Page 23 of Scr*wed By the Minotaur in Hallow's Cove
I threw on clothes—yesterday’s shirt, clean enough, and my softest jeans, the ones with the paint flecks and a rip in the knee from when I’d tried to move a dresser alone. I didn’t bother with makeup or my usual braid; I just pulled my hair back into a poof and silk scarf and jammed my feet into battered sneakers. I grabbed my wallet, keys, and a granola bar, and was halfway out the door when I realized I hadn’t called Rick. We were supposed to go on our first date that night—or our first redo date.
I found his number—he’d entered it in my phone as “Rick (Hardware, Minotaur, Hot)”—and pressed call before I could overthink it. It rang twice before he answered, voice already awake but husky.
“Hey, Lea,” he said, and I heard him smile into the phone. “Was just thinking about you.”
I almost lost it right there. “That’s sweet. Listen, something came up. I have to go back to the city for a day, maybe two.”
I braced myself for a joke, a quip, something to detach us from the awkward intimacy of actually needing each other. But all he said was, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I just… it’s a long story. Can I tell you when I get back?”
He made a contemplative noise, then: “You want company?”
It was the last thing I expected, and I almost said yes, even though the idea of showing him the ruin of my old life made me feel naked and exposed. “I think this is something I need to do on my own.”
“Yeah.” He waited, giving me a full five seconds to change my mind, his voice softer than I’d ever heard it. “I get that. You know where to find me when you’re back?”
I could see him in my head, broad-shouldered and still a little awkward, pacing a hardware aisle or hunched over a cup of black coffee. I wanted to reach through the phone and grab on, but instead I just said, “Yeah. Don’t go anywhere, okay?”
“I won’t. Promise.”
I let myself believe it. Then I hung up, squared my shoulders, and headed for the car.
Chapter eleven
Lea
Thedrivetothecity felt endless, a slow crawl through mist and uncertainty. I tried to focus on the road, the skyline, anything other than the pounding questions in my head.
My hands were shaking by the time I found parking outside the shop. It was cold, drizzly, the sidewalk slick with a thin film of ice and city grime. I stood in front of the door for a full minute, just staring at the peeling gold letters on the glass—THOMPSON & DAUGHTER—a little smudged but still legible. Britt was waiting inside, face pinched and eyes red-rimmed. She’d beaten me by an hour, probably, and had already picked up coffee and a box of donuts, like she could bribe the universe into giving us a softer landing.
The bell over the door still jingled when I stepped in, but it was a pitiful sound, like the whole building had caught a cold. The air inside was a punch: mildew and scorched electrical, the sharp tang of rotted wood and wet, ancient carpet. My sneakers squished as I walked. The floor behind the register, once soft and faded from years of standing, was buckled and warped, a seaof blistered laminate undulating under each step. The counter—my mother’s counter, the one I’d sat behind and traced names into with a ballpoint pen while she did payroll—was bloated and stained, rising at the seams like a corpse.
Britt stood in the wreckage, untouched cup of coffee in her hands, and tried for a smile. She wore her old work boots and the green hoodie she’d lifted from the soccer team in college, and the sight of her in that uniform almost did me in.
“Welcome home,” she said, voice hoarse, and I just nodded, because there was nothing left in my own throat.
We moved quietly, surveying the damage. The storeroom was the worst. The shelves had collapsed, spilling a sodden rainbow of packets and seed tins into the water that still pooled ankle-deep. My boots quickly soaked through, the icy chill climbing up my calves before I even reached the back wall. The inventory—months, maybe years of it—was useless now. I picked up a fistful of seeds, once so carefully counted and catalogued, now washed to a clump of mulch in my palm. My mother’s neat handwriting on the labels was smudged, the ink bleeding out like the memory of her voice.
I sank onto a crate near the ruined shelving, brittle plastic giving way a little under my weight, and let my head drop into my hands. I’d braced for this on the drive over. I’d told myself it was all just stuff. I knew that, and it didn’t matter. Everything here was haunted, and now it was rot, all the history blurring into a sopping, ruined mess.
Britt crouched beside me, her usual armor of sarcasm gone. She didn’t reach for me, just sat, mirroring my posture, squinting into the same dark corners I was studying. “It sucks,” she said at last, with a kind of reverence, like she didn’t want to break the spell of the silence. “I was hoping it’d be less bad, but, uh. Nope. Just garden-variety apocalypse.”
I coughed out a laugh, surprised to find I still had one in me. She smiled at that, a real, small thing, and then rested her chin on her knees, huddled in against the cold and wet.
“I guess we’ll have to pull everything,” Britt said, surveying the ragged remains of the back room. “Drywall, shelving, the whole nine yards. And the insurance guy is coming at two. Just so you know.”
I tried to answer, but my voice had gone sticky again, too weighted down with grief and mess to say anything. I picked at a loose thread on my jeans and stared at the warped ceiling tile above, counting the slow drip of the brownish water that still leaked, weeping for what it once was.
Through that haze, I heard Britt get up, boots squelching, then come back with a couple of towels from the front closet. She draped one over my shoulders before wrapping herself in the other, pulling it tight like a cocoon. “Look, we’re gonna need at least a dozen fans and maybe a priest to exorcise the place,” she said, voice dry but kind. “But we’ll get through it.” She nudged my knee with hers. “You want to crash at my place tonight? No way in hell you’re fit to stay at your mom’s house, and I made up the guest room. It’s got blackout curtains and a weighted blanket. I even bought you the fancy oat milk.”
I tried to say no, tried to insist that I was fine, but the last twenty-four hours had left me hollowed out, running on pure survival and muscle memory. “Yeah,” I said, the word as limp as my spine. “I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
Britt’s mouth went soft at the edges, a comfort I hadn’t realized I was looking for. “You’re never alone, you idiot.” She slid her arm around my shoulders, holding on just long enough that I could feel her pulse, her warmth, the stubborn thrum of life that refused to be drowned by the mess.
The insurance guy arrived precisely at two, with a clipboard and a bureaucratic frown. By the time he left, the shop wascolder, darker, and I was shivering. Britt locked the front door and turned to me with a look that said she’d carry me if she had to. Instead, she just made me stand and follow her out to her car—the ancient, rusted Corolla that had ferried us to college and back a hundred times. It smelled like old coffee and lemon air freshener, and as she cranked the heater, I let the hum lull me into the closest thing to peace I’d felt all day.
At her place—a cozy, second-floor walk-up above a laundromat—she hustled us inside and turned on every lamp, banishing the gloom. I barely remembered to unlace my boots before collapsing onto her couch, towel still wrapped like a shroud around my shoulders. Britt set water to boil, then rummaged in her cabinet for the chamomile tea I hated, but which my mom had always insisted on in times of crisis. I almost cried again just seeing the blue box.
