Page 1 of Finding Silence
Chapter 1
Phil
* * *
“This is the one.”
I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.
If Mom were still kicking around, she’d be giving me a hard time for being so impulsive. She might have had a point, given I rolled into town less than four hours ago, and am about to put an offer in on a house.
What can I say? Who wouldn’t fall in love on the spot with this beautiful town nestled between stunning mountains? Hell, I was so taken, I found the one and only realtor’s office and walked right in, and am now about to buy my own little slice of this heavenly place.
“Are you sure?” Rowan, the realtor I dragged into my house-hunting mission, checks. “You haven’t seen the inside of the place yet.”
I spread my arms wide and twirl around in the dirt driveway.
“It won’t matter,” I assure her. “If I don’t like what’s there, it can be changed.”
“I suppose,” the younger woman mutters as she flips through the file folder she’s been carrying around. “At least it’s had an inspection done when it was first listed four months ago, and it passed. It looks like the building is structurally sound anyway.”
I turn to face her, grinning wide. “See? When it’s right, you just know.” I pat a hand on my chest. “In here.”
Rowan smiles a little uneasily, probably not used to someone like me. Someone who has taken a vow to live in the moment; to let the heart and not the mind rule.
The house itself is cute, but not necessarily remarkable. I think it might even be one of those prefab designs with one small dormer above the porch to the front door, and one over what looks to be a garage. But I do like the contrast of the natural beams of the porch and the slate gray siding and slightly darker trim. It looks fresh.
“It’s a little over twenty-five-hundred square feet, has three bedrooms—or two and an office—a loft, and two-and-a-half baths,” Rowan rattles off.
“It sits on the edge of a beautiful creek with rapids, on a property awash with wildflowers, with three-hundred-and-sixty-degree views of the mountains,” I add. “When I’m in the house I’ll be looking out, and that’s going to be my view. That’s why those things are more important to me. To top it off, this place is about five minutes from the sweetest little town I’ve ever seen. As far as I’m concerned, this place was made for me,” I gush.
“I’m getting that sense,” Rowan observes dryly, cracking a grin. “Do you at least want to have a peek inside?”
“Absolutely.”
When we walk in, I notice the house is completely empty, but for a thin layer of dust on everything. It feels like a clean slate; just what the doctor ordered.
“Is this brand new?” I ask Rowan.
“Technically it’s not—it was built three years ago—and was lived in for only a few months,” she clarifies.
“So it’s been empty for that long?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“It’s a bit of a sad story. It was built by a local woman and her fiancé, but he died two days before the wedding in a freak workplace accident. She couldn’t bear to live here by herself so she moved into town, but wasn’t able to bring herself to list the property until a few months ago.”
That is tragic.
“I can’t even imagine, that poor woman.”
When you come in the front door, you walk into an open-concept space. I’m guessing immediately to my left is the dining area, straight ahead would be the living room where the fireplace is, and to the left of that is a kitchen with a long island. The kitchen has a nice big window and a simple door leading out to the back deck, and from the large picture window in the living area you get a fantastic view of the creek and the mountains beyond.
In here it’s a little smaller than my place in Portland, Oregon, but out there I have all the space in the world.
Rowan shows me the two spare bedrooms and one bathroom off a small hallway that runs behind the fireplace on the right side of the house. Off the kitchen on the left side of the house is another hallway that leads to a good-sized master suite, a powder room for guests, a laundry room, and a stairway leading to a bonus room and third bathroom above the garage. That bonus room could be my home studio.
