Page 24 of Scr*wed By the Minotaur in Hallow's Cove
“Take your time,” Britt said from the kitchen. “We don’t have to talk about it right now.”
I nodded, staring at my knees, wrung out and raw. The tea was steeping when she returned, the mug pressed between my hands. I could barely feel the heat, but the gesture landed. We sat side by side in the hush, and it was only after I’d drained half the mug that Britt finally asked, “Are you going to stay in the city, or head back to Hallow’s Cove?”
The question was soft, but it cracked open the tremor I’d been holding on to for hours.
“I don’t know,” I whispered, cheeks burning. “I need to stay here and fix this—but I am knee deep in demo of the shop in Hallow’s Cove. I can’t be both places at once. I don’t know what to do. I feel split in two…” I trailed off pathetically.
Britt made a tsk sound. “You don’t have to decide today. Just get through the next five minutes, and then the next, and the next. Hell, I’ll stage a sit-in if insurance gives you any more grief. I’m still flexible from yoga class.”
It was supposed to make me laugh, and it almost did.The next morning, I rose early. While I hadn’t figured out long term, I couldn’t leave Britt and the shop as it was. It wasn’t her responsibility. We spent the next two days in a fog of triage. Britt made it her mission to salvage whatever we could: old photos, a handful of undamaged books, the battered sign from the window. I called the plumber, the insurance rep, the disaster cleanup crew, and my landlord, and tried to sound like a person who had their shit together. The shop emptied out box by box, the shelves stripped bare and left to warp in the cold. I boxed up the smallest things that mattered: a tin of my mother’s favorite tea, a bundle of dried lavender she’d hung from the ceiling, a handful of polaroids from the first year I worked there after college. The rest was junk by comparison, a loss I could live with. But the rest—the history, the love, the literal blood and sweat—was gone.
That night, I lay awake in Britt’s guest room, limbs heavy, brain picking over the wreckage with the slow, endless precision of a forensic accountant. I kept thinking about what Maisie said, about how you do all the things you put off once death has stripped away your excuses. I tried to imagine my mother, hands on her hips, surveying the mess and deciding it was time to start over. She’d probably crack a joke about biblical floods, then make me sweep out the mud while she called the neighbors to see who wanted sopping packets of discount nasturtiums.
I missed her so much. The absence was a living thing, clawing at my insides. I wondered if it was stupid to miss her more now, when she’d been gone for months, than in the first weeks after her funeral. Maybe because before, I had been so busy keeping the shop above water—literally and figuratively—that there hadn’t been time for grief to get its hooks in so deep. Now, with nothing left but the bones of her life and my own empty hands, the loss felt fresh all over again.
The next morning, Britt was up early, boiling eggs and lining up phone calls with the precision of an air traffic controller. She pressed a cup of coffee into my hands, then nudged me toward the shower with a gentle, bossy hand. “You’re not going to solve everything before lunch,” she said. “But you can put on clean underwear and eat breakfast like a human being.”
I did as told, sitting in the puddle of sunlight that spilled through Britt’s kitchen window, and let her mother me. For the first time since the call, I felt a little less like a ghost haunting my own life. I made it through two eggs and half a banana before the silence got uncomfortable.
I pushed away from the table and wandered into the living room. The city morning was muffled: a constant, distant hum of traffic, the occasional siren, the slow, predatory prowl of the garbage truck. I checked my phone—no new messages. No calls from Rick.
I hated that I hoped for one even though I told him I needed to do this on my own.
Quietly, I left Britt’s apartment and walked the ten familiar blocks to my mom’s old house. It stood at the end of a dead-end street, a pale yellow two-story with a crooked mailbox and a porch swing that still creaked in a breeze. I’d spent my whole life in this house, every inch of it mapped into the muscles of my body. I unlocked the front door and stood in the entryway, letting the heavy smell of old air and lemon cleaner hit me in the face. I still didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to leave the city without addressing the house I grew up in.
Nothing had changed. Her shoes were still lined up in the entry, practical and well-worn. Coats hung in the closet, including one I’d outgrown a decade ago but she refused to donate because “it made me look collegiate.” The living room was set for the ghost of a party, the runner on the table pressedcrisp and flat. I walked from room to room, checking for ghosts, finding only the same aching stillness. In my old bedroom, the twin bed was made tight, complete with hospital corners just as my mother had taught me. I opened the closet, half-expecting to see some relic of my childhood—a box of graded papers, an old soccer trophy—but it was empty, except for a single wire hanger and a forgotten scarf.
