Addison
I watched Michael retreat up the stairs, knowing I’d shattered everything good between us. How could I have been so stupid? So weak? I should never have allowed the closeness to grow between us, should never have begun touching him, taking comfort in his constant nearness, in his warm smile.
I’d ruined everything, and the stiff posture of Michael’s shoulders as he moved away from me told me exactly how angry he was. There would be no salvaging this.
Even though I wanted to fix everything, I knew it would be stupid to let myself become more involved with a man in Singletree. I couldn’t stay here. This was not my life. I had a job to return to, friends who would surely be missing me—though very few of them had called, actually, and I’d only gotten a couple of texts checking in over the two months I’d now been gone.
But I’d made my life years ago—I was a city girl, not the girl who stays in the small town. I needed bigger opportunities, bigger possibilities than a small town like Singletree could offer. Lottie had reminded me of this enough times while I was away.
Still, every time I thought about Michael’s smiling face, that divot in his stubbled chin—my heart warmed in a way it never really had when I thought about Luke. But when I thought about the anger that had stormed in those eyes after I’d pulled away from our kiss . . . none of it mattered. He probably hated me now, thought I was some kind of long-game tease. And that was for the best. We were supposed to be business partners, nothing more.
I wished Daniel had been there this week, having him in the house would have diluted some of the awkward tension that filled the spaces between Michael and I over the next few days. We barely spoke, only found ourselves in the same room when the kitchen crew needed a decision made or had a question while he was home. But mostly, Michael stayed away, spending long hours at the store while I supervised the kitchen project and the men who were beginning to rebuild the front porch to make it safe. I began to search for affordable apartments in New York during my down time.
The good thing was that with so much activity in the house, I had little time to be frightened. The ghosts, it seemed, had settled down. Or maybe I’d just grown accustomed to the middle of the night screams and the strange scrabbling noises I heard around me sometimes. I wasn’t afraid of them anymore, at least, but I just didn’t know what a person was to do about harmless ghosts who occasionally swiped shiny objects. We’d probably have to handle it somehow before we could sell the house.
Four days passed with Michael essentially ignoring me. I ate before he came home from work, and waited until he’d gone in the mornings to go down and make coffee in the makeshift kitchen we’d set up in the dining room. It was awkward and horrible.
On the fifth day after our kiss, I spent the day with Mom at the Tin as she went into mass production of her Halloween treats. Halloween was just a week away, and as Mom told me, “these goblin toes won’t frost themselves!”
I spent the day covered in frosting and enduring Mom’s philosophies about ghost infestation.
“I think what you really need is to get in there with Sally McHord.”
I sighed, steeling myself for this idea. “Who is Sally McHord, Mom?” I asked as I placed a toe on the baking sheet.
“She’s a psychic,” Mom said, nodding her bobbed head sagely. “Very good one, too.”
“How do you know if someone is a good psychic, Mom?”
“Yelp reviews,” Mom answered. “And she helped George Dews with his malamute.”
“His dog?”
“Yes. It turned out the dog really wanted George to stop playing The Beatles. He hated their music, but was having trouble communicating with George. Sally stepped in, and now that George has sworn off The Beatles, he and the dog are doing fine.”
“So she is a skilled psychic who can communicate with dogs.” This conversation seemed completely appropriate, given what my life had become.
“She’s a pet psychic, if you want to get specific,” Mom huffed, as if divulging this detail was super annoying.
“Um. Okay.”
“I’ll bring her up to the house.”
“If the place was being haunted by Chihuahuas, that would be a great idea, Mom. But I don’t think that’s what we have.” It really almost wasn’t worth the effort of arguing. I felt emotionally and physically exhausted.
“You don’t know.”
That was true, I thought as I deposited my three thousandth toe on the sheet. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything.
“So what’s wrong, Addie? Not just the ghosts.” Mom was way too observant.
“Everything is good.”
Mom put down her spatula and fixed me with a glare that had terrified me as a kid. “Do not lie to your mother. I can read you like a cookbook, Addison. Always could.”
That was the truth. I sighed. I couldn’t tell her I’d kissed Michael Tucker. Then I’d get an earful of I told you so about getting involved with Tuckers. So I deflected. “I don’t know. I just . . . I guess I’m feeling like I need to be getting back to New York soon. The longer I stay here, the harder it is to remember what I really want.”
“What do you really want?”
“My life back! In the city!” As I said the words, I realized how empty and untrue they were.
“The one where your boyfriend ignored you, you worked so much you could never see your family, and you hardly ever called home?”
I sighed. “Those were the less good things about that life, yeah.”
“Tell me the more good things, then. What did you love about your life in New York?” Mom had stopped frosting, and I laid down my spatula too, taking a sip of water as my mind spun.
“There were a lot of good things. Like every kind of take-out you could possibly want.”
Mom’s lips formed into a thin line, but she said nothing, so I continued. Mom didn’t seem swayed by the take-out options.
“And the energy. There was always something going on, always something to do. The people there were very cosmopolitan—no food in buckets.”
“So your dislike of your hometown has to do with The Shack?”
I shook my head, scrambling for other examples. “No, it was just one example, Mom.”
“You haven’t mentioned friends, people.”
“I have friends there,” I said, feeling defensive. “But you know, everyone there is very busy. We all have lives. Jobs.”
“It sounds horribly lonely, Addie.”
For some stupid reason, my mind flashed to the house, to dinners with Daniel and Michael, to the movie nights we used to have before I screwed everything up. “Well, it wasn’t. I was too busy to be lonely.”
“And too busy to notice that your relationship wasn’t working.”
Pain sliced through me and I let my eyes slam shut for an instant, trying to absorb it. Mom was right. “That’s not fair. And that’s not a nice thing to say.”
Mom sighed and turned back to the frosting. “I’m your mother, Addie, not your friend. It’s my job to say the things you don’t want to hear.”
I had nothing to say to that because I was still reeling that my own mother would poke her finger in a wound as raw as my relationship with Luke. The worst thing was, I knew she was right.