their order, the crush of the coffee beans, whisking them into obedience, and the iridescent stream of espresso collecting into a shot glass. And when that five minutes was up, it was on to the next. It felt meditative, necessary for the fragile state I was in.
Processing Lottie’s death felt like an impossible task, but the cottage she left me felt like a tangible way toworkthroughmy grief. I saw the two paths as vividly as I could see the milk diluting the espresso in front of me.
On the one hand, my dream house had been dropped into my lap, but it was in a town littered with emotional land mines. I still held on to New York City, because even if it wasn’t to support my mom any longer, I wassureLottie’s death would become easier to digest. Or, if I was being honest with myself, easier to ignore. Easier to drown myself beneath the crushing weight of work in a city where I’d never made memories with her.
And the other land mine, the one who had hired me, the one with kind eyes and a low voice, the one who literally lived across the street, was the other, more active threat.
Because the thing was, when Iwasn’tin Declan’s orbit, the thought of opening myself up to another human being enough to constitute a relationship sounded less appealing than eating an entire pack of Sour Skittles and then swishing peppermint mouthwash around my mouth—which I knew from experience. Filling the hundreds of micro-tears in my gums with stringent mouthwash was such an intense burn; all my thoughts went white.
And wasn’t that a microcosm of relationships? All the tiny ways you offer up your soul are left as smoking craters when all is said and done. And regardless, I felt plenty fulfilled working toward retiring my mom and spending time with Roshi and Faye in between. But now that Iwasin Declan’s vicinity again, I was acting touch starved—a version of myself so distilled to the point of becoming an unrecognizable, craven being. I felt embarrassed for myself being this affected by him.