I sat on the bed, hands folded in my lap, and tried to think of some reason to stay. There was comfort in the familiarity, in the way the air bent around me, settling in all the old grooves. But it didn’t feel like home anymore. It felt like a place I’d already left, like a chapter I’d reread so many times the pages had gone thin.
The plan, originally, was to rent out the house—to hold it as an escape hatch, a safety net if the flower shop in Hallow’s Cove failed. But now, surrounded by the echo of my mother’s life, I knew that was a lie.
I wasn’t coming back. I’d changed more in the last week than in the past year of mourning, and the idea of folding myself back into this house—of pretending the old patterns still fit—made me feel sick and small.
I was going to have to sell it. Not yet, maybe, but soon. The thought was brutal, but right. I needed the money if I was going to fix up the shop in the city, if I was going to have a chance at making the Hallow’s Cove thing work. The logical, adult part of me wondered why I hadn’t come to this conclusion months ago, but the rest of me—the soft, stubborn, petulant daughter—still clung to the memory of my mom’s hands on my shoulders, telling me I’d always have a home to come back to even after she was gone. I let myself cry for her, for the house, for every ugly and beautiful thing that had ever happened under this roof. The tears felt cleaner this time, more final—like a storm that, when it passed, left the sky clearer than before.
Chapter twelve
Rick
Ididn’thearfromLea for three days. Which, after the way things ended, was maybe fair, maybe the new normal. I tried not to be the guy who kept texting, who sent a running tally of “just checking in”s and “hey, you okay?”s. I tried to be the guy who kept his word, who gave her the breathing room I thought she needed.
But I was a liar and a hypocrite, and by the time her silence hit the seventy-two-hour mark, I was already inventing reasons to walk past the flower shop, just to see if the lights were on.
They weren’t. Not once. Not even in the middle of the night, when I left my own apartment with the excuse of midnight inventory, and stood on the sidewalk with my hands jammed in my jacket pockets, watching for a flicker behind her windows. At first, I told myself she was sleeping late, or working in the back, or maybe—just maybe—burying herself in whatever project she’d dreamed up to make the place feel like hers. But as each hour ticked by, that hope shrank, replaced by something sour and restless in my gut.
On the fourth morning, I lost the battle with my self-respect and called her. Straight to voicemail. I hung up before the beep, then slammed my phone on the counter. It wasn’t just nerves anymore. It was anger, low and smoldering, the kind that made my pulse throb in my temples and my hands clench into fists for no reason at all.
I grabbed my keys, shoved them into my pocket, and called to Bryce. “You’re running the shop today,” I barked, the clipped intensity of my voice making him jump. “I’ve got to go.”
I drove. Not fast, not reckless. Just the steady, single-minded way you do when there’s nothing else you can do. I stopped at the city’s edge, just before the bridge, and sat in the idling truck like a statue, wondering if this counted as stalking or saving.
There was a moment where I saw myself, really saw myself: a minotaur in a battered Ford, halfway to the city for a woman who might not even want him there, a woman who might already be packing up her failures and moving on, leaving Hallow’s Cove (and me) the way she found it. Fuck it. I was going after her. I wasn’t letting her leave without seeing what could have been. I wasn’t going to let this slip out of my hands again.
I drove, and the city took me like a punch. I parked outside her shop, not even caring about the expired meter or the glare of a meter maid. The doors to the place were propped open, air thick with the smell of mold and wet sawdust. I ducked inside, ready for anything except what I found.
Lea was nowhere in sight. A woman I didn’t recognize was there, standing on a half-collapsed milk crate and taping off a ruined section of drywall with hazard-yellow caution tape. She wore cut-off jeans, a shirt that said “Plants Before People”—she had to be Lea’s best friend Britt.
The second she saw me, her eyebrows went up. “Well, well. If it isn’t the minotaur of the moment,” she said, stepping down offthe crate and landing with a wet squelch. “If you’re here to sell us a dehumidifier, you’re about three days late.”
