43. Chapter 43
Evie
Turns out you can find out your life has a return policy and still get up at dawn to bake for strangers, because the alternative is lying in bed alone with your own thoughts, and mine haven’t been pleasant company lately.
After the weekend I’ve had, being outmaneuvered by a commercial oven before seven in the morning feels less surprising than it should.
The door won’t open. I wrap both hands around the handle, brace my weight through my heels, and haul backward until my shoulders protest. The hinges don’t so much as creak.
The seal has fused itself shut through some mechanical failure I can’t diagnose.
Behind the glass, my double-chocolate chunk cookies deepen from golden brown to mahogany, their glossy centers disappearing beneath a spreading char.
I keep telling myself this is a repair, a line item, a thing with a solution, and not one more proof that I’ve been holding the entire operation together on willpower and denial.
I tug again. The handle bites into my palms, but the door gives me nothing.
The smoke detector goes off next.
“Fantastic,” I mutter, grabbing the broom and jabbing the reset button. The shrieking stops, though its echo keeps needling the back of my skull. That shrill insistence that something is wrong, wrong, wrong, which I can’t seem to switch off no matter how many buttons I hit.
Burned sugar and scorched chocolate seep through the oven seal, filling the kitchen. By now, the cookies are unsalvageable. I know that. Still, I return to the handle and test it once more, because apparently I haven’t learned when to stop trying to save what’s beyond my reach.
Arms shaking, dignity nonexistent, I make the same shameful calculation that’s followed me since the festival.
One signature, and Foxglove stops being the place I’m forever trying to save.
And the price wouldn’t come due until I was dead. By then, what would I care where my soul went? I’d have had years of the Foxglove Inn blossoming.
For several dangerous seconds, the bargain doesn’t sound so bad.
The door tears open with a metallic crack, pitching me backward as smoke billows into my face. I cough until my eyes stream, waving one arm through the bitter cloud. The thought retreats, but it doesn’t disappear.
I set the ruined tray on the stovetop and stare at twenty-four charred cookies welded into glossy black islands.
Then I remember the spare batch. I always make one, because experience has taught me that ovens fail, guests arrive early, and somebody inevitably drops a pan at the exact moment there’s no time to start over.
The cookies are waiting in the pantry beneath parchment and plastic wrap.
I wedge the oven door open with a wooden spoon and carry the tray toward the trash can. One solvable problem at a time.
Milo rounds the corner, surveys the smoke-filled kitchen, then silently starts opening windows.
Ah, yes. Our new favorite choreography. I call it Two People Who Definitely Need to Talk Choosing Manual Labor Instead.
Yesterday’s rendition was particularly impressive.
He opened with an earnest pivot toward vulnerability, and I countered with a devastating redirection to the linen closet.
He attempted a second approach in the herb garden, and I met him with a Not now—my preferred defense against emotional availability since puberty.
I didn’t throw him out. The old me would’ve.
Self-preservation used to be the one thing I was genuinely good at.
But Milo became the person I wanted badly enough to unsettle every rule I’d built my life around.
I’d begun to trust that his affection could survive the parts of me I usually kept under lock and key: the temper, the fear, the need I hated anyone seeing.
Worse, I’d started wanting him to know them all and stay.
That’s the truth I keep avoiding. Even now, losing him feels worse than being angry with him. What happened at the festival changed everything, but it didn’t erase what I feel for him. I still want the future I started to picture before Krell showed me how easily it could be used against me.
He’ll be gone in five days. That was always the deadline. Milo never promised permanence. Now part of me wants it over today, wants the waiting cut short so the loss becomes a fact I know how to survive.
But then I look at him, and five days feels brutally short. Whatever this has become between us is still new and unfinished.
My phone buzzes on the counter. I grab it and an email fills the screen: So sorry for the late notice, but we need to cancel our reservation for tonight. Family emergency. Hope you understand.
The policy means I keep half the deposit, but that doesn’t cover the loss of revenue. The numbers rearrange themselves in my head: less income, more pressure on next month’s mortgage payment.
“Everything okay?” Milo asks.
“Last-minute cancellation.” I set the phone down. “So that’s three rooms instead of four for tonight.”
He crosses the kitchen and stops beside me. His hand lifts toward my waist, then closes into a fist before it reaches me.
“That’s still good though, right?”
