Chapter 10
MAGGIE
Ryan could make macaroni and cheese from a box. He was also cooking it over a woodstove that’d been smoking so much earlier that the neighbors had probably thought the house was on fire.
I blinked hard as I tried to make sense of it all. I mean, just… how?
“You fixed the stove,” I said finally, standing with my hip propped against the counter in the small kitchen as I watched him stir the mixture in a pot. “What is your deal, Ryan? How do you know how to do all this?”
Asking point blank might’ve been considered rude under any other circumstances, but twenty minutes ago, the guy had told me that my wedding had been tacky and that he’d hated my dress. I figured if he could dish it out as a straight shooter, he should be able to handle the return fire.
Ryan glanced at me over his shoulder, his soaked jacket now hanging over a chair to dry while his tie was off and the top few buttons of his shirt were undone.
He’d also rolled his sleeves up to his elbows and kicked off his wet shoes and socks.
While I was relatively sure he wasn’t pregnant, he was barefoot in my kitchen—and not looking too put out about it at all.
Those ice-blue eyes bored into mine for a moment before he shrugged and returned his attention to the pot.
“I don’t have a deal,” he said easily. “I knew how to fix the stove because it’s really not that hard when you’ve had to teach yourself how to fix things before.”
He dumped the cheese packet into the pot with one hand and ran the other through his hair before it came to rest on the side of his neck. At this point, he’d had his hands in his hair so often today that it’d dried in a tousled mess, but the slightly disheveled look worked for him.
Naturally. Because everything just has to work for Ryan freakin’ Thayer.
When I sighed, he must’ve mistaken it for dissatisfaction with his response because he suddenly looked at me again, his lips pursing before he blew out a breath through his nose and shook his head.
“My family got dragged through the dirt, Maggie. I was dead broke as a college kid. Trust me, I’ve cooked in much worse situations than this. ”
“How much worse?” I asked, still trying to figure him out.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the guy. He was a giant walking contradiction. Everything about him screamed wealth, from the way he dressed, to how he spoke, and even the way he carried himself, but I supposed he didn’t have it anymore. Not the way he used to, anyway.
He turned halfway back to the stove, stirring again but keeping his eyes on mine as he shrugged.
“For three months, I lived on ramen cooked on a hot plate that had exposed wires. My roommate and I used to cook eggs in our tea kettle and we went camping once, but we forgot the box with our pot back at home, so we had to make do with tins we cut open. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it worked. ”
For a long beat, I just stared at him, but when he turned fully back to the stove, my gaze dropped to the expensive watch on his wrist and his tailored pants. He moved with such confidence that it was almost impossible to remember that once upon a time he’d lost everything.
I did remember it, though.
Thinking back, I remembered my mother being pressured by her friends to stop inviting Nora to things. At first, it’d been little events, just a lunch here or a charity drive there, but over time, the invitations had simply stopped.
I hadn’t really understood it back then. I’d only known that the Thayers weren’t around anymore. Even when I’d run into him at my bridal shower, I’d obviously known about their history, but this was the first time I’d truly stopped to think about what those years might’ve been like for him.
While I was marveling about all that, though, Ryan was pretty frustrated with me and it showed. “You do know that for every minute we spend here, your family and the Hawthornes are one minute closer to declaring all-out war on each other, right?”
“What I choose for my own future shouldn’t affect theirs.”
He scoffed. “That’s not how this works and you know it.”
I glared at him. “Why are you so angry?”
“Because this is a mess, Maggie. It’s a huge mess and you don’t seem to have any interest in cleaning it up.”
“That’s because I don’t know how.” I threw my arms out to my sides. “Are you happy now? Is that what you wanted to hear? That I can’t go back because I don’t know what to do? Why are you even here, anyway?”
“Marcus told me where to look for you.”
“So you came? Just like that?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” I shook my head. “You don’t even know me.”
Ryan went still, the spatula pausing halfway through another stir of the pot before he turned to look at me fully again. Then he lifted his hand and flipped me off.
I scoffed. “Oh, very mature.”
Just as I was about to rip into him, he turned his hand, and suddenly, I could see a small, pale scar on his middle finger in the shape of two front teeth. My two front teeth.
“I needed five stitches,” he said slowly. “In case you’ve forgotten. So, yeah. I know you, Maggie. Maybe I don’t know all the ins and outs of who you’ve become, but I do know you.”
As I stared at that little scar, I realized that was my first real memory of Ryan Thayer.
He’d been just a teenager then, a boy who’d come looking for me at my own thirteenth birthday party, and now, so many years later, he was doing it again.
For no discernible reason other than wanting to help me, apparently.
Unfortunately for him, there were many people who were trying to help me right now, and none of them were actually helping either.
