"Bernadette is very reliable."
" — and I am going to support you completely because that's what I do, but I need you to have a plan. An actual plan. Not a vibe."
My eyes sting again, and this time I let them.
"I have a plan," I say. "Step one: make one room livable. Done. Step two: learn how to do everything else. Step three: open for business before the money runs out."
"That's three steps. That's not a plan, that's a haiku."
"A very actionable haiku."
Del laughs, which is what I wanted, and then she wants photos of everything — the damage, the kitchen, the gnome. Estimates. Timelines. She wants me to find the electrical panel so her cousin Tony, the electrician in Jersey, can tell me whether I'm going to die in a fire.
"I'll send everything tonight," I say.
"You better. And eat something. You've been living on gas station coffee and whatever Del-isn't-watching snacks you think I don't know about."
"I had a protein bar at the state line."
"Which state line?"
"...I decline to answer."
She threatens overnight delivery of a meal kit, which is her love language, and we hang up. The room is quieter after. The house settles around me — ticks and groans and the creak of old wood adjusting to someone's weight after years of emptiness.
"Just us," I tell it.
The light is fading, going amber and then gray through the old glass. I should go down and bring up the rest — flashlights, battery lanterns, the cleaning products I optimistically purchased as though a bottle of Murphy's Oil Soap could fix a century of neglect. But first I want to look at this room in the almost-dark, with my sheets on the bed and my books on the nightstand, and just have it. Hold the moment where this is new and possible and entirely mine.
Not Matt's. Not the job's. Mine. Inherited from a woman who loved me enough to leave it to me, and I'm going to make it into something, even if I have to learn everything from YouTube and sheer stubbornness.
I tap my thumbnail against my teeth.
Tomorrow: electrical panel, plumbing assessment, full damage inventory. Hardware store, grocery store, a coffee shop that doesn't know me. Start.
The flashlights, the lanterns, the cleaning supplies — still in the car. My footsteps echo through the empty house on the way down, and the lanterns make the foyer look almost romantic once I set them up — warm circles of light against the water-stained walls, shadows pooling in the staircase corners. I'm hauling supplies toward the kitchen when my foot catches on something near the parlor doorway.
A piece of paper on the floor, just inside the threshold. Same cheap notebook paper. Same blocky capitals.
LEAVE WHILE YOU STILL CAN.
This one isn't dusty.
This one wasn't here when I walked through an hour ago.
The warmth drains out of my chest in a single, sudden pull, like someone opened a valve. My hands stay steady — they've learned that trick — but my heart is hammering something frantic behind my ribs.
Someone was in this house. While I was upstairs, on the phone with Del, making jokes about the floor eating me — someone walked into this parlor and left this note and walked back out, and I didn't hear a thing over my own voice.
The front door. Did I lock it? The kitchen has a back entrance — did I even check it?
Every creak sounds different now. Every tick of the radiator, every groan of settling wood. The shadows in the staircase aren't romantic anymore. They're just dark.
I call Del.
Something in my voice must land wrong, because she goes silent — no jokes, no teasing, just listening. I tell her about the notes. Both of them.
"You're leaving," Del says. Not a question. "Right now. Get in your car and — "
