12. Chapter 12
Dean
The prince went to his kingdom looking for answers. He found indigestion.
The air is getting chillier as we get closer to October, and I feel it on my morning run.
A run that’s become rare now that I apparently have an unpaid job at an inn. But Rosie’s at church with her family right now, and I need the fresh air.
Thirteen days left. The orchard is still burned, the barn is still damaged, and the raccoons are still in residence.
The last company I contacted never showed, and the earliest appointment I could get with anyone else is still a week away.
Meanwhile, I’ve become genuinely good at caulking somebody else’s bathroom.
Which sounds like a terrible metaphor, but I have literally been caulking the Rapunzel bathroom.
The cold isn’t the only thing slowing me down this morning. I haven’t slept well all week. It could be the bed. It could also be that I can’t stop thinking about being in Rosie’s.
Which is . . . ridiculous.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been that close to anyone. Maybe that’s all this is. Or maybe it’s that it was her. I’m not sure I want to think too hard about that.
I pulled her back in when she tried to leave, though. I knew I was doing it. I wanted her there, so I pulled her back. But also, I was half asleep. And gravity’s force toward the center of that mattress was hard to fight.
And there I go, thinking about it again.
Rosie is . . . something else. Now that the Cinderella room is fixed and dry, she still has three rooms to finish, a festival to run, and a truck in her garage that belongs to someone else. She’s building rooms so strangers can be comfortable and keeping the worst space in the building for herself.
I’m sure there are others like her, but I haven’t met one.
My feet take me to the same place they always do when I actually go on my run: the farm.
I come to a stop in front of it and bend over, planting my hands on my thighs as I try to slow my breathing.
It’s overcast this morning, and the charred trees and the dark windows of the empty house make the whole place feel ominous.
“Hello, neighbor,” I hear someone say and find Wendell standing on the porch waving at me with one hand and holding a broom in the other.
“Hello,” I say, waving back, still trying to catch my breath. How have my lungs gotten out of shape so fast?
“Thought that was you. Haven’t seen your car in a while.”
Right. I’ve been busy working on an inn.
“You sweeping?” I say, asking the obvious.
“The porch gets leaves,” he says, holding the broom out as evidence. “Vivian never could stand leaves on the porch.”
I smile and nod. Cleaning the porch was one of my summer chores.
“Thanks for keeping that up,” I say, like that covers it.
He waves it off. “She figured she’d be back in a year or so.”
That was six years ago.
He goes back to sweeping. “Have you figured out what you’re going to do with the farm?”
I knew that question was coming, and it still makes something tighten in my chest.
Or maybe the indigestion is back.
“I think I’ll be selling,” I say.
Even from the sidewalk, I can see the disappointment in Wendell’s expression.
I could be projecting. Because saying it out loud to him, while standing in front of the farm, makes that answer feel wrong.
It’s the easy one. The simplest choice. I sell the property—raccoons and all—put the money in a trust for my mom, and hope somehow Ed doesn’t figure out a way to get his greedy hands on it.
He will, though. My mom will take the money out and hand it over to him. That’s her pattern. Well, it is when she has money.
“Well, you’ve got to do what’s right for you,” he says. “If I could afford it, I’d take it off your hands myself.”
“I think Vivian would have loved that,” I say.
Maybe finding the right person to own the farm is the answer. Someone who’d put in the work. Someone who’d fix what’s broken instead of tearing it all down.
He’ll know what to do.
Or maybe my grandma had a lot more faith in me than she should have.
Later that evening, Rosie and I are in the Rapunzel room painting it the color Wisteria Hysteria, which is the actual name and not one Rosie had made up like I accused her of doing.
She’s humming something while I tape the baseboards.
“The color is perfect,” she says, taking a step back from the section of wall she’s just been working on.
“It’s purple,” I say, though the ceiling fan light is giving it a slightly blue hue.
“Shhh,” she says. “You’re ruining the moment.” She looks at the wall reverently and then smiles to herself as if she’s remembering something.
Only Rosie would take a moment to be sentimental about paint.
I’m not looking at the wall. I’m looking at her. I’ve been doing that a lot lately.
I clear my throat. “Let me guess. Rapunzel’s dress is purple?”
She gives me a confused look. “Obviously. Haven’t you watched the movie?”
I shake my head. “No. There weren’t a lot of fairy tales in my childhood.”
“Dean, everyone needs fairy tales in their life.”
“I think I turned out okay,” I say, turning back to the tape and the baseboards.
