Page 97

“Yes you.”

“But you came up with all the plans, I just own the place. You should be the manager! I’m not ready.” I covered my face with my hands, peeking out between my fingers.

Ryan rolled his eyes and pushed my hands aside, grasping my chin. “You’ll do fine, love. We all believe in you. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t.”

The words knocked the breath out of me, and when I looked around the room, every one of them was nodding.

For the first time since I’d bought the place, I felt like it could actually be what I dreamed of it being. And I had Ryan to thank for all of that.

My heart would be insufferable about it now, I just knew it.

eighteen

Trial and error

Owain

“You didn’t even let me try!” I said to Ryan as the ghost in front of me evaporated in a cloud of smoke, the scent of its essence lingering in the air.

“It was coming right at you!” Ryan argued.

“Well, yeah, but I didn’t get to do anything!” I whined, looking around the room I hadn’t intended to be the retreat. It was just the emptiest one when the ghost showed up and caught me off guard.

“I don’t think a sun catcher and Enya was this thing’s…thing,” Ryan said, reaching into the pocket of my shorts to grab my phone and cut the music.

“You might be right.” I wiped my glasses free of ghostly specks. I needed something different. Somewhere different.

“You’ll figure it out,” he said, replacing my glasses for me and pecking my lips. “And until you do…I’ve got you.”

“I was sure this would work!” I wiped yet more goo off my forehead and stared at the hole in the wall where Ryan’s gun was poking through.

“No comment,” he said, voice muffled by the barrier between us, and I frowned.

“You didn’t think it would work?” I asked, hands on my hips and the best glare I had in my arsenal trained on him. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Would you have listened?”

“I might’ve,” I mumbled.

“No, you wouldn’t have,” Ryan said. “You were so convinced this was the perfect use of this room that you were blind and deaf with it. I thought letting you make your own mistakes might do you good.”

“You sound like your mother.”

“You don’t know how my mother sounds,” he said, squeezing himself out of the tiny little space adjacent to the room I’d chosen to be the retreat for ghosts. It was barely bigger than a cupboard and had a door covered in wallpaper that made it barely visible. A tiny hole was obscured by a potted plant but still allowed Ryan to keep an eye on me and exorcise any ghost I failed to help.

Which, so far, had been all of them. For some reason.

“What am I doing wrong?” I asked, looking around the space like the answer would be written on the walls.

“I think you’re thinking like a human.” Ryan waved off the cloud of black that appeared around his head, letting out a soft ping in his ear. “A ghost won’t need a hammock, love. Or a face mask. Or a foot massager.”

“Well then, what do I do?” I asked, barely stopping myself from stamping my feet in frustration.

“Think like a ghost,” Ryan said, handing his phone to the shadow while I pondered.

“Think like a ghost… Think like a ghost…” I whispered to myself. “If I were a ghost, what would I like?”

Nothing came to mind, so I opened the BRAT app again and started mindlessly scrolling until a line in a random tab caught my attention.