Chapter 15
“This isn’t where I expected to see you.” She’d walked in casually looking around but her words jolted him to his core.
She shouldn’t have that effect on him. He’d known she was coming.
He’d seen her on the calendar, and he thought he’d prepared himself.
Yet it was all he could do to hold on to any sense of normalcy.
He was already on his feet, though he didn’t need to shake her hand.
He wasn’t just meeting her. Far from it.
“Where? In my own office?” he asked.
She tilted her head, her eyes narrowing as though he were being stupid. Maybe he was, because he missed her almost glaring at him like that.
“No, in an older Victorian house. I always imagined you in a skyrise in New York or such.”
He nodded. She imagined that because he told her his dreams. Memories of late nights when they weren’t supposed to be out after curfew, when they were curled into a bed they had found, when she was warm and soft in his arms, lingered into his adulthood.
Those memories should have been long gone by now, but they clung.
He’d told her about his plans and his dreams. She told him hers, and they’d adjusted to bring them together.
NYU for undergrad. Columbia for graduate school for him.
The thing was, he’d followed through. He’d done it, seven years of exactly what they’d planned. But he’d done all of it without her.
“Well,” he said, still trying to find balance in a world suddenly spinning out of control with her here. “It turns out my plans weren’t entirely wrong, but they weren’t entirely right either.”
Rowan turned away, grabbing what he needed and hoping he could treat her like just another client. Or at least fake it. Unfortunately, she could always see through him. He might pull it off with someone else, but not her.
He’d always imagined he would be writing contracts and gunning for junior partner at a huge law firm, but he’d come home and realized this was really where he belonged.
This was right for him—outside of Richmond, in the yellow Victorian house converted into several law offices.
He handled all kinds of domestic and personal cases and needs.
The closest he got to a corporate contract was franchise law for some local small business owners.
With a deep breath that lied and told him he was okay, he finally sat down.
He’d popped to his feet through no control of his own when she walked in.
He told himself he normally did that when he greeted a new client.
What he didn’t normally do was breathe them in and get shot through with memories of them writhing beneath him, begging for more.
He sat now, motioning for her to take the plush chair opposite as he desperately tried to remember what he normally did. “This is about homeowners insurance?”
She nodded as if she couldn’t see all the sweet and dirty memories assaulting him, pulling her own folder out of her bag. “I don’t even know if there’s a case. Story forgot to pay it or decided not to pay it. I don’t even know which.”
The news hit him like cold floodwaters. Annelise had been uptight about something since the day of the flood, and he’d assumed it was just the disaster, the likelihood of losing all their possessions and having to go through what they’d all gone through fifteen years ago again.
But no, this was worse if there wasn’t insurance to pay out to help them rebuild the house. Oh hell. He asked, “Have you tried FEMA?”
“Have you met Story?” she countered.
“Touche.” He tipped his head, granting her the point.
He’d met Story. He’d been in and out of Annelise’s house as a kid.
Melissa, Annelise’s mother and Story both lording over her.
Melissa laid back and go-with-the-flow. Story stubborn as a mule crossbred with an ox crossbred with a stone set four feet deep into the earth.
The woman was often immovable. On top of that, anytime she didn’t want to do something, she tended to claim witchcraft.
“Did she have a vision?” he had to ask.
“You know it. ‘Change is coming to the Hollow,’” Annelise held her hands up, making air quotes.
He almost laughed. It was interesting—he thought Annelise was a powerful witch in her own right, and yet she was more than willing to admit that maybe her grandmother was a little off center.
Leaning forward, he laced his fingers and asked a question he would only ask of a select few families in Belle Hollow. “Did you cast for money for the house?”
“You know it,” Annelise said.
“How much did you get?” Because he didn’t doubt that it had worked. Annelise might be a water witch, but it didn’t mean she could only work with water. It just meant that that was the element where she was most powerful.
“Well, Story got a lotto ticket, and she scratched off ten K, but that’s going to be about eight weeks to get here.”
“Oh, nice.” In a previous life, he would have been jealous.
As a kid, he’d watched the Lockheart women do this more than once.
Money was often tight, and he got the impression that Story wasn’t that great with it.
But worse, all three of her daughters were positively terrible.
Annelise had been the one making sure the money was there for food, for the house payment, and so on. “The place is paid off, right?”
Annelise nodded. He couldn’t remember a time when the family had owed more than taxes on the house, and he wasn’t sure how old the little row of homes was.
They all looked different because they’d been updated and modified and brought into whatever current century all at different times.
He remembered when Annelise convinced Story and Melissa to put in central air conditioning at some point when the two kids were in middle school.
She’d come home with five thousand dollars to do it. He hadn’t asked how.
He asked now, “What else? Did you get anything?”
“FEMA.” She rattled off a number that also wouldn’t be enough.
“Wait, I thought you just said—”
“I got FEMA. Also, not a grant but a loan.” He didn’t ask if she’d pretended to be Astoria Lockheart for it.
Rowan tried not to sigh. It wasn’t a small chunk, but he also knew that rebuilding a house was so much more than what Annelise was describing.
Honestly, the extra money would mean that they wouldn’t have to scrape by with an insurance payout—one they probably weren’t getting.
