Page 5 of Bone’s Choice

That was going to take some getting used to.

My apartment in Ohio had overlooked another apartment building and a parking lot where two people had been fighting over the same parking space for the better part of three years.

Here? Nothing. No traffic or people walking down the sidewalk.

Mostly because there wasn’t a sidewalk. The road stretched in both directions with thick trees and open land surrounding it.

There was one house next door. That was it.

I’d driven farther down the road yesterday out of curiosity and discovered it eventually dead-ended a couple miles away to a gated driveway and some big buildings. Whatever was down there wasn’t any of my business. At least, I hoped it wasn’t.

I wasn’t looking to make anything my business, and that was part of the appeal.

Ohio hadn’t been terrible. I hadn’t fled in the middle of the night with some horrible secret chasing me across state lines.

Nothing dramatic had happened. That was almost the problem.

Nothing happened. Ever.

I’d waitressed at the same restaurant for six years, lived in the same apartment for four, bought groceries at the same store, filled my car at the same gas station, worked with the same people, and saw the same customers every day.

Went home to watch TV, went to bed, got up, and did it all over again.

There hadn’t been anything keeping me in Ohio.

No boyfriend, no kids, and no family. I had friends, but none close enough that moving over six hundred miles away felt like I was ripping out a piece of myself.

When the lawyer told me the house was completely paid off, something inside me had clicked.

Why the hell not? That had been it. That was the grand decision-making process that had brought me to Wisconsin.

Why the hell not?

I wasn’t sure if that made me brave or stupid. Probably a little of both.

I looked around the living room again. The house definitely needed work. A lot of work.

The hardwood floors were scratched but solid. The walls were painted a shade of beige that could only be described as depression with a hint of yellow. The windows were old. The kitchen cabinets had probably been installed sometime around the invention of sliced bread, and one of the upstairs bedroom doors refused to close unless I lifted it slightly while pulling.

But the roof didn’t leak. The furnace worked. The plumbing worked.

And the most beautiful words I’d ever heard: No mortgage.

I’d take ugly cabinets. Hell, I’d hug the ugly cabinets.

I had three bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, a decent kitchen, a big living room, a basement that I was currently pretending didn’t exist because basements creeped me the hell out, and a backyard that was probably bigger than the entire apartment complex I’d left behind.

It was mine.

For the first time in my thirty-four years, I owned something bigger than my car.

Granted, I was also unemployed. That little detail was going to become important sooner rather than later.

I had some savings, though not enough to sit around for six months discovering myself while I painted walls and learned how to garden.

Enough to get settled. Enough to breathe for a few weeks. After that, I needed a paycheck.

The house might’ve been paid for, but apparently the electric company didn’t give a shit about dead aunts and unexpected inheritances. Neither did the grocery store. Or the gas station. Or the insurance company.