Sneak Peek of The Hampton House, Chapter One
M andie Grover took a sip of her coffee, now lukewarm, and told herself to go dump it out and get some water. She’d been experiencing heartburn more often than not on days when she drank the entire cup of coffee she picked up on the way in to work.
She set the to-go cup further from her and reached for the next file in the pile. Part of her job involved looking through prospective properties, and she really enjoyed browsing through the “slush pile.”
At tomorrow’s meeting, she’d be expected to have her top three choices for the next clean-up project, appropriately labeled CUP in her department, and literal tally marks went up on the white board as the team reviewed their personal favorites.
Mandie had two files in her favorites folder already, but she told herself to have an open mind as she looked at the picture of the mansion on the first page in the new file. “Sixteen thousand square feet,” she said. In all honesty, most mega-mansions approached ten thousand square feet, with multiple bedrooms, twice as many bathrooms, and ornate staircases.
Her heartbeat pumped out an extra beat, because she absolutely loved taking the abandoned and restoring it to full glory. That, and her phone had just sparkle-chimed with her husband’s assigned ringtone.
Charlie had said, I’m so going to pass this Pharmacology final , with a smiley face emoji. To celebrate, I’m stopping by Lin Chu’s for dinner. You want those chickeny noodles?
She grinned at his use of “chickeny noodles,” abandoned the file, and reached for her phone to answer him. You’re finished with the final already?
Piece of cake , he said, which was Charlie-code for yes, I’m done and leaving campus . He only had the one final today, and Charlie hated staying on campus when he could leave it. She’d find him in their one-bedroom apartment when she got home, and he’d most likely time dinner to arrive only a few moments before her.
She and Charlie had been married for almost five years now, and he took very, very good care of her. Mandie loved him with her whole heart, and they’d even started talking about starting a family.
Everything Mandie did required her to go through a minefield of thoughts, and she often felt like she’d made the wrong turn and gotten blown back to the beginning. She envied others who could made quick decisions with confidence, because that had never been Mandie’s strong suit.
See you at home , she texted Charlie, and then she got back to the file in front of her. She had to have her choices done for tomorrow, and then she had some appointments to make with a restoration company for an apartment building here in the city that had sustained some flooding damage.
She loved her job at PastForward Restoration Company—PFRC—because they helped people who needed it while showing respect to the history of the dwellings and buildings on the East Coast. Some properties here were hundreds of years old, and Mandie felt a sense of reverence every time she got to go out on a field assignment.
The house in the file intrigued her, and Mandie leafed through the floor plan, read the story behind its abandonment, and embraced the growing excitement within her. She didn’t often make her choices based on pictures, checklists, and facts. She relied on her feelings, and she reached for a green sticky note, which she attached to the front of this file.
It got placed in the yes-pile, and Mandie sat back. She loved learning about old things, and since she hadn’t been on a field assignment yet this year, she muttered, “So you’ll bring it up in your meeting tomorrow.”
Part of her yearned to get out of this office building, though she’d once been tickled and thrilled to be riding the subway from Brooklyn, where she and Charlie lived, to the Flat Iron building every day.
She still was, but she definitely felt like some of the glitter that had first coated her job had started to flake off. She stood and stretched her back, glancing across the partition that separated her desk from the one in front of her.
The man who worked there had various camera equipment littering his space, and Flint Rogers looked up. “Hey.” He leaned back in his chair. “My eyes are starting to cross.”
“Editing your latest film?”
“Final edits,” he said. “It’s due to production by tomorrow night, and it should air next month.”
“That’s awesome,” Mandie said. By “air,” he meant the complete walk-through of one of the abandoned mansions. He led a film crew on field assignments, and they documented everything from the first step the team took onto the property to the final walk-through when a place went up for sale.
If he was lucky, he could work on one project per year, as his post-production was far more detailed than Mandie’s. She was involved in field assignments from the first step to the sale, and that was it. She didn’t then have hundreds of hours of film to go through and edit into a ninety-minute documentary.
“I can’t believe the Maryland Mansion is almost done,” she said.
“Hopefully, there will be something new at tomorrow’s meeting,” Flint said. He wore a neatly trimmed ginger beard, with a full head of hair to match. He was what Mandie would call a “clean hipster,” as he showered regularly and didn’t wear his hair long. His emerald eyes always seemed to see more than Mandie could, and he wore loafers everywhere he went, even into dangerous, abandoned mansions.
He rolled his khakis at the ankle, always wore skinny jeans and skin-tight tees—if he didn’t have on a too-small polo like he did today.
“You think you’ll get another assignment right away?” Mandie asked. She leaned against the chest-high divider and took in more of his mess. How he worked in those conditions, she didn’t understand. He had yellow legal pads filled with notes and numbers in black pen she couldn’t read. But Flint somehow knew what it all meant, and she supposed that was all that mattered.
“Jo Ann’s quitting,” Flint said. “Which means they’ll have to promote up another film lead, and last time Candace needed to do that, it took four months for me to go through multiple interviews, present my portfolios, and get named to the position.”
Mandie drew in a breath. “Jo Ann’s quitting?”
Flint looked away. “I guess that isn’t common knowledge.” He looked at Mandie with puppy-dog eyes. “Don’t say anything, okay?”
“Yeah, of course not,” she said.
Flint stood and stretched his arms above his head, his tiny shirt pulling up over the waistband of his khakis. “You haven’t been out in the field in a while.”
“Tell me about it.” Mandie rolled her eyes. “I think Candace thought I’d get pregnant, and she didn’t want to assign me to anything.”
“So you’re not pregnant?” Flint grinned at her, and Mandie smiled and shook her head.
