Mistakes Were Made (Story Lake #2)

Chapter 1

A snake to the face

Zoey

My cousin was lucky she was an entire state away and that murder was illegal.

“Inez,” I said with the last of my patience. “I need you to take the hysteria down about eight notches. I can’t help you when you’re incoherently wailing.”

“Why do you sound like you’re in a cave?” Inez demanded, temporarily forgetting whatever drama had caused her to call me in a panic. “Holy shit, Zoey! Are you trapped in an actual cave?”

I would have rolled my eyes, but seeing as how I was belly down exploring the nether region under my bed, the effort would have been wasted. “Yes, Inez,” I said dryly. “I’m trapped in a cave but I’m so selfless I didn’t want to bother you with my life-threatening situation when you called.”

“Oh my God!” My gullible cousin’s screech through the speaker made my ears want to bleed. “Okay, drop me a pin, and I’ll send the Mounties or whoever climbs into caves to rescue people.”

“For the love of God. I’m not spelunking. I’m under my bed looking for a boot. Call off the Mounties, who are Canadian by the way. I’m in Pennsylvania.” I continued to scan the dark abyss beneath the lodge’s king-size bed with my phone’s flashlight.

So that’s where my fuzzy knee socks went.

“You’re sure you’re not trapped in a cave about to be eaten by bats?”

“Positive.” Aha! I spotted the missing Stuart Weitzman boot wedged between the rustic nightstand and bed leg. It cost me a strained neck muscle and a bump on the head to wrestle it free.

“Good. So back to me then. Where am I going to liiive?”

We Moodys were a dramatic people.

“Here’s a thought,” I said as I inched my way out from under the bed.

“Why don’t you keep staying in my apartment?

You know. The one-bedroom, third-floor walk-up that I generously sublet to you while I temporarily moved to Teeny Hallmarkville.

Are you giving up on your modeling-slash-catering career already? ”

Inez had moved to Manhattan with dreams of launching a topless catering company. But as she put it, like an artsy topless catering company. The last I’d heard, she was only serving cold passed appetizers after an unfortunate incident with hot tomato soup.

Out of breath and massaging my sore neck, I threw myself onto the mattress and surveyed the disaster masquerading as my hotel room.

Piles of clean and dirty laundry vied for floor space.

My “work stuff”—a.k.a. my laptop and several small paperwork explosions—spilled across the bed and occupied the tiny two-person table under the room’s expansive lake-view window.

The small closet had experienced a clothing apocalypse, and now the doors no longer closed.

Living and working in a hotel room for an extended period of time wasn’t nearly as glamorous as I’d hoped. And even with the generous discount the lodge had given me, it was still expensive as hell. Something I was freshly and painfully aware of.

I’d been a few weeks late on my monthly peek at my finances only to realize I’d reached the bottom of my savings account. Drastic measures were called for to survive until my agent percentage of my only client’s advance came through on publication of her book…in seven weeks.

“That’s just it, Zoey. You don’t have an apartment anymore,” Inez whined as I held my leg aloft and shoved my foot into the boot.

“You didn’t accept any edibles from the baker on the seventh floor and gamble my apartment away in the building poker game, did you? I warned you. Madame Reneski is a card shark. She’s been banned from four casinos in Las Vegas.”

“What? No! I only lost your Chanel sweater to her.”

“You better not mean my red Chanel sweater, or I will murder you at the family reunion.”

“Zoey, will you please focus? I’m trying to tell you our apartment isn’t an apartment anymore. It’s a condo.”

I sprang into a seated position like a curly-haired jack-in-the-box. “What did you say?”

“The building is going condo. They said you have thirty days to buy your place or get our stuff out.”

“Who said, Inez?” I demanded.

“I don’t know, Zoey. The people who sent all the notices and spoke at the building meeting a couple weeks ago.”

I slapped a hand to my forehead. “Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”

“I thought I did. Didn’t I?”

As someone who had endured being labeled as “flighty” for most of my life, I’d always found the romance novel industry’s label “too stupid to live” a little harsh. Until this moment.

“No,” I countered. “You told me when that hairy guy you met at Pilates clogged my shower drain and when you thought you saw the winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race buying hot dogs at Quick Stop.”

“Oh. Yeah no. This was way before that. Maybe I told a different cousin?”

“You know what, Inez? I’m going to call you back.” I disconnected before I could give in to the raging impulse to insult her.

