5. Ember
Ember
“I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m doing it loudly.”
— Ember
My back is currently a collection of screaming vertebrae held together by sheer willpower and a fine layer of lingering drywall dust.
I wake up to a beam of aggressive morning sunlight stabbing me directly in the left eyeball through the uncurtained, cracked window of the master bedroom.
I roll over, the springs underneath me letting out a high-pitched, metallic shriek, and reach for my phone. My fingers are still slightly stiff from yesterday’s walking tour of the county, but my thumb finds the Safari icon with professional, high-speed accuracy.
Luxury organic latex mattress. Italian linen bedding. Express white-glove delivery to rural zip codes.
I tap the screen with a series of frantic, violent jabs.
Five thousand four hundred dollars later, a confirmation screen pops up, complete with a little digital animation of green leaves fluttering around a delivery truck.
It will be here by Tuesday.
The company’s automated customer service bot assures me that their delivery team will carry it up the stairs, assemble the reclaimed white-oak frame, and dispose of the existing “historical mattress” without me having to lift a single, caulk-stained finger.
I hesitate for exactly three seconds before opening another tab.
Compact utility vehicle. All-wheel drive. Good gas mileage. Small enough to survive narrow country roads without taking out additional mailboxes.
My finger hovers over the screen.
This feels like cheating somehow.
Like admitting defeat before I’ve even survived one full week of pretending to be an agricultural woman of the people.
But then I remember carrying eighty pounds of supplies down a country road while people watched me suffer.
I exhale sharply and tap purchase. The delivery estimate pops up.
Three to five business days.
“Oh my God,” I whisper to myself. “I’m becoming practical.”
The feeling is deeply upsetting.
I sit up, pulling the blanket around my shoulders, and stare at the peeling floral wallpaper.
I could do this for the whole house.
I know I could.
I could open my banking app right now, drop six figures on a top-tier construction firm from the city, move into a high-end bed-and-breakfast down in the valley for three months, and return when the place looks like a spread from an architectural digest.
I have the capital.
I am, as I casually mentioned to Brooks, kinda rich.
Which sounds deeply obnoxious out loud, but fortunately remains factually accurate.
But as I look at the jagged, empty hole in the ceiling where the brass fan used to live, my jaw tightens.
No.
That is exactly what Marcus said I would do. “You’re a conceptualist, Emmy. You design the wrapper, but you don’t actually build the box. The second things get heavy, you hire a vendor.”
“Screw you, Marcus,” I whisper to the dusty room. “I am building the box. I am the vendor.”
I want to do this myself.
I need to know that I can look at a broken, dry-rotted, structurally compromised reality and force it into shape with my own two hands. I just need a little bit of local stabilization first.
“Step one,” I announce to the empty hallway, testing the sound of it. “Corporate outreach.”
I’m going to make one friend in this town today, or I’m going to die trying. And looking at the state of this house, it’s a toss-up which happens first.
I pull a new pair of overalls out of a box I haven’t unpacked.
After buying the farm, I panic-bought fifteen pairs of overalls online because my mother said, and I quote, “Country women always have suspiciously strong thighs and excellent denim.”
At the time, it felt charming.
Now I’m trapped inside a rural-themed costume commitment.
I march into the bathroom and aggressively apply moisturizer, trying to scrub the ‘delusional urbanite’ look off my face with a packet of luxury wipes. It’s not working.
Ten minutes later, I am walking down the gravel driveway, making sure to step entirely around the tragic, broken remains of Brooks’s mailbox.
I glance toward his property.
His driveway is still empty.
My chest does a weird, unauthorized little flutter at the memory of his rough fingers brushing against my forearm while he taught me how to coil that extension cord.
“You’re a headache,” he had said in that deep, gravelly voice.
“A charming headache,” I remind myself, flipping my hair over my shoulder as I hit the main road.
He promised he would come by after his shift today to help me with the structural issues. He explicitly said he would come back, even though he looked like he wanted to swallow his own tongue immediately after saying it.
But I can’t just sit on the porch like a damsel in distressed denim waiting for the fire department to save me.
After my very brief, highly dramatic mental breakdown last night, I actually walked through the house room by room.
And honestly?
It’s… not that bad.
Yes, there are approximately fourteen thousand things that need fixing, and at least three sections of flooring that feel unsafe, but nothing is actively collapsing.
