Chapter 3
Morning dawned. By the time the sun had hauled itself into the sky like a hungover party guest, the town of Assjacket had settled into a misleading calm, like it hadn’t watched shifters pass through it at all hours of the night.
Birds chirped with too much enthusiasm. Dew sparkled.
And the air, thick with honeysuckle and just a whisper of rain, carried the faintest promise of drama.
I’d been in town less than twenty-four hours and I could already feel the storm building.
The kind that didn’t just break over rooftops, but cracked foundations and flooded the streets with secrets that smelled worse than sewage.
According to Zelda (and the Assjacket gossip circuit that ran faster than the postal service and twice as reliable), dearly departed Beau Moran had left behind a very particular kind of legacy.
Complicated, charming, and quite possibly cursed.
Which, naturally, brought me to the woman who had once worn his ring.
And when I found out that she was still alive, I had no choice but to go and see what I could make of her.
Meredith Moran's house wasn’t just expensive.
It was intentional. Less home and more curated experience, like a set designer had been given a budget and no emotional constraints.
It sat perched on the edge of town like it didn’t quite belong there.
White-columned, ivy-draped, and so aggressively symmetrical it made my molars ache.
The lawn was an even, deep green, trimmed within an inch of its chlorophyll-soaked life.
The cobblestone drive curled like a question mark, leading us past sculpted rose bushes and an unnervingly realistic fountain shaped like a weeping angel.
It sobbed gently into a koi pond that radiated money.
“Feng shui with a side of neuroticism,” Zelda murmured beside me, her Max Midnight jeans so tight they looked like they’d been spray-painted on. She turned her suspicious green gaze to the front steps. “Place looks like it charges crystals with tax fraud.”
I snorted. “Behave.”
“No promises. You’re lucky I left Fat Bastard in the car.”
“Is that what you’re calling your emergency vibrator now?”
“No, my familiar.” Zelda rolled her eyes. “Don’t project your repression onto my toolset, Hearst.”
Before I could raise a hand to knock, the heavy oak door swung open with dramatic timing that felt suspiciously rehearsed.
Meredith Moran stood framed in the doorway like she’d been posing for a magazine spread titled Widow: An Aesthetic.
She wore black silk, red lipstick, and the kind of diamonds that weren’t so much worn as wielded.
Her silvery hair was swept into a perfect chignon, and her eyes, icy and precise, swept over us with a polite sort of distaste usually reserved for wine that had been left open overnight.
She looked about fifty, give or take a few mimosas with the girls.
“You must be the psychic,” she said, voice low and musical, with the smooth finish of someone who’d spent years talking in expensive rooms. “And the... other one.”
Zelda offered a smile somehow managed to look both charming and threatening. “Zelda. Pleasure’s all yours.”
I stepped forward, extending my hand without bothering to correct her about my job title. “Ivy. We appreciate you taking the time.”
“Of course,” Meredith said smoothly, ignoring Zelda altogether like she was a minor hallucination. “Follow me.”
The was a cathedral of curated ‘clutter’. Antique furniture gleamed. Oil paintings lined the hallway—ancestors, lovers, or well-paid actors; hard to tell. They all had the same vacant, judgmental stare. The air smelled of jasmine, lemon oil, and money. Even the silence had been lacquered.
Every step sounded too loud on the glossy hardwood floors, like my boots weren’t up to code.
Zelda peeled off into a sunroom with glass walls and promptly began examining a shelf of taxidermied birds.
A fox in a top hat gave me side-eye as I passed.
I followed Meredith through the house and out the back door into a garden so immaculate it looked digitally rendered.
Rose bushes framed narrow gravel paths. Wrought iron chairs nestled in a circle beneath a flowering dogwood that looked like it had its own spa routine. Somewhere, windchimes tinkled. Seems both Meredith and Beau had a penchant for the dramatic… just in different ways.
“I thought we’d talk out here,” Meredith said, motioning to a chair with a flick of her French-manicured fingers. “Beau hated the garden. I find that amusing, now.”
I sat slowly, letting my fingers trail over the wrought iron armrest. It was unexpectedly warm beneath my skin, like it had soaked up whatever sun the morning could spare.
A tiny detail, but it grounded me. Anchored me.