Twice now, he’d been on my side of history, back at my birthday party and again at the wedding, but this time, he was dead wrong. “I’ll bite you again if you try to force me out of this house.”
The corners of his mouth started inching upward. “I have no doubt, but I’ll bite you right ba—”
A booming, loud crash from above interrupted him and both of us immediately looked up. Seconds later, something scurried across the ceiling and I froze, another trickle of fear running through me. “What was that?”
“I don’t know.”
Another crash rang out, followed by more scurrying, and Ryan slowly lowered the spatula to the counter. “Stay here.”
“No.”
“Fine. Don’t.”
He gave me a look that said he wouldn’t save me if whatever was up there turned out to be dangerous, but I knew he would, so I followed him up the stairs, both of us listening intently as whatever it was kept racing around the attic.
Ryan stopped beneath a small wooden panel in the ceiling and pulled the stairs down. “Okay, let’s go see what’s going on up there.”
I peered into the darkness beyond the panel. “It’s probably a ghost.”
He scoffed. “Go do something useful, would you?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How about you try calling Daniel and fixing this mess so that I can go home in peace?”
With that, he tested the first step of the ladder and started ascending. Meanwhile, my blood was simmering all over again. “Right. Because it’ll be that easy. If you’re so smart, why don’t you tell me exactly what it is you think I should say to the man?”
“I’d start with how sorry you are and telling him that you’re alive,” he replied, his head already disappearing into the dark. “I’m sure you can improvise from there, but at some point, you should probably also talk to him about what’s going to happen next.”
“Good luck with the ghost,” I called when he disappeared fully into the dark.
When he didn’t respond, I slumped against the wall, my heart racing with both anger and fear. Guy thinks he knows everything, but he doesn’t really know anything, does he? He has no idea how hard I tried to talk to my parents.
“Ryan?” I called up, fully intending to let him have it for thinking that he knew anything about me just because I’d bitten him thirteen freaking years ago, but again, he didn’t respond. “Ryan, are you alive up there?”
I gave him a second, but when he still didn’t say anything, I climbed the stairs too, surprised by how large the attic was once I climbed into it.
Lightning flashes and the occasional sliver of moonlight as the clouds rushed by lit up so much Revolutionary War memorabilia that I immediately wondered if my grandfather had been preparing for an extremely niche apocalypse.
It sure looked like it.
Either that, or he’d wanted to start his own museum. Old trunks and military uniforms stood all over, antique furniture, maps, flags, books, newspapers, and piles upon piles of dusty photographs.
I took a step forward, not seeing Ryan in my immediate field of vision, but then something moved and I screamed.
A shape that looked a whole lot like a human under a sheet jerked forward and I screamed again, but as it shot toward me, the sheet fell and a raccoon darted between my legs, disappearing through a hole in the roof a split second later.
So scared that I was basically paralyzed, I looked around wildly, but I still didn’t see him. “Ryan! Where are you?”
An image raced through my head of Ryan having been bitten by the raccoon, dramatically bleeding out somewhere in this very attic, and it spurred me into motion. I raced forward, desperately searching for him on the floor.
“Ryan!”
When I practically slid around a stack of military-looking crates, I found him crouched beside an old wooden trunk, completely calm and definitely not bleeding. Instead, he was holding his phone up, its flashlight on as he inspected the contents of the trunk.
Before I could ask him what he was doing and why he hadn’t answered me, he held out a stack of pictures. “They’re of your grandfather’s wedding.”
I took the stack in a trembling hand, along with several bundles of what appeared to be old letters, but I barely even heard him when he spoke again. “The raccoon got into this trunk, unfortunately. I’m trying to see what we can save, but most of it is ruined.”
Staring down at the old photograph at the top of the pile, I tilted it closer to the light to get a better look. What I was seeing just made no sense whatsoever. Ryan, meanwhile, kept rummaging through the crate, pushing some things aside and extracting others.
“I suppose we should be grateful their wedding pictures survived,” he said. “Your grandmother was very pretty. Seriously. He got lucky when they arranged his marriage to her.” Ryan finally looked up at me then, and in my periphery, I saw him frown. “Maggie? What’s wrong?”
I turned the picture to show him. On it, my grandfather stood beside a beautiful young woman in a wedding dress, looking both impossibly young and impossibly happy. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him look quite that happy in my lifetime.
Ryan glanced at the picture and smiled. “Yeah, I saw that one. Good thing it’s not ruined, right? Your grandmother—”
“Ryan,” I muttered, my head shaking as I turned the picture once more and looked back down at it. “That’s not my grandma.”
My grandfather had hidden this cottage and his collection from our entire family for decades, but now, I was starting to wonder if that was the only secret he’d been hiding. Because it was definitely him in the picture, but I’d absolutely never seen that woman before in my life.