Chapter 9
CHAPTER
NINE
Mira
“Come on, Miles,” I say, waving at Mayor Blackwell’s little girl on the side of the street. “Pick up the freaking phone.”
What is it with men not answering my calls?
His voicemail greeting begins, but I hang up before the beep. “Let’s see what you get for Christmas, pal.”
It’s probably for the best that my brother missed my call.
I don’t exactly feel hysterical, but I don’t not feel hysterical either.
Despite being the oldest of the three of us, he doesn’t really have oldest-child energy.
He’s our father’s oldest child, conceived before Dad met my mom.
But Miles is his mother’s middle child—and that’s the vibe he brings to the party.
And sometimes you just need a person who will let you melt the heck down and will fan the flames, so you get it out of your system.
“You two must be married for a full year.”
My palm hits the steering wheel as another wave of energy rushes through my veins.
There’s no way this is really happening. Marriage to inherit a house?
Is Lolly out of her freaking mind?
I pull into Markie’s and have my feet on the driveway almost before the engine is off. My sister opens the front door as I take the stairs two at a time.
She winces, and it’s clear this conversation was expected. “I was heading to—”
“The couch.”
Sighing, she pivots on her heels, flinching when the door slams behind us. “I take it you talked to Lolly.” She flops onto the sofa with her arms crossed over her chest.
“You knew.”
She nods slowly. “Yes. I did.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” I chirp. “You’re supposed to be my sister. My best friend. How could you let me be bamboozled like this?”
“I found out just before lunch.” She sits up, dropping her hands to the cushions. “There wasn’t time to tell you.”
“And how could you agree to it? Lolly said you gave this your full support.”
A grin catches the corner of her mouth. “I gave her my full support to cash me out of the house and give it to you. She dropped the marriage part of it and then answered a call, so I rushed inside to try to catch you, but Hartley was already there.”
My palms run down my face, pressing hard enough to release a bit of the frustration building inside me. I want to be angry with my sister. She should’ve told me. But, in reality, this isn’t about her.
“Look,” she says, softer this time. “I walked into the kitchen, and you two looked … natural. Just like you looked together at Patsy’s.”
Heat colors my cheeks as I take a seat next to her on the sofa. A dull headache begins to throb behind my eyes as I remember the warmth of his arms on the dance floor, and the way he moved so easily around Lolly’s kitchen. This is an emotional clusterfuck of epic proportions.
“And I figured if you didn’t want to do it, you’d just say no,” Markie says, watching me carefully. There’s a long pause before she speaks again. “So did you say no?”
I take a deep breath, letting the air hold in my lungs until it burns.
I’m not sure how to answer that because I didn’t say no. But I didn’t say yes, either. And Hartley walked out without saying a word to me, and I don’t know what that means.
Marriage?
“I’m not asking you to fall in love. I’m not asking you to have a baby. I’m simply asking you to give this place that I love dearly a chance before you sell it or let it ruin you. That’s all. And marriage is the only way I can see it working.”
“That’s what I thought,” Markie says.
My gaze lifts to hers. “I’m just replaying it in my mind. I can’t believe this is real.” I shrug. “Why didn’t she offer it to you and let me cash out?”
“I think she has her reasons.”
“Well, I don’t understand them. You get off with a freaking check. How is that fair?”
“First of all,” she says, sounding like our mother, “we’re discussing a very large inheritance here. I think we need to keep some perspective. This is a very real first-world problem.”
I snort. “I feel more like the stepsister who has to marry—”
“Who? A prince?”
I roll my eyes. Her insinuation isn’t lost on me, but the point isn’t that Hartley could easily play the role of the handsome white knight in a princess movie. It’s that I don’t want to be the princess.
“Listen, I have a house … well, a mortgage,” Markie says.
“And when Lolly asked me what I thought about selling to the developer, I said that I’d hate to see the house torn down, but I’m ready to write my own story elsewhere.
She agreed. But if she just turned it over to you, you’d just sell it without a second thought. ”
“Wouldn’t that be my decision to make?”
“Yeah.” She smiles sadly. “But you’ve never given Sugar Creek a chance, Mira. And I really think that Lolly worries that you’ll be this nomad your whole life and will never find a sense of community. You’ll never have people around to love you.”
“Maybe that’s by design,” I say matter-of-factly. But even as I say it, I begin to understand what Markie’s trying to say. Worse? It makes sense.
Lolly has always worried that Markie and I will have no one after she passes away, and that fear only got worse when Pop died a couple of years ago. It’s made her restless, and I know she spends more energy worrying about me than she does my sister. I hate that I cause her such grief.
“Do you think she’s dying or something?” I ask.
“No. I heard Dr. Isaacson tell her that she’s as healthy as a horse about a month ago.”
I nibble my bottom lip and let that thought go.
“Let me ask you a question,” Markie says. “Before we go any further with this, I think we need to establish one thing.” She searches my eyes. “Do you want Lolly’s house?”
A weight drops on my chest, and I struggle to inhale.
It’s so complicated. That place is full of some of my best and worst moments.
I know it’s been a long time, but I can feel my mom at Lolly’s.
I can hear Pop’s laughter. It’s the closest thing that I have to a home, even if I can’t walk into a room and predict whether I’m going to smile or tear up.
But the thought of someone else with a tire swing in the hickory tree, remodeling Lolly’s kitchen, or painting Mom’s bedroom, which Lolly has left alone all of these years, makes me want to puke.
My life lives inside that house. Every version of myself, from the preteen waiting on her parents to come back, to the twentysomething woman still trying to outrun losing them, exists in those walls.
