Love Next Door (Lakeside #1) by Helena Hunting

She lets herself out, and I allow myself to deflate. My mom has always been a firm believer in things like fate and karma. She has her tarot cards read all the time by some batty lady who lives in the next town over. She used to take our neighbor Bee with her every once in a while. They dragged me along once. The lady told me she couldn’t read me because I was blocking her energy, whatever that means.

I can’t see any reason for me to be back here, other than fate and karma are having a good laugh at my expense.





CHAPTER 3

HOME SWEET HOME

Dillion

I head back to the U-Haul van and grab my suitcase so I can do what Mom suggested and settle in. I shouldn’t be surprised that Billy has my bedroom now. His is tiny, barely able to fit a double bed and a dresser, whereas mine has a closet. The room hasn’t technically been mine in almost ten years, when I moved to the city for college.

And Mom has a point about privacy. There isn’t much in the house. My parents have a bathroom to themselves, but I’ll be sharing the shower with Billy, so this is definitely preferable.

I check the fridge, more to see if it’s cool than anything else. I’m surprised to find a six-pack of beer. And it’s cold. I free one from the plastic ring and crack the top, bring it to my lips, and tip my head back.

After I moved to Chicago, I stopped drinking beer out of cans. I stopped doing most things that reminded me of home, wanting to remove myself as much as I could from small-town life. I drop down on the sofa and sigh. The curtains are a lot to handle in such a compact, brown space. I reach over and pull them open so I can look at something that feels less like a bad acid trip.

Beyond the trees is Bee’s cottage. My heart aches at the sight. I miss her. She was such a huge part of my life growing up, and even after I moved away for college, we stayed close. She helped me in ways I could never forget, so the fact that I couldn’t make it to her funeral gutted me. I’d been overseas at a conference when I got the news, and I wouldn’t have made it back until after the funeral was over. It was better that I’d missed the funeral, though, because if I’d met Bee’s family, I probably would have said things I shouldn’t.

Apart from one of her grandsons, she didn’t have much good to say about them, and she was particularly disenchanted with her son-in-law. I think she blamed him for her daughter’s death. Her daughter, Adelaide, had passed when Bee’s grandchildren were very young due to complications during an elective surgery, one Bee said she hadn’t wanted but felt pressured to go through with. According to Bee, her daughter had an allergic reaction to the anesthesia and suffered a fatal heart attack. She was only in her thirties. Bee called it a waste of a beautiful life. I couldn’t fathom what it would be like to lose your child, no matter how old they were.

Losing Bee felt like losing a family member, and I don’t feel like I’ve had much of a chance to mourn her properly. She passed in her sleep—a brain aneurysm that took her swiftly and painlessly. At least she didn’t suffer.

I decide I should do the thing I’ve been avoiding for the past six months, which is check on Bee’s place. I was hoping that by the time I came home, her grandson would have finally gotten his priorities straight and cleaned it out.

My dad checks on the place every week. Rodents love abandoned homes, and the pipes can seize and the septic system can take a real shitter—pun totally intended—if no one is around to make sure things are working properly. But since I know Dad’s been busy, I wonder what state I’ll find it in.

I push up off the couch, and a flash catches my eye. I pull the curtains open farther and frown as I take in the sports car sitting in Bee’s driveway. It looks expensive, like something an out-of-towner might drive.

Donovan Firestone, Bee’s favorite grandson, is from Chicago, so that might make sense. Ironic that we’ve been living in the same city and he spent all his summers growing up next door, and yet we’ve never officially met. He was the sole recipient of her entire estate, which includes the cottage next door, its contents, and all the land that goes with it. To the left of her cottage is a huge plot of undeveloped land, which also belonged to Bee. I’ve been communicating with Donovan since her passing. This has consisted of a few emails back and forth regarding the estate and me checking on things until he had the time to come out this way to do it himself. Despite what Bee has said about him, he hasn’t proven to be much better than the rest of his family.

Donovan hasn’t seemed particularly concerned about the property, although it’s hard to read someone’s tone in an email. After the will was shown to the family and it was revealed that I was the executor, he called me with some questions about the property. He wanted a better idea of how many acres she had, as well as how much of that was water frontage, and if I could tell him the value. It was an unexpected blow—I was still processing Bee’s death, and all her beloved grandson cared about was how much the property was worth. Apparently Bernie, who had prepared Bee’s will, got a similar call, only this time asking about subdividing the lot and how easy it would be to parcel it off or develop it.

It irked me that this guy who had spent so many summers at Bee’s was so quick to look at trying to squeeze money out of the land by developing it. That maybe he didn’t care about the cottage, like Bee had suggested and I’d believed. I might not have spent time with Donovan, but in a lot of ways I felt like I knew him, because of the stories Bee would tell me and my observations from a distance. He was always helping Bee out, working on the cottage when he was here in the summers. From what I’d seen and heard, he had genuine affection for his grandmother.