Probably.
Some of it is actually gorgeous beneath the dust and disaster, too.
There’s this enormous antique mirror in the upstairs hallway with carved gold detailing that caught the morning light so perfectly I literally stopped and stared at it for a full minute.
When I hit Main Street thirty minutes later, the morning sun is warm, and the town center actually looks incredibly beautiful today—like a vintage postcard, if you ignore the lingering aura of social hostility.
I see the maple syrup woman from yesterday, whose name I have decided is Gertrude, exiting the local dry cleaners. I slide my sunglasses down the bridge of my nose, flash her my most winning, million-dollar corporate smile, and wave.
“Good morning! Beautiful weather we’re having!”
Gertrude stops dead on the sidewalk, looks at my white overalls, looks at my red lipstick, lets out a small, sharp tsk, and walks straight to her station wagon without returning the greeting.
She doesn’t even look back as she backs out of the space.
“Okay, a difficult demographic,” I mutter, my smile faltering for a fraction of a second.
I try again at the local pharmacy.
An older man in a flannel shirt is coming out the door holding a bottle of antacids. I step up, holding the heavy wooden door for him with an enthusiastic tilt of my head.
“After you, sir! Have a wonderful Saturday!”
He stops, squints at me through his thick lenses, mutters, “Yep,” and shuffles past me without making eye contact.
By the time I make it past the town square, I am zero for four.
The local community is a wall of judgment.
Every time my boots squeak against the pavement, I can practically hear the collective sigh of a hundred people who wish I would take my cash, my glitter, and my corporate design degree back to the highway.
And then, the scent hits me.
It’s the rich, buttery, intoxicating aroma of caramelizing sugar, toasted yeast, and fresh cinnamon.
It’s drifting out from under a faded green awning about eighty yards down the block. I look up and see a weathered wooden sign swinging in the morning breeze: Suncrest Hollow Bakery.
The sign itself is a visual tragedy—a muddy, ‘dried-gravy’ brown with typography that looks like a war crime. It’s an affront to every design principle I’ve ever paid tuition to learn.
“Oh, you poor thing,” I whisper to the wood.
My stomach lets out a betrayal of a growl—a loud, demanding reminder that I haven’t eaten anything that didn’t come out of a box in forty-eight hours. I push the door open, the bell chiming with a cheerful sound that feels entirely too optimistic for this town.
The bakery is small, clean, and lined with glass display cases filled with magnificent, golden-brown pies, towering loaves of sourdough, and rows of perfect, frosted cinnamon rolls.
Behind the counter stands a tall, imposing, older dark-skinned woman with sharp, piercing eyes and a crown of beautiful, silver-streaked hair pulled back into a neat bun.
She’s wearing a crisp white apron over a dark blue denim shirt, and she is currently wiping down the stainless-steel counter with a level of intensity that suggests she is trying to scrub the molecular structure out of the metal.
Her name tag reads MARGE.
“Good morning!” I say, stepping up to the counter and resting my hands on the clean glass. I slide my sunglasses completely off, letting them hang from my collar. “Wow. It smells like actual heaven in here. I think my soul just left my body for a second.”
Marge stops scrubbing.
She folds her wiping cloth into a perfect, precise square, sets it down on the counter, and looks up at me.
“You’re the city girl,” Marge says, her voice a deep, resonant alto that doesn’t hold even a hint of a welcoming lilt. “The one who bought the Gilded Goat and ran over Chief Lawson’s mailbox on your first day in town.”
“Word travels fast in the valley,” I say, my laugh sounding a little tighter than I intend. “And it was a very minor, highly collaborative altercation. Brooks and I have already established a verbal maintenance agreement.”
“Brooks is too polite for his own good,” Marge grunts, crossing her arms over her white apron.
“His mother raised him to be a gentleman, which means he spends half his life picking up after people who don’t know how to drive a truck.
Now, what do you want? I’ve got three batches of sourdough coming out of the oven in ten minutes. ”
An older couple sitting at a small laminate table in the corner stop chewing their bear claws. They lean in slightly, their eyes fixed on my back.
The level of local surveillance in this town is truly unparalleled.
“I would love a cinnamon roll, please,” I say, keeping my tone warm. “And a black coffee. If you have it.”