Page 72 of The Roommate Lie

I hesitate. Alice is hanging on every word—I’ve got Carrots eating out of the palm of my hand—but I’m officially out of sign material. So I go rogue.

“While the society was originally ladies only, they did eventually allow men to join. As long as they promised not to mess anything up.”

Henrietta barks out a laugh from her flower bed. “You’re not wrong.”

“Actually,” a sweeter voice pipes up from the other flower bed—Dottie? “Men were allowed to join pretty early on, even in the hand-watering days. The only one who’s ever been a problem was Bobby Simon last year. When he petitioned to use the Lilac House for his annual Super Bowl party. Like a darn fool.”

Interrupted and outdone—twice. Who knew tour-guide life was this cutthroat?

Beside me, Alice is delighted by the whole thing—the history, the War of the Tour Guides, all of it. She tries to keep herself together, but a giggle escapes. And that truly magical sound is going to haunt me until the day I die.

All that joy on her face does something to me. It feels like a challenge. Old instincts hum under my skin, and I’m desperateto pull her closer, to see if I can help that happiness of hers multiply.

But I give her a friendly shoulder nudge instead. Because I’m a gentleman…most of the time.

Alice pauses for some neighborly small talk, and I don’t know why that hits me as hard as it does. Why seeing her chat with Dottie and Henrietta makes my heart pull tight in my chest. No out-of-towner has ever fit in here quite like Alice. It’s as if this town was made for her, and I don’t want to think about how empty it’s going to feel when she’s gone.

After a few minutes, I nudge her past the Lilac House before those Old Birds can say too much. Just in case their next historic fact is about me and that time I tried to egg this place only to get egged by Dottie instead. Or when I wanted to spray-paint the side of the building, and Henrietta tackled me like a linebacker.

We don’t get far. Alice and I only make it a few houses down before she’s ready to cause a little hedgerow trouble of her own. Casting one last glance at the Old Birds, she drops her voice to a whisper. “Have you thought about how we’re going to do it yet? How we should infiltrate the Old Birds?”

I haven’t.

If anything, I’ve avoided thinking about it. The idea of unmasking the Victorian still doesn’t sit right with me. Involving the Old Birds only makes it worse. My relationship with them is complicated, that feathered trio is complicated, and my mood dims.

When I shake my head, Alice has a few ideas of her own. She pitches them as we continue our walk. Then, out of nowhere, it happens.Finally.

Alice turns her head toward the long row of lilac bushes beside her, the ones that frame the entire street. Pausing, she inhales that rich floral scent—and freezes with a jolt. Slowly, sheglances up at me, and I’ve been waiting for this moment all day. That woman has finally remembered our list.

“Number five.” She sighs happily. “Stop and smell the lilacs.”

I grin, drawing an imaginary checkmark in the air like I’m marking that item off our to-do list. “I’m just glad they bloomed while you were still in town.”

She stops to inhale that scent a few more times as we continue our tour of the hedgerow. There’s so much to see, and we even pass a few town slogan signs along the way. I’m not sure how many we have scattered around town, how many unofficial slogans we’ve adopted over the years. Dottie’s favorite—Ponderosa Falls: a great place to fall in love—is downtown by the courthouse where we issue marriage licenses. I showed that one to Alice a few days ago, but there are plenty of others.

That girl enjoys every slogan, following those signs like a trail. She notices the historic landmarks too, all the scattered pieces of history. But then she spots something else in the distance—the only landmark I wish she hadn’t.

We’re on the edge of the neighborhood, the very last street, when she sees the tiny bungalow on the other side of the intersection. All eight hundred abandoned square feet. It isn’t technically in the hedgerow. It’s right outside, forever looking in.

“Does anyone still live there?” she asks.

“Not anymore.”

It looks so much smaller with Alice standing beside me, so much more run down, and I pause, not sure what else I want to say. Except I’m in a strange mood, a self-destructive mood. So I keep going.

Alice already has plenty of proof I’m not her type, that she’s too good for me. Why not give her a little more?

“That’s where I grew up. We lived there until my parents split.”

I can see Alice trying to do the house-math in her head. Trying to figure out how a family of five could fit in anything that small. The answer is poorly. We fit in that small housepoorly.

I never thought twice about it until I was a teenager, when friends from school or girls I wanted to impress started wrinkling their noses at where I lived. I never knew how to deal with that, their comments or glances—all I could really do was distract them. There are a million bad ways to make people forget where you came from, and I perfected every single one.

But when Alice glances at me, there’s no judgement in her eyes. “You were so close to the hedgerow. Did you like growing up there?”

It’s such a good question, one that doesn’t hurt my feelings or make me feel self-conscious. “Yeah,” I say honestly. “I did.”

Maybe it looks small, but I always loved living here and being part of my family. My dad traveled a lot for work, but the rest of us were so close. When you get to live with your favorite people, the size of the house doesn’t matter so much.

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