He’d seen cases where homeowners insurance didn’t cover rent on a different place while the house was being rebuilt, and that could take months or a year.
When something bad happened—a house fire, a fallen tree through the roof, even the rare tornado—the rest of the town came together, almost like an Amish barn building. They’d help take care of the damage, the house, the cars. They’d give the family a place to stay.
But now, two-thirds of the town was devastated. People had already moved out toward Charlottesville, toward Richmond. There wasn’t enough community to raise all the barns though they were trying.
That was probably why he was here in this yellow Victorian house outside of Richmond, where he could commute easily and live in the home on the hill with his mother and brothers and sisters in Belle Hollow.
Losing their dad had brought them back together.
Alder had stayed for school, as had Indie, both attending the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Not the easiest commute, but not difficult.
Alder claimed that medical school was so expensive, saving on dorm costs would be essential.
It would alter the amount of student loans he came out with.
Rowan hadn’t questioned him at the time, but a few years later he’d seen the paperwork out in his brother’s room.
Alder’s scholarship fully covered a dorm, and he lied to them all about it. Rowan had never pressed for why.
Shaking off the thoughts of the house that he and his siblings now shared—with plenty of space—and the home Annelise had moved back to with her grandmother, he had another vision.
A present that should have been. She should have been standing next to him at the big window as the rain came down, instead of suffering a replay of a fate from fifteen years ago.
He wondered what Story was saying about the flood and could easily imagine her saying that fifteen years ago things had not played out as they were supposed to.
So the universe was offering a redo. Fifteen years ago, the flood had been the first domino falling in a chain that left Annelise walking away from him and never speaking to him again. Until now.
But he had to turn his attention to the case at hand. Annelise might be here, but she wasn’t here for a reconciliation, and she sure as hell wasn’t here to apologize.
He had to ask, “If she let the policy lapse, why do you think I can get it back?”
“Jenna said she heard rumblings in Charlottesville,” Annelise looked away. “I hate saying I hope my grandmother got scammed, but I’m really hoping she did, because then we might have a legal leg to stand on.”
“What do you mean?”
“I looked it up. It seems that after the floods in Asheville, insurance companies in the states surrounding the Blue Ridge Mountains have been trying to offload policy holders.”
He felt his eyebrows rise. He hadn’t heard of that here, but he had heard of it in other places.
In California with the wildfires, the rates had gone up, and the companies had canceled policies without fair warning—an illegal move in an attempt to dump unsuspecting homeowners.
They’d only been caught because another set of wildfires had come through so quickly that people inspected their policies and realized they’d lapsed or that they had been dropped for unfair reasons.
Annelise leaned forward, her look beseeching him. He wished it was for something else, but he would take what crumbs he was getting. He knew what he would dream tonight. Same thing he’d been dreaming all week. Only this time, he’d smell her and breathe her in, and wish.
“Could that be happening here?”
“It could,” he agreed. “I’ll look into it. What I’ll need from you—” he rattled off every possible insurance paper she might find from the last several years, “any emails or digital communication warning Story that the policy was going to lapse.”
Annelise nodded. She produced a folder with actual papers that Story had filed at some point, and even a few prints from emails. She pushed it toward him. “It looks like they jacked their rates on her a year ago.”
“Which may be why she didn’t pay it,” he murmured.
“That’s what I’m thinking, but she didn’t ask me, and letting it lapse feels just wrong.
” Annelise raised one hand, and he knew she was fighting tears forming at the corner of her eyes.
He also knew she would not cry in front of him.
Not now. It had always been difficult to get her to trust anyone.
Even him. He looked down for a moment, making notes on his yellow legal pad.
Then he pointed to the folder. “Can I keep these?”
“That’s what they’re for.”
“I’ll look into it,” he promised. She hadn’t been here for long, but she’d stirred up so much inside him that it would probably be better if he ushered her right out the door, locked it behind her, and communicated through email for the rest of whatever happened here.
Maybe she wouldn’t even have a case, and he could simply write, I’m so sorry, there’s nothing I can do, and leave it at that.
But she was nodding, sliding back slightly in the chair, reaching for her bag. When she looked up and asked, “What do I owe you for a retainer?”
He shook his head. She was the one who encouraged him to get out of the Hollow and go to school and pursue skyrise New York dreams. So the idea of taking money from her for this just felt wrong. But somehow, he was on his feet, around the desk and standing in front of her as she rose.
He’d not given her enough space. Or himself.
He couldn’t breathe and he watched as her chest rose and caught. Damn. She felt it too. At least he wasn’t alone in this.
Rowan knew since she turned up wet and tired in his living room that he was not over her. Maybe she wasn’t over him either. The small kernel of hope tried to grow, and he fought to squash it. As stubborn as they joked about Story being, Annelise had inherited all of it.
Covering for the inappropriate move, he held his hand out, ready to shake his head and say, “You don’t owe me anything.”
It felt like the right thing to do, as if after fifteen years he could finally sever whatever bond still held them together. When she’d walked away from him, she’d made the break cleanly and not looked back to see she’d left him utterly destroyed.
But he couldn’t say it. Instead, some wicked little seed settled deep in his soul and bloomed right then. So he said, “I’ll let you know what I need.”