The alarm on my phone jangled irritably with my two-minute warning of my appointment with Hazel.

“Damn it,” I muttered, snatching a reasonably clean blazer off one of the chairs by the window and dialing another number.

“Zoey! So nice to hear from you. What did your dumbass cousin do now?” Mrs. Newville was an eighty-something-year-old retired Broadway star turned amateur food critic who lived across the hall from me in Manhattan.

“She didn’t tell me the building was going condo.”

There was a weighty pause. “Well, shit.”

“How can this happen?” I demanded, shoving my arm through the sleeve of the blazer.

“Building owner got his hand caught in some pyramid-real-estate-scheme cookie jar and went to prison. The new owner decided she didn’t want to deal with rentals and went the condo route. You know you’ve only got thirty days, right?”

“Thirty days to decide whether I’m going to buy my place?” I asked hopefully as I slicked on a coat of my second favorite lip gloss. I’d misplaced my first favorite a week ago and hadn’t remembered to order a new tube. Which I wouldn’t be doing now due to the aforementioned financial shit fest.

“Thirty days to close or get the hell out,” Mrs. Newville corrected.

“Well, shit,” I muttered. There was a cheery knock at my door. I vaulted over last night’s dinner tray and flung it open.

Hazel, my best friend and only client, stood there looking all smug, glowy, and in love.

Her long chestnut hair was pulled back in a swingy ponytail, her thick fringe of bangs accenting her glasses.

The scruffy dog at her feet gave me what I considered to be a judgmental look.

Meetcute was a medium-size black-and-white ball of wiry floof that had been part of last summer’s grand gesture apology-proposal from Campbell Bishop, Hazel’s soon-to-be-husband.

The dog pawed at my boots like they were a rawhide chew.

I waved them in and tried to keep some distance between my prized boots and Meetcute’s mouth full of tiny razor-sharp teeth.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like animals. I just preferred to appreciate them from a respectful distance.

Away from their teeth, claws, fur, and slobber.

“I’m texting you the link,” Mrs. Newville said. “Be warned, the asking price ain’t for the faint of heart.”

“Thanks for the heads-up. Are you staying?” I couldn’t imagine the building or New York without her.

She snorted. “At that price? Fuck no. I’m moving to Portugal with my new boyfriend. Listen, I gotta go. I’m meeting a VP of finance and two nuns for karaoke. Ta-ta, kid!”

I could live to be two hundred and still wouldn’t have a life as interesting as hers.

“Bye, Mrs. Newville,” I said morosely.

This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t part of the triumphant comeback I’d been working toward since my unceremonious firing last year. This was a monumental setback.

“How is our favorite broad of Broadway?” Hazel asked, letting Meetcute off the leash when I disconnected the call.

The adorable terror immediately nosedived into my dirty laundry with an ecstatic groan.

“Moving to Portugal. Which might be my next destination depending on the cost of living.” I clicked on the text link from Mrs. Newville, violently scrolled, then fervently wished I could reverse the clock to a happier, less homeless time in my life.

Even at my previous Literary Agent with a Stable of High-Earning Clients Zoey peak, I couldn’t have afforded to buy my own apartment.

Down to One Client and Living on Dwindling Savings Zoey was fucked… and not in the good way. “Damn it!”

“What’s wrong?” Hazel asked, clearing the stack of mail off one of the dining chairs and sitting.

“My cousin—”

“Topless caterer, hippie innkeeper, or biochemist that raises alpacas?” she cut in.

“The bucket-of-hair-for-brains caterer subletting my apartment just informed me that the building is going condo and I have thirty days to buy or get out.”

Hazel did her best not to look gleeful. It wasn’t fooling me one bit.

I pointed an accusing finger at her. “Stop it.”

“Stop what?” she asked, brown eyes going wide with feigned innocence.

“Stop gloating.”

“I’m not gloating. Meetcute, am I gloating?”

The dog looked up from the sock he was mauling and cocked his head thoughtfully.

“I have options,” I insisted.

“Of course you do.”

“I could buy the place.” If I robbed several banks or discovered a wealthy deceased relative I didn’t know existed who had left me everything in their will.

But that would probably take more than thirty days.

“Or I could find a new place in the city. Maybe move to the Village. Or New Jersey. Or maybe I’ll find a place with…

roommates.” I congratulated myself on not choking on the words.

“Sure,” she said as she organized my untidy paperwork into piles.

“Don’t get comfortable. I’m ready to go,” I warned.