“Did you, though?” she asks, and I shoot her a look, the straight line of disapproval or whatever she calls it.
She smiles and then points to the paint. “It’s not the actual color of her dress. This is much lighter.”
“So why this one?” I ask.
“I saw it once in the bedroom of a little girl I used to nanny.”
“The one from Boston?”
“Right,” she says after a beat of silence. “That’s the one.”
She goes back to painting and I go back to taping.
I thought she was done with the story, but then she says, “Lindsey, her mom, was trying to be an influencer, so she pretended to paint the room while I filmed it, being overly dramatic about how hard it is to DIY things. But then when we were done, she had professionals do the rest.”
“Sounds like something a wannabe influencer would do,” I say, unimpressed.
“I thought it was funny at the time, but looking back, it feels more like a lie.”
“It’s definitely a lie,” I say. “Most of those curated posts are.”
“That’s how that world was, though. The surface had to look pretty, but underneath it was pretty messy.”
“Sounds familiar.” It comes out flatter than I meant it to.
“How so?”
How so? My mom was like that. Everything looked great on the outside, while underneath it, we were moving from apartment to apartment, chasing something or someone. Never settled.
“I’ve worked with companies like that” is all I say, and it’s not a lie. Plenty of the businesses I’ve consulted looked much better on paper. “So, is that why you left the nanny job?”
“No. It was their decision, actually.”
I don’t say anything. I want to know more, of course. Rosie was probably a really good nanny, even though I’m sure she was a total pushover.
But I don’t want to push. I want her to tell me because she wants to, not because I asked.
We’re quiet again, Rosie painting and me taping.
“It wasn’t anything I did, by the way,” she finally says, as if I were thinking otherwise. “The kids went to school all day, and my services were no longer needed.”
She says it like she’s repeating exactly how it was said to her.
“That was the hardest part—leaving the kids,” she continues. “August was seven by then. Ivy was five. I’d had her since she was two. I don’t even know how they’re doing now.”
She keeps painting the same three feet of wall she’s been working on for a while.
“You haven’t heard from them?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No. Their mom deleted her account, so I can’t even check that.”
Something about that doesn’t sit right with me. She helped raise those kids for years, and then one day, that was apparently the end of it.
“So, you came home after that?”
“Eventually.” She loads the roller with paint. “There was also Jackson.”
“Boyfriend?” I can’t help but ask.
“Jackson Pruitt,” she says. “The Suttons—the family I was working for—introduced us.”
“Jackson Pruitt? That’s a pretentious-sounding name.”
She snorts out a laugh. “Right? And he was very pretentious. He’d tell me how to dress and even wanted me to wear my hair a certain way.”
“Did you want him to?”
She shrugs. “Not really. But he had opinions about everything, and it was usually easier to go along with them.” She tugs on the strap of her overalls. “He would have hated these.”
Jackson sounds like a jackass.
I don’t think anyone has ever asked this woman what she wants.
“What happened with pretentious Jackson?”
“He broke up with me the night I told him I was moving home.” She shrugs. “Long distance is hard.”
She says it like she’s defending him.
She goes back to the wall. “Anyway, it never would have worked. He always wanted to call me Rosaline. Even when I’d correct him.”
“Rosaline? Why?”
She pauses mid-paint-stroke. “That’s my full name.”
I stop and turn my head fully toward her. “Rosaline,” I repeat, testing it out. “You don’t seem like a Rosaline to me.”
I’m not sure why I say that part out loud. Rosaline is a pretty name, but it feels wrong on her.
Rosaline sounds like someone who sits on the board of a private school and makes people nervous at charity luncheons.
Rosie is paint on her cheek, impossible plans, and making room for everyone who asks.
Maybe that was the problem with Boston. They wanted Rosaline—the polished nanny who dressed the right way and made their lives easier. I’m not sure any of them knew Rosie at all.
Her eyes find mine, and she blinks twice, a serious look on her face. “Thank you,” she finally says. “It’s my name, but it’s never really felt like it. Even my mom wished she had just named me Rosie instead.”
“Why didn’t she?” I ask.
“Because she didn’t realize you could do that.”
She’s back to that sentimental smile from earlier.
“If it makes you feel better, Dean was originally my middle name.”
The hand holding the roller brush drops by her side. “Originally?”
“I had it legally changed.”
“So, what was your first name?”
“Milton,” I tell her.
“You’re lying.”
“I wish I were.”
She covers her mouth like she’s just finished one of her signature ramblings, but then she laughs.