And I don’t know if keeping the house would heal me or trap me there forever.
“Wanna know what I think?” Markie asks.
“Sure.”
“I think you should do it.”
My stomach wobbles. “Why?”
“Because if she sells it, the decision’s final.
You can never go back. But if you agree to her terms, you’ll guarantee yourself a year to figure out what you want.
And maybe when the year is up, you’ll know for sure that you do or don’t want to sell it.
” She grins. “I think living for the next fifty years knowing that you had time to make the right decision will age better than panic-choosing to let it go.”
Oof.
Panic-choosing to let it go is exactly what I’d be doing.
I stretch my legs in front of me, and the adrenaline begins to subside. A chill touches my skin as I climb out of fight-or-flight mode, and as I exhale, it reminds me of a balloon deflating all the way.
“I know you get it, Hartley. Your family did the same thing here before ours.”
My heart softens. Hartley deserves that land. There’s nothing in the world he loves more than the ranch. Bringing the whole thing back together again would mean everything to him … and that matters.
This isn’t just about me.
“It would be a full year,” I say, testing the waters. “And Lolly said it has to be a real marriage, and no one can know it’s for the inheritance.”
Markie smirks. “Could be fun.”
A fire roars in my core, but I tamp it down. That’s not what this is about. That’s not what this would be about. It’s a marriage of convenience, and that’s it.
“How does Hartley feel about it?” Markie asks. “Is he game?” She rolls her eyes. “I know he’s game. But have you two talked about it?”
“No. He walked out of Lolly’s, and by the time I got to my car, he was already gone.” I nibble my lip again. “I don’t know, Markie. I mean, if I do this, I’d be here for a year. I have a whole life in Kentucky.”
“And you work from home. You could just as easily work here as you do there.”
True, but that’s not the point. “What am I supposed to do? Just pack up and leave?”
“That’s never stopped you before.”
Ouch. She was speaking matter-of-factly and didn’t mean to hurt my feelings. After all, I do bounce around from place to place on a whim. Still, there’s an edge to the words that makes me think that she might have bigger feelings about my practices than she lets on.
I rise to my feet and move slowly around the room. Like Lolly, she has framed pictures everywhere. So many are of her and her friends here in Sugar Creek. Sure, there are a lot with me, but the number that I’m not in—because I wasn’t here—eats at me a little.
Markie’s life is so full of friends and activities, and I love that for her.
It’s not something that I think about too much.
But seeing it here, in full color—years memorialized in photographs—creates a vivid representation of how absent I am in her life.
That her friends probably know her better than I do. And I don’t like that. At all.
I have three photos up in my house, and they’re all of my family. Come to think of it, none of them were taken in the past five years. But buying new frames is a pain in the butt, and keeping the number low makes them easy to pack when I move.
My heartbeat quickens as I contemplate what marrying Hartley might entail. He’d get his land back, and I’d make Lolly happy, as well as buy myself some time to decide what I want to do with Lolly’s house. And I’d get to spend some time with my sister.
And some time with Hartley.
“You must act and live as a married couple. If you tell anyone that it’s for show, the deal is off, and I sell to Beardsley.”
My chest is too tight for my lungs, and every breath hitches somewhere beneath my ribs. It feels like I’m walking in the dark, fearing that I’m about to trip over something I can’t see but sense is there. It’s familiar yet … dangerous.
I’m not sure I can do this.
My finger trembles as I trace the edge of a frame with a picture of Markie and me.
What does marrying Hartley truly mean? By Lolly’s rules, we’d have to live together.
But where? At the ranch? I can’t imagine Hartley loving the idea of having me in his personal space, and I don’t want to touch on what that might feel like to me.
And I have no clue what happens when we go out in public.
Does he hold my hand? Are we riding together to church?
A grin sweeps across my lips. Guess Lora will need to find a new place to sit.
Oof. Lora.
What if the reason Hartley walked out without saying anything was because of Lora?
I’m sure she’s hot for him, but it never occurred to me before now that he might be hot for her.
That’s probably because he’s never had a serious girlfriend that I know about, although I know he’s dated a bit here and there.
I completely avoid Sugar Creek when he’s dating.
But what if he does like her and has plans to date her? Or marry her?
My spirits sink because even though the idea of another woman being on Hart’s arm makes me irrationally irritated, it also hurts my heart to think that I could ruin something for him.
Hate it or not, it’s not my place to get in the way of his life.
I made my choice, and it’s only fair that I live with it.
“There’d be an expiration date on the marriage,” I say to no one in particular. If Hartley wants the land badly enough, he could marry me, ride it out, and then go to her. It’s not like he’s choosing me. “I’ve done harder things for a year.” I think.
“I don’t know,” Markie says, a playful lilt to her voice. “I have a feeling this one would be very, very hard. If you get my drift.”
A fireball rolls through my body, leaving a trail of flames behind it. “This wouldn’t be a real marriage. There would be no sex.”
“Uh-huh.”
“There wouldn’t,” I say, narrowing my eyes and pretending my body isn’t fighting a five-alarm fire.
I’ve had sex with Hartley, and Markie doesn’t know just how right she is. But I do, and that’s precisely why it can’t happen again. Because sex with other guys is just that—sex. But with Hartley, it’s messy. My brain has a terrible time extracting itself from my heart.
If we do this, if I marry Hartley, I can’t get it twisted. It can’t change anything. I can’t start wanting the real thing, because pretending to love Hartley feels survivable.
Actually loving him doesn’t.