“It’s fine.” The word tastes sharp. “It happens.”
Except it’s happening more lately. Broken appliances, repairs, unexpected expenses that chip away at the careful budget I’ve maintained.
“Evie, three rooms is still good. And one cancellation doesn’t change what you’ve built here.” His knuckles graze the counter beside my hand. I move mine away.
“I’m going to strip the empty rooms.”
In the Garden Room, I crouch to check the nightstand for abandoned belongings. The drawer resists when I pull. I yank harder, and physics decides to teach me a lesson about excessive force.
It rips free, the brass handle separating from the wood with a crack that echoes through the room. Pens and notepads scatter across the hardwood, and the TV remote skitters under the bed.
“Are you kidding me right now?”
Another thing I’ll fix myself, or pay someone to repair, or leave broken and hope no guest notices.
Milo’s name rises instinctively, ready to carry down the hall.
I close my mouth around it and remain crouched on the floor, the broken drawer pressing awkwardly across my knees.
For the past few weeks, reaching for him has become easier than remembering I’m supposed to manage alone.
Soon there’ll be no one to answer. I look down at the broken drawer and hate how much that scares me.
Only me, after I’d begun to want it to be us.
In the Sunrise Room, the lamp decides to have a complete electrical breakdown.
I flip the switch, and instead of light, I get a strobing effect that should come with a seizure warning.
“Is that supposed to happen?” Milo asks from the doorway.
I flip it again. Off. On. Off. The flickering continues.
“Oh, the irony,” I mutter.
“What?”
“Nothing.” I unplug the lamp, and blessed darkness returns. “Wiring issue. Can’t touch it myself without risking death by electrocution.”
“I read about electrical work once—”
“Absolutely not.”
“Right.” A tentative smile pulls at his mouth as he nods toward the lamp. “Probably wise. Me experimenting with live wiring seems like an opening paragraph of an insurance claim.”
I coil the unplugged cord around the base, keeping my eyes on my hands. When I straighten, his smile is gone. The warmth he’d tried to coax in goes with it.
But the Clover Room sink is what finally breaks me. I turn on the hot water, and an icy stream runs over my hands. I let it run, counting under my breath, waiting for the temperature shift that should come.
Thirty. Forty. Sixty.
Still freezing.
My fingers go numb, and I shut off the water and grip the vanity edge. Dark circles shadow my eyes in the mirror, and my ponytail is coming apart in pieces.
“Let me guess,” Milo says. “No hot water.”
“Stellar detective work.”
He leans one shoulder against the doorframe, unmoved by the barb. “I was going to offer sympathy next, but I can see you’re having more fun with hostility.”
I whip around. “Do you find this funny?”
“No.” He doesn’t flinch. “I think you’re overwhelmed and taking it out on me.”
That only makes me angrier. “You don’t get to stand there and psychoanalyze me while another part of my inn falls apart.”
His mouth tightens for half a second, then eases. “Can you wait to fix it?”
“Guest checking in at five specifically requested this room.” I dry my hands and pull out my phone. “So no, it can’t wait. Which means emergency-plumber rates and another chunk disappearing from my savings.”
The call to Hayes Plumbing confirms exactly what I was afraid of.
Yes, emergency.
No, this evening is too late.
Yes, I understand rates are higher for same-day service.
Martin Hayes arrives forty minutes later in a faded blue pickup with rust freckling the wheel wells and headlights clouded white with age.
The engine gives a tired shudder when he kills it.
He sets a scuffed toolbox on the ground before climbing out, broad and solid beneath his flannel, with a comfortable belly softening his frame.
His beard is dense and well kept, his dark hair flattened on one side from a cap he tosses onto the seat behind him.
“Evie.” He gives me a warm grin that creases the corners of his eyes, lending his thirty-five years an easy, boyish charm. “Heard you’ve got hot water problems.”
“It’s in the Clover Room.” I’m already heading for the stairs. “I need it back in service before today’s check-in.”
“I’ll get you sorted.” He follows me up, tool belt jangling.
I’m hyperaware of Milo trailing behind us.
Usually, a new face draws him out within seconds, his curiosity spilling into conversation before anyone has properly introduced themselves.
Today, he offers Martin nothing beyond a quiet hello.
Without the frustration that sharpened my earlier words, I can finally hear how needlessly cruel they were.