“Even if I was,” she said. “That shouldn’t exclude me from field work. It’s pregnancy discrimination.”
“Sometimes those old houses are full of mold.”
“We have protective gear for that.” Mandie folded her arms, becoming more and more determined to get an assignment tomorrow. She’d had enough of desk work, phone calls, and file browsing. She swatted at Flint’s chest. “Plus, you tromp through those sites in shoes with barely any soles and no socks. It’s a miracle you haven’t contracted gangrene or something.”
Flint bellowed out a laugh, and Mandie allowed herself to smile. As he quieted, she said, “All right, Flint. Tell me how to get assigned to something tomorrow.”
“Step into my office,” he said, and Mandie scrambled to go around the dividers and into his disorganization. If it would help her get a field assignment, she could sit among cameras, flash lights, and micro SD cards.
“So the final went well?” Mandie asked as she entered her apartment. She tapped the door with her foot to close it, then noticed the candles on the table. She froze. “What anniversary did I forget?”
Charlie turned from the back counter, a plate of orange chicken in his hand. “Final went amazing. There’s no anniversary.”
“There’s something,” Mandie said as she got moving again. She’d brought home her top three files so she could obsess over them while she and Charlie watched TV tonight. He sometimes had her quiz him, especially with anything math-related, but he’d already taken that final, so she anticipated an evening filled with some sort of action-adventure movie, and she could easily keep up with the plot while she looked through her files again.
“There’s me finishing another year of school,” he said. “That’s it.”
“Only one more,” Mandie said as she dropped her bag over the back of the couch and shrugged out of her jacket. Springtime in New York could still be chilly, and Mandie hated nothing more than being cold on the subway.
She wrapped her arms around Charlie once he’d set down the plate of chicken. “You’re amazing, baby. One more year of pharmacy school.” She kissed him, glad she got to spend her evenings with her best friend in the whole world.
“Tomorrow, they’re making assignments for the next major field assignment, and I want it so badly.” She whispered the last few words, almost afraid to speak her desires.
“You’ll get it,” Charlie said. “You haven’t been out of the office in a while.”
“For six months,” she said. “And I know Candace just got a whole heap of new funding. She might even schedule two projects.”
“Where are they?”
“My favorite one is in The Hamptons,” Mandie said as he pulled out her chair and she sat down. “It would be a dream to work on it. It’s close, so I wouldn’t have to live on-site. My other two favorites are out of the city. One in South Carolina—a really old plantation that would be pretty cool—and one up in Cape Cod.”
“Mm.” Charlie sat down too. He dished up some of her chickeny noodles, and Mandie simply watched him.
“Did you hear about the internship?”
“Another interview next week,” he said casually, but Mandie knew he hated the multiple interview process. Honestly , he’d said. If they don’t know by now, I don’t know what else to do to win them over.
She smiled at him. “So we’ll both have amazing news by this time next week.”
“You’ll have yours tomorrow.” He grinned at her and took orange chicken and ham fried rice for himself.
“What if I don’t get it?” Mandie let her vulnerability show. Only for him, and Charlie heard her and looked right at her. “She’s been passing me over for some reason, and I just—what if I’ve gotten my hopes up and I don’t get it?”
“You’re going to get it.”
She sighed, because frustration frothed through her. “Thank you, baby.” She did like his confidence in her, but they’d been together long enough to see that sometimes confidence didn’t always equate to getting what they wanted.
He hadn’t gotten into the Pharm.D. program at Rutgers, for example. He’d had to settle for his second choice of St. John’s, and while he loved his program there now, Charlie had definitely been disappointed.
“And if you don’t,” he said. “I’ll have mint chocolate chip ice cream here tomorrow night, and we’ll go away for the weekend. Go see your mom and dad in the cove.” He raised his eyebrows. “Okay? It won’t be the end of the world.”
“It’ll just feel like it,” she said miserably.
“Hey, let’s be positive,” he said. “You’ve got a strong case for getting assigned, and they’ve picked your top choice the last four times.”
“Yeah.” Mandie twirled up some noodles and stuck them in her mouth. Salty, savory deliciousness moved through her. “Mm.”
Charlie grinned at her, and suddenly everything was okay.
“And hey,” she said. “If I do get it, I know I won’t have to work with The Bulldozer.”
Charlie choked on his chicken as he started to laugh. Mandie smiled too, though she truly didn’t like working with Suzette Paxman. She’d been nicknamed The Bulldozer by everyone in the office, because she rammed through old houses like one. She held a degree in Anthropology, and she acted like she was the only human being alive who did.
In some cases, working with her meant Mandie didn’t have to get her hands and feet as dirty, as Suzie wasn’t afraid of anything. She’d go into any room, any broken-down pool house, over any surface, to get the footage and information they needed.
Every team had a bulldozer, actually, but none of the other employees at PastForward carried the nickname the way Suzie did.
She giggled with Charlie, because suddenly everything felt lighter. “I’m going to get it,” she said, mustering up all the optimism she could. “And I’m going to have the best team ever, and it’ll be the house in The Hamptons, and when we go home to Five Island Cove this weekend, it’ll be to celebrate my new field assignment.”
“There you go.” Her husband beamed at her, and Mandie reached over and covered his hand with hers.
“Should I really get us tickets for the Steamer?” she asked.
He nodded. “Yeah, my mom would like it too. She’ll take us to lunch to celebrate another semester done.”
“Free food,” Mandie mused. “I see how you are.”
“Hey, I never say no to free food.” Charlie grinned, and Mandie did too. She suddenly had so much to look forward to in the next few days, and her stomach flipped over tomorrow morning’s meeting.
She just had to get a field assignment. She simply had to.