Chapter 1
Shay
Students will be able to do battle with attorneys, cow trucks, and pirates.
“You have to sign for a letter.”
I blinked up at Jaime from my cocoon on her sofa, day drunk and dressed in three-day-old pajamas. Two weeks after being left at the altar, I was at least slightly drunk most of the time but I didn’t cry constantly, which seemed like an improvement.
That, or evidence of dehydration. I wasn’t sure.
“But why?” I asked.
She scooped her long, silky brown hair up and tied it in a ponytail. “I don’t know, doll. I tried to do it for you but the dude asked for ID.”
It took me a minute to scrape myself off the sofa. The door was quite the journey for me. I’d only ventured outside the warehouse-turned-loft apartment Jaime shared with three other women a handful of times since everything fell apart on my wedding day.
The first time I pulled myself together enough to leave the apartment was to chop off six inches of hair—hair I’d spent nearly two years growing out for the perfect wedding look—and then take my natural blonde to rose gold.
I had no specific reason for wanting shoulder-length pink hair. I couldn’t explain it. All I knew was I didn’t want to see the old version of me in the mirror anymore.
That was what led me to the tattoo. Much more permanent than changing up my hair but I’d wanted it for years, and now I needed a visible reminder that whoever I had been before this disaster wasn’t the me of today.
Then, I sold everything touched by my former relationship.
Dresses of every kind. Engagement photo dresses, engagement party dresses, bridal shower dresses, bachelorette dresses.
The after-party and the next-day brunch outfits, the honeymoon looks.
Those fabulous magenta shoes and the veil.
Anything I’d worn with the ex. All the random bits of wedding kitsch I’d carefully collected. Even two-ish years of bridal magazines.
And that damn gown. As it turned out, I hadn’t ripped it in any significant way. Just a tear along the side seam, nothing a tailor couldn’t handle. Seeing as that designer hardly ever made anything to fit a size sixteen gal like myself, there were dozens of brides lined up to buy it from me.
There wasn’t much left after that. The clothes I wore to teach kindergarten. A collection of yoga pants in assorted shades of fading black. A shoebox filled with wacky earrings I loved but my ex-fiancé had hated.
So, here I was with new hair and fresh ink, guzzling liquor while bingeing mindless reality television on my best friend’s couch in days-old pajamas as the ex enjoyed the honeymoon I’d planned and paid for as a wedding gift to him. That was my prize for following the rules.
That, and whatever the hell I had to sign for at the door.
I shuffled across the apartment, a blanket draped over my shoulders and clutched tight to my chest because this tank top could not be trusted to contain me. One wrong move and it was tits out.
Jaime leaned against the wall while I handed over my identification and signed for the letter. “What is this?” I asked the courier.
“Not my job to know,” he said. “Just my job to serve the papers and you didn’t make this one easy on me.”
“Cryptic, much?” Jaime said as he took off down the hall.
I turned the envelope over in my hands. “Whatever it is, I don’t think I care,” I said, trudging back to the couch. I tossed the envelope to Jaime. “Just tell me what it says.”
I stared at the television, blanket pooled at my waist as I slurped up the last of a truly heinous blend of red wine, ice, and Diet Coke. Heinous. A crime against wine. Also delicious.
Jaime tore into the envelope and I appreciated—not for the first time—the complete absence of judgment from her.
Some people wouldn’t abide this much wallowing.
They wouldn’t debate tattoo designs or cheer when the first locks of hair hit the salon floor.
Jaime didn’t judge, she embraced, and that was only one of the best things about her.
“It’s about your step-grandmother,” she said as she flipped through the pages. “The one who died.”
I rattled the ice in my cup. Grandma Lollie died a couple of months ago, quiet and happy in her bed at a Florida retirement community she’d insisted on describing as “a swinging good time.” She’d been ninety-seven years old though that never stopped her from tearing it up on salsa night.
I’d lived with her for a time during high school when things were complicated for me and I loved her dearly.
She was one of the only family members that I considered true family . I’d believed with my whole heart that not having Grandma Lollie at my wedding was the worst thing that could happen to me.
That was a cool way to tease fate.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Jaime murmured, shuffling the pages. “It sounds like she left you a—a farm . In Rhode Island .”
My gaze fell to the laundry baskets, trash bags, and mismatched boxes assembled along the wall.
