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So I sat in the car for ten minutes, engine running, staring at what my life had become.

“Okay,” I said out loud to no one, because talking to yourself wasn’t crazy if you’d had the days I’d had. “Now what?”

I turned off the engine and grabbed my purse. Time to see what rock bottom actually looked like.

7

— • —

Sam

The photos hadn’t done justice to how monumentally ugly the cottage was. It looked like it had been personally victimized by the last forty years.

I stood in what would generously be called a driveway, though it was mostly just gravel with delusions of grandeur, staring at my spectacular mistake. The real estate photos had been taken by someone who clearly understood creative angles and strategic cropping. In person, my new home looked less “charming fixer-upper” and more “structure that should probably be condemned.”

The porch sagged in the middle like it had given up on life. The front steps had gaps between the boards wide enough to lose a small child. Paint peeled off the siding in sheets, revealing at least three different color choices from previous decades. The yard had gone feral, with grass tall enough to hide bodies and bushes that had apparently decided to eat the front windows.

“Ms. Collins?”

I turned to find a woman in a fancy pantsuit, holding a folder and wearing a smile that said she worked on commission. The real estate agent, Margaret Something. We’d only spoken on the phone, and she looked exactly how she’d sounded: professional, eager, and slightly concerned about my life choices.

That made two of us.

“That’s me,” I said, pulling my hoodie tighter. Between the sunglasses and the hood, I probably looked like a celebrity trying to avoid paparazzi. Or a woman whose wedding disaster had gone viral and who couldn’t face human interaction without disguise. Same difference.

“Wonderful! I have all the paperwork ready. Shall we?” She gestured toward the house with enthusiasm usually reserved for properties that weren’t actively decomposing.

The inside was worse than the outside. The kitchen hadn’t been updated since approximately never, with appliances that belonged in a museum dedicated to horrible decor choices. Harvest gold refrigerator. Avocado green stove. Wallpaper featuring what might have been roosters or might have been abstract art. Hard to tell through the water stains.

The living room had carpet that had once been beige but was now the color of regret. The bathroom made me question my life choices even more than catching my husband with my sister had. Peeling wallpaper revealed at least four previous patterns, like geological layers of bad taste. The tub was pink. Aggressively, unapologetically pink.

“The bones are good,” Margaret said, which is what real estate agents say when everything else is terrible. “Lots of potential.”

“Potential for what? A crime scene?”

She laughed nervously. “It just needs some love.”

What it needed was an exorcism, but I signed the papers anyway. Used most of my savings, the money I’d been carefully hoarding for years in what I’d thought was our joint future fund but turned out to be my escape fund. Garrett didn’t know about this account. One smart decision in a sea of stupid ones.

“Are you planning to flip it?” Margaret asked as I signed my life away. “The market here is actually quite good for…”

“I’m going to live in it.”

Her pen paused mid-signature. “Oh. How… adventurous.”

We finished the paperwork in awkward silence. She left me with the keys and a business card for her brother who apparently did renovations, probably sensing a goldmine in whatever disaster I was about to create. I stood in my empty living room, holding keys to a house that might actually be haunted by the ghost of good taste.

What the hell had I been thinking?

The answer was: I hadn’t been. I’d been running on pure adrenaline and spite, buying the first property I could find that was somewhat cheap and far enough from Charlotte to avoid accidentally running into anyone I knew. The fact that it was also apparently in a calm neighborhood with a lot of empty space and slightly far enough from civilization had also factored into my decision.

I walked through the rooms again, each one a new level of disaster. The master bedroom had ugly wood paneling. Who puts that in a bedroom? The second bedroom was painted purple. Not a subtle lavender. Purple. Like someone had murdered Barney in there. The floors creaked with every step, probably discussing whether they wanted to support my weight or just give up entirely.

A truck rumbled up the road, breaking me out of my spiral into buyer’s remorse. I moved to the window, peering through blinds that immediately fell off their brackets and clattered to the floor. Perfect.

The truck pulled into the driveway next door, the only other house on this dead-end street. It was everything my cottage wasn’t: well-maintained, recently painted, with a yard that suggested someone actually cared about property values. A man got out of the driver’s side and my brain short-circuited for a second.

He was tall. Basketball player tall. The kind of tall that made you reconsider your stance on not dating ever again because men were trash and not to be trusted. Black hair that looked professionally messy, which suggested he’d run his hands through it exactly once and achieved perfection. Green eyes that I could see from my disaster of a living room. A nose that had definitely been broken at least once, which somehow made him hotter. He wore all black, which on anyone else would look trying-too-hard but on him looked like he’d simply grabbed the first things in his closet and accidentally achieved model status.