Page 6 of The Heartbreaker Next Door

I hated it.

Once I was inside, the kid grabbed my hand and ushered me to the kitchen, where he pointed up to a gaping hole above the sink. “Look!”

I pulled out my flashlight from my back pocket and tilted it up. The ceiling leak was even worse than I’d feared. It wasn’t sagging drywall, it was the Grand Canyon with a steady stream of water. The sound of water had always unsettled me, from the time I was a kid and the pipes in our house sang like angry ghosts. Now, it was a professional concern—I managed the finances for a multimillion-dollar ranch operation, and even the tiniest leak could spiral into disaster if you let it. I felt my blood pressure spike just being in the same room as the leak.

I could feel Felicity’s eyes on me the entire time I surveyed the damage, her arms folded over her chest, still gripping the saucepan and can, her weapons of choice.

“Is the electricity not turned on yet?” I asked.

“No.” She shook her head. “I mean, yes it is, but it went out just before you got here. The storm knocked it out.”

I walked down the hall to the fuse box. The kid trailed behind me, narrating my every move to an imaginary audience, occasionally providing sound effects for his story.

Once I located the box, I opened it, reset the breakers, and voila, let there be light. When I turned around, I found Felicity’s neck straining, as if she’d been peeking over my shoulder. It was fucking adorable.

With one problem solved, I immediately moved on to the next, trying to shake off the thoughts she was inspiring in me. “Do you have a ladder?” The question came out harsher than I’d wanted.

She shrugged. “We only got here a few hours ago. Your guess is as good as mine.”

The first order of business was triage. I went back to the kitchen and scouted the immediate area for anything electrical, which, blessedly, was limited to a single outlet with nothing plugged into it. The drywall was so waterlogged it looked ready to birth a new species of mold.

“I’ll be back,” I told the kid, not wanting him to follow me outside with these weather conditions. He nodded with a solemnity that felt both hilarious and tragic on a kid that size. I turned my attention back to Felicity. “Do you have towels?”

She nodded.

“I’ll need them when I come back,” I instructed as I walked out the back door.

I knew Walter’s outbuildings well enough to know which one was most likely to have a serviceable ladder, and which one would be housing generations of angry raccoons. The wind was horizontal now, driving sheets of rain through the air and turning the yard into a series of small, interconnected lakes. My boots squelched as I slogged across, the air so dense with water that every inhale felt like drinking through a soaked napkin.

The shed, of course, had no working light, so I used my own flashlight to navigate a maze of rusted tools, half-finished wood projects, and the collapsed remains of a kayak. I found everything I needed for the patch, including a ladder—aluminum, bent in two places but still functional—and shouldered it, bracing myself against the wind for the trek back.

I placed the ladder beside the house, climbed up and after finding the gap in the shingles, I secured a blue tarp over it. Once that was in place on the exterior, I climbed back down to address the interior.

As I came in through the back door, carrying a ladder and plastic wrap, Maverick and Felicity, who was now holding a stack of towels, looked at me as if I’d left to fight a dragon and they’d not been entirely sure I’d return.

“Can I help?” Maverick asked, ready for action.

“Yes, I’m going to go up on the ladder. Can you hand me the towels when I get to the top?”

He saluted, grinning with all the intensity of a soldier in boot camp. I headed to the attic access and positioned the ladder beneath it, then climbed up, reaching down to retrieve the towels into the rafters, feeling the structure sway uneasily as I did. The roof was old. Not just in years, but in the way it flexed under pressure, like a body that had suffered one injury too many.

When I located the breech, I pushed through the insulation, which was soaked and heavy and reeked of old dust, and traced the water’s source: a decent sized gap in shingles. Nothing I did tonight would be more than a band-aid, but I hoped it would hold long enough to keep the ceiling from caving in.

Working by flashlight, I jammed every towel I could find into the gap, then wrapped the mess with duct tape and plastic sheeting.

Back on the floor, I wiped my hands on a dish towel and tried not to think about how much worse this would get before the night was over. Felicity was watching me, her expression less hostile now and more neutral. She’d put down the tennis racket and mace at some point, but her hands were still fidgeting, fingers worrying at the hem of her shirt.

“Is it fixed?” Maverick asked, hope and skepticism running parallel in his voice.

“The roof is taken care of for now,” I reported, wishing I could create a more permanent solution. I turned my attention to Felicity. “It’s not safe for you to stay here.”

Her spine straightened to steel as soon as I told her she couldn’t stay in the house. The words weren’t meant to be harsh, just factual—the kind I specialized in. But she looked at me like I’d called her a bad mother, not the resident of a dilapidated home. Her jaw worked through the stages of fury.

“I grew up in Seattle,” she said tightly. “We don’t shut down city blocks for a little rain.”

“This isn’t rain,” I argued. “It’s the prequel to a flood.”

“And you think I can’t handle it?” Her eyes flashed, blue and bright, both challenging and pissed off.