This haphazard, ramshackle mess loudly and proudly proclaimed that some combination of my sweet, amazing, crazy friends went to the luxury high-rise condo in the Back Bay of Boston I’d shared with the ex and snatched everything they believed to be mine.
Everything, right down to a nearly empty bottle of olive oil and a broom I’d never seen before.
They were the best friends anyone could ever ask for and the closest thing I had to family here in Boston. They kept asking if there was anything I needed, if I was okay. And the truth was, I wasn’t all right. Not even close.
But I didn’t say that.
I glanced back to Jaime, asking, “What?”
She shook her head, pointing to the cover page. “We need to call your step-grandmother’s attorney because I don’t understand this stuff and there are a whole bunch of dates and requirements in here that seem really important.”
I wandered into the kitchen to insult another glass of wine with ice and soda.
“That doesn’t make sense. It’s probably a mistake.
Lollie wouldn’t have left me the farm. It’s been in her family for hundreds of years and she had four actual grandkids, you know, from my stepdad’s first marriage.
She would’ve left it to them. Or my stepdad. Or anyone else.”
Jaime pointed to the document. “We need to call this guy.”
“I don’t have a phone,” I said. “You took it away. Remember?”
She’d pried the phone from my hands at some point.
Between her and the others, they held me off in the moments I wanted to scream at the ex for waiting until the last possible seconds of our wedding day to end our relationship, and in the moments when I wanted him to explain what happened, to tell me what went wrong, what I did wrong. Why he’d chosen to make a fool of me.
The explanation wouldn’t help. I knew that.
But there were bits of time when I was tired of being drunk and sad and numb, and I wanted to stand inside the rage of being wronged in such a careless manner.
I wanted that rage to exhaust me. To drain me to the extent that I was too tired to cry, too tired to even feel the numbness.
That rage was the truest thing I could feel, and even then it was little more than charbroiled disappointment.
I’d planned that wedding down to the last inch and then—poof.
It was gone, like none of it had ever existed at all.
Like everything the wedding had represented—everything it had meant for me—never existed.
“We’ll use mine,” she said, pulling the device from the back pocket of her jean shorts.
I held up my glass in salute. “I’m telling you, it’s a mistake. She didn’t leave the farm to me.”
“But what if she did?” Jaime shot me an impatient stare before dialing the number listed on the papers.
I returned to the sofa, half listening while she explained our situation to someone on the other end of the line.
A moment later, she handed me the phone, saying, “They’re putting us through to the attorney now. ”
I switched over to speaker as the line rang. Then, “Hello, this is Frank Silber.”
“Um, yeah, hi, this is Shay Zucconi,” I said.
“Miss Zucconi! We’ve been trying to track you down for a month,” he said, a laugh ringing through his words.
I turned over the envelope. No need to explain that he had my old-old address, the apartment where I’d lived before moving in with the ex. “Yeah, I recently moved.”
“Well, now that I have you,” he said, still with that jovial laugh, “I’ll explain the terms of your inheritance.”
“About that,” I said, ignoring Jaime’s arched brows. “I don’t think you have the right person. Lollie’s son, maybe, or her grandkids? I really don’t think I was supposed to get anything.”
“Your step-grandmother was very clear about her wishes,” he said. “She reviewed her will with me about three months prior to her passing. This is what she wanted.”
“Okay, but—” I didn’t know what else to say and Frank took my silence as an opening.
“Your step-grandmother’s estate names you, Shaylene Marie Zucconi, as the sole recipient of the residence, farm buildings, and agricultural land known as Thomas Twins Farm, commonly referred to as Twin Tulip, located at eighty-one Old Windmill Hill Road in Friendship, Rhode Island.”
“That’s insane,” I said. “I—I don’t understand why she’d leave the farm to me .”
“I can’t speak for Lollie but I do remember her saying on several occasions that you’d know what to do with the farm,” Frank said.
I glanced down at my sleep shorts and tank top. “Frank, I don’t even know what to do with myself. Acres of land seems like a lot of responsibility for me.”
He responded with a deep chuckle, as if I wasn’t being completely honest, and pressed on. “There are two important requirements that I have to explain. First, you must live at the property at least fifty percent of the year and—”
“But I work in Boston,” I interrupted. “I can’t commute from Rhode Island.”