Page 9 of Big Witch Energy

But the kids were inside, and responsible parents did not abandon their children in the middle of the night on the same day that they moved into a strange house in a new place. His kids had been through enough.

Despite the frigid temperatures, the door was standing open. Ben could swear he could see the silhouette of a tall, thin man against the lights of Shaddow House, but it didn’t look quite right…almost opaque?

Yeah, he needed to get some sleep.

***

Clark Graves’s office was all subtle masculine dominance, dignified navy and beige, dark polished wood, classic lines—the office of a covert douche-nozzle.

Ben didn’t want to be sitting in the “cozy” environs of Tanner, Moscovitz, and Graves, one of the island’s few law firms. He didn’t like Clark or his office or his face. The man oozed smarmy self-satisfaction, even in the emails they’d exchanged over the last few months, like he was assured that he was better, smarter, than anyone born on the tiny island. Like he was doing them all a favor by deigning to live there.

If he’d learned anything over his medical career, it was that better education didn’t necessarily mean smarter. Look at Caroline. She’d never been able to leave the island for, well, family reasons, so college was never an option for her. And her mind moved with a swiftness that scared the hell out of Ben, even when they were kids.

Caroline.

He’d hoped to slowly reintroduce her into his system, thoughtfully and with great preparation—not that awkward, rushed “hi there” kick to the gut the night before. But what was done was done, what was kicked was kicked. And all Ben could think of was his next opportunity to see her.

None of these thoughts were helpful, he noted, and would not settle the business that he and Clark were meeting to discuss. And he wanted this meeting to be over as quickly as possible—and not just because of Clark. He was more nervous about leaving his kids unattended on the island than he had been in Arizona—and there had been rattlesnakes in Arizona. And scorpions.

“I’m sorry that we had to meet like this, Ben, but as you said in your last email, interactions between yourself and my client have broken down to the degree that unmediated communication no longer seems productive or advisable,” Clark said, smiling that toothy grin meant to put Ben at ease. They were just a couple of guys sitting around, shooting the breeze. “Which is a lot of lawyer-speak for ‘I’m here to make sure everybody plays nice from here on out.’”

Ben gritted his own teeth at Clark’s tone, like he was too dumb to understand that “unmediated communication” meant sorting out the total breakdown of Ben’s relationship with the property management company that rented out Gray Fern Cottage. Martin Property Management was a sort of cadet branch of Martin & Martin Realtors, run by a nephew the family didn’t trust with home sales.

“Your interactions with my client have devolved,” Clark admitted. “Because of a series of misunderstandings. Perhaps Mr. Martin was a little…overzealous in his efforts to protect your property, which if you think about it, is a positive trait in someone who is renting your historic family home to strangers. If you would just put yourself in his place—”

“That’s the problem. My place. Clifford Martin’s not supposed to protect the property from me,” Ben told him. “He doesn’t have the right to tell me when I can occupy my own family home. Look, I’m not interested in a prolonged discussion. I just want to sever the relationship with the company as quickly and cleanly as possible.”

“Well, you have to admit that will be somewhat complicated by the fact that you have moved into the home in question,” Clark noted.

And that was the point of contention between Ben and Clifford Martin. Using Clifford’s services had made sense when Ben’s parents put the house up for vacation rentals. Clifford collected rent on time, kept the house clean, even arranged for repairs that time a frat bro tried to ride a Jet Ski down the stairs. But over the years, it seemed that Clifford felt more ownership of the house, establishing increasingly stringent usage rules for renters and making them uncomfortable, resulting in poor online reviews. Rentals declined to the point where the house was empty on July Fourth weekend the previous summer. That had never happened in all the years since Ben’s parents had moved.

When Ben saw the house sat unused on the island’s busiest weekend of the summer, he’d asked himself, what was the point of renting it out? And then he wondered, what was the point of paying a mortgage on an expensive home in Arizona when he had a perfectly comfortable house on Starfall Point? Why not move his kids somewhere they could live a quieter, calmer life, and maybe even thrive? The idea took hold, and Ben started preparations to take his family home.

He had expected his ex-wife to be the one who made the move difficult, but while she barely raised an objection, it was Clifford who responded with a list of reasons why Ben should just stay in Arizona. While Clifford railed about the house’s potential profitability and his own longtime dedication to it, Ben realized the objections boiled down to Gray Fern Cottage being the jewel of Martin & Martin’s “rental crown.” Clifford didn’t want to lose bragging rights to that gem, to the point that when Ben informed him of the family’s move-in date, Clifford yelled that Ben he had “no claim” to the house and hung up on him. From there, Ben was done.

So why was Clark pushing for Ben to stay in this unhealthy dynamic?

“There’s no home ‘in question,’” Ben replied, his voice level. “I own the home, legally, free and clear. There’s no question about it.”

“A home that you have under contract with Martin Property Management until the end of the month,” Clark reminded him.

“I used the company website to book all dates between our move-in and the end of the month, which is allowed by that contract,” Ben replied, smiling. Clifford hadn’t liked Ben using that particular loophole.

“And there’s nothing we can do to persuade you to renew?” Clark asked. “After all, you may need Clifford’s services again.”

“That’s not a consideration for me,” Ben said. “Beside the fact that my children and I have become permanent residents of Starfall Point, I make it a policy not to recommit to untenable situations.”

“That’s funny, that’s not what I’d been told.” Clark’s smile was banal, but there was a curdling edge to it, like he knew he was poking at an emotional bruise.

One of the better things about moving away from Starfall had been the anonymity. If Ben so much as sneezed at the grocery store as a kid, his mother asked about him having a cold by the time he walked home. Out in the world, no one knew anything about his life that he didn’t want them to know, and that included the slow, painful disintegration of his marriage.

Ben should have seen it, the way Isabelle talked about him and his med-school plans, the way she’d planned his career path for him. The way the kids seemed more like accessories than children, accessories meant to cement their marriage when he’d started to wonder if they’d made a mistake. He’d never had reason to doubt her story about “accidentally” conceiving far before they’d originally planned to have their first child, but then she’d insisted on naming their daughter “Benjamina,” just in case he had any inclination to leave. Things tilted toward the absurd years later when Josh was born. Isabella had actually suggested changing Mina’s name to Belinda, after Ben’s mother, so they might make their son a “junior.”

That was how she saw the kids, and Ben himself. Impassive art pieces in the gallery of her life, without their own feelings about how she placed them.

Also, Ben was pretty sure that had been a joke on The Office, and he wasn’t about to “Nard-Dog” his own child.

In the end, Isabelle had loved being a polished, presentable doctor’s wife a lot more than she loved the not-quite-polished doctor himself. It was what kept their marriage on its legs long after the kids couldn’t do it anymore, after the comfortable life they enjoyed couldn’t do it. He might have attributed these thoughts—which he only uttered to himself alone, in the dark of night, with a bellyful of scotch—as the mental meanderings of a bitter divorcé, if not for the fact that she’d left him for the chief of surgery at another hospital, who also happened to be the heir to an old-school timber empire.

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