Forrest leans against the kitchen counter and folds his arms. “I say this with full sincerity, Saylor.”
“What?”
“You fucking suck.”
I chuckle. “Come on. It’s nothing two former farm boys can’t handle.”
“Ranch,” Forrest corrects, pushing off the counter. “I grew up on a ranch. I’m a cowboy. Cowboys are significantly cooler than farm boys. There’s a whole genre of music and books about us. I don’t see a romance section in Barnes and Noble about boys who feed chickens.”
“Oh please. You’re a pretty-boy jackaroo. I could work circles around you and still kick your arse.”
“Outwork me? You’re Australian. My dad’s ranch is the size of your entire country, buddy. You don’t have my stamina.”
“It’s a continent, actually, and?—”
“Okay, are we going to stand here debating geography, or are we going to fix this woman’s house?”
I look around the kitchen. At the dated cabinets, the yellowed granite, the window with the view that could sell a dream. I think about the girl who grew up here and left and is now trying to come back, not for herself, but for a baby who doesn’t exist yet and already needs a home.
“Let’s fix the house,” I say.
Forrest rolls up his flannel another notch. “Where do we start?”
“Deck first. It’s structural—can’t have the caseworker falling through a board. Then the nursery. Paint, shelves, make it look like someone’s expecting a baby and is genuinely excited about it. Kitchen after that—deep clean, new hardware on the cabinets, replace the appliances if the budget allows. Then clean up, room by room, until we run out of days or energy, whichever comes first.”
“And that heinous wallpaper?” Forrest points toward the living room where ugly floral patterns have accosted the walls.
“That wallpaper dies tonight.”
Forrest nods, grabs two water bottles from the cooler we brought in, tosses me one, and heads for the back door. I follow him out onto the deck, which groans under our weight like a bloke getting out of a chair after sitting too long, and I look at the backyard—the oak tree, the tire swing, the garden that’s one good weekend away from being beautiful again—and I think about a girl with brown eyes who used to live here. Who drew dresses on her wall and measured herself against a doorframe and grew up to build something extraordinary from nothing but vision and stubbornness and a refusal to accept the world as less beautiful than she knew it could be.
I’m going to make this house worthy of her. Worthy of the baby. Worthy of the woman Whitney believed Celeste could be.
Six days. Two guys. One truck full of power tools and gas-station jerky.
We’ve handled worse.
Probably.
chapter 12
Celeste
I am driving forty-nine in a thirty-five, my left blinker still flashing from three turns ago, and the speedometer needle twitches higher every time I remember I’m supposed to be slowing down. I am chaos. I am chaos incarnate. And I don’t fucking care.
My new attorney called eleven minutes ago while I was standing in my closet in underwear and pantyhose, holding a blouse that I’d already rejected twice, trying to decide if my first functional day back at the office warranted silk or cotton. The answer, it turns out, is irrelevant, because Denise Bilch—my new, sharp, expensive, mercifully blunt attorney—said the words “they moved it up” and my entire morning plan to head to work detonated.
Two days.The visit was supposed to be Friday. I had two more days to pull myself together, to drive up to Westchester and see what Saylor had done, to walk through the rooms and rehearse answers and build the version of myself that a caseworker would trust with a child. Instead, the caseworker is arriving at eleven a.m. today because apparently the court’scalendar shifted and nobody thought to give me more than a sneeze of a warning.
Denise said Eleanor’s team requested the acceleration. Of course they did. Eleanor wants me unprepared. Eleanor wants me to scramble. Eleanor has been playing chess while I’ve been lying in bed for four days staring at ceiling cracks and crying into a duvet like a woman auditioning for the saddest perfume commercial ever made. The black-and-white kind, where she’s stuck in a French noir scene after some Don Juan broke her heart. But that’s okay—this perfume is magic elixir and with one spritz she’s young, alive, and everything is in color.
I have no such magic elixir.
What I have is sheer determination, and a deep-rooted desire to send Eleanor straight back to the twisty maze of Pan’s Labyrinth from where she emerged.
I texted Saylor before I got into the car, not wanting to add yet another risk to my morning. Me, having to drive, is dangerous enough. I shot off a message, thumbs shaking. Autocorrect mangling every other word.
Me