Ghosts might send chills, but it was living people who gave me the creeps.
“How so?” I asked carefully, keeping my tone neutral.
“It’s always been where I preferred to spend my time,” she said airily, like she was playing the role of wistful widow in a soap opera no one had asked for. “It used to bother me when we were married. Now I can sit out here whenever I choose.”
She was lying.
Not just fibbing or spinning some nostalgic tale.
Lying. The kind of lie that slid off the tongue too smoothly, too quickly rehearsed.
I didn’t need to be psychic to spot the tells.
No woman with hair that perfectly lacquered enjoyed a breeze strong enough to threaten her blowout.
And no self-proclaimed nature lover trimmed their rose bushes into submission with hedge clippers that gleamed like surgical instruments.
This wasn’t a garden, it was a stage. One she kept under control, just like everything else in her curated little world.
Including, I’d bet, her dead ex-husband.
People lie for all kinds of reasons. Guilt. Fear. Control. But the ones who smiled while doing it? Those were the ones you had to watch. And Meredith? She was smiling a little too easily for a woman whose life had just been torn apart.
“Thank you for making time for this,” I said, taking the path of conversation she’d started us on. “How long has it been since he died?”
When I’d first seen his ghost, I’d assumed it had been decades ago.
He was infinitely more Clark Gable than Clark Kent.
Broad-shouldered charm wrapped in a crisp black suit and the kind of smirk that felt stolen from another century.
He carried himself like a man who’d died in the golden age of cinema and never quite let go of the spotlight.
There was nothing modern about the way he looked at me.
No awkward shuffle, no TikTok-era tics. Just stillness.
Poise. Like he’d stepped out of time and expected the world to pause with him.
But now, sitting across from Meredith with her flawless skin and icy composure, I could see that it hadn’t been that long at all.
Unless Meredith had one hell of a surgeon hidden in her walk-in closet, they belonged to the same decade.
Which begged the question… why did his ghost feel so much older than she did?
Had death aged him? Or had guilt, regret, or just unfinished business settled over him like a layer of ash, making him seem heavier, older, elsewhere?
Whatever the reason, it was clear that time didn’t touch the dead the same way it did the living.
And Beau Moran had not gone quietly into the afterlife.
“Eight years.” She poured tea from a china pot into a matching cup painted with gorgeous lilies. The kind of delicate that screamed heirloom, not Etsy. There were no cups for Zelda or I, and she hadn’t offered us refreshment–practically a jailable offense here in the South.
“So,” she said finally, setting the cup down with a click that echoed louder than it should have. The sound rang through the air like a tiny gavel, an elegant little punctuation mark on her performance. “You say you’re here to move him on.”
“That’s the goal,” I said, careful not to sound too optimistic. I kept my tone low and even, like a poker player sliding chips across the table. “But I can’t do that unless I know why he’s still here.”
Meredith leaned back, the silk of her blouse whispering against the chair.
Her expression didn’t shift, but her gaze sharpened just slightly, a predator’s flicker beneath the debutante mask.
“I don’t believe in ghosts, Miss Hearst. And if I did, I’m not sure why Beau would choose now to show his face.
But I do believe in closure. If your presence helps put the rumors to rest, then by all means. ”
The line was rehearsed, a little too polished to be casual.
Her words might’ve been about closure, but her body language screamed containment.
I watched the way her fingers stayed laced in her lap, perfectly still, as though one twitch might give her away.
She was a woman trying to control a narrative that had already slipped its leash, and I could smell the tension beneath her gaudy perfume.
And just like that, I was being invited into a dance where every step had already been choreographed.
But I’d danced with ghosts many times before, both the kind with heartbeats and the kind without.
People assumed the dead were the liars, the manipulators.
They never expected the medium to have a bluff of her own.
What Meredith didn’t know was that standing between worlds taught you to read tells like tarot cards.
And if I had to, I could out-bluff a ghost, a grieving widow, and a courtroom full of attorneys without breaking a sweat.
She sipped from the teacup. Bone-white and faintly translucent, it smelled faintly of bergamot but also underneath that, something floral and bitter. Belladonna, maybe. Or just really expensive rosehip.
“Were you and Beau close?” I asked, watching her.