She and Jack cleaned up from breakfast after they finished. He wrapped the leftover pancakes lovingly in plastic wrap and displayed the syrups on one whole shelf in the refrigerator. She spotted at least a dozen flavors, from vanilla to peach caramel. “I’ll be on the roof if you need me,” he said. “Gotta fix the leaks before it rains again.”
“Do you need help?” she offered.
“Wow, no one ever asks that.” Jack smiled sunnily at her. “But it’s kind of a one-person thing. Not sure the porch roof can support two people on it.”
Fair enough. “Got it. Don’t want to repair another Calisa-size hole.”
His eyes widened. “It’s absolutely not personal!”
Calisa wasn’t offended. Shehadcrashed through the porch, and she had zero interest in repeating that performance on a roof. “It’s fine. I’ll find something else useful to do.” It wouldhave been nice to keep talking to him. She hadn’t asked him anything about himself, about his life here, about why he thought the inn was so vacant, about whether he’d ever had his heart broken, about whether he thought hot chocolate and pancakes would be enough to heal that.Stay focused.The last thing she needed was to attach herself to another boy.I’ll admire from a distance. And not on a roof.“How do you know what Auntie Zee wants you to do next?”
“I just try to spot what needs doing and do it.”
“But how do you know if she really wants you to do that?” If this were an ordinary job, she’d be given assignments. She wasn’t convinced there was anything ordinary about this place.
Jack shrugged. “Guess I don’t? But when I fix stuff, she seems happy. Or at least she grunts in a kind of friendly way?”
Okay, at least she knew her goal: make Auntie Zee grunt happily.
As Jack headed outside, Calisa surveyed the kitchen. She’d made pancakes, but she had no clue whether Auntie Zee or any of the guests had liked them.
If she wanted to impress her great-aunt, she had to do more. A lot more.
She’d already boasted to Auntie Zee that she knew how to clean, and she did. Her moms believed in cleanliness, as well as the importance of chores. She’d been cleaning stuff since she was five or six. Granted, that was a tiny apartment, not an inn, but other than scale, it should be the same.
Plus she could pretend she was scrubbing Ethan out of her brain.
Thatsounded like an excellent plan.
Calisa located cleaning spray and dustrags in a closet next to the refrigerator. She hesitated when she realized she’d opened a door without permission and then shook her head at herself. Surely, Auntie Zee hadn’t meant closets…except the door from the other night had been a broom closet.
She closed and reopened the closet. Just Lysol, sponges, and soap.
“Stop being ridiculous,” Calisa told herself out loud. She’d start with the worst room, she decided, to make the greatest impact: the sitting room, where the majority of the furniture was hidden beneath sheets as if this were an abandoned Victorian house populated by ghosts and overdramatic widows.
The elderly white cat was curled on the red velvet chair again. As Calisa entered, the cat opened an eye to look disapprovingly at her.
“I promise I won’t disturb you,” Calisa told the cat. “I’m just going to clean.”
Yawning to show all its teeth, the cat stretched and then lowered itself from the chair. It sauntered past Calisa, its tail flicking her ankles, and out of the room.
“I don’t know whether that’s permission or disapproval,” she said to the retreating cat. She made a mental note to ask Jack its name and if it ever allowed anyone to pet it. It did not seem approachable.
Calisa turned back to the sitting room.
“I can do this,” she said to the dust and the covered furniture.
She dove in, dusting and spraying and scrubbing every surfaceshe could reach, from the floorboards to the doorframe to the windowsill.
She thought of Ethan and the promises he’d made her.
Forever,he’d said.We’re soulmates.
Liar,she thought.
Playing music on her phone, not so loud that it bothered the guests but loud enough that it chased away the silence of the mountains outside, she danced as she cleaned. With each bit of the room she attacked, she imagined herself scouring away another memory. Another lie.
I’d never lie to you,he’d said.You are my one and only.
