Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 94313 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 472(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94313 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 472(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
Cursing, I put my boots back on and headed down to the basement to see if I could figure out what was wrong with the furnace. As I passed the back wall of the kitchen, I reached out and unconsciously touched the bottom of one of the picture frames hanging there. Inside was a photo of my grandparents when they were young. Grandma was holding a newborn—my dad—and sitting on Grandpa’s lap. When Gram had seen the photo, she’d looked at it for a moment and then turned to me. I like your house. This’ll be a good place for a family.
I couldn’t really imagine having a family or even a steady girlfriend at that point, but I’d still felt a little something in my gut when she’d said it. It did feel like a place you’d put down roots. Not once since I’d bought the place from my dad had it felt like a starter home or something I’d ever actually sell—even if it was a major pain in the ass most of the time.
“Okay,” I said, pulling on the little cord hanging from the ceiling to turn on the single light bulb that lit the room. I looked at the furnace. “What the fuck is your problem, now?”
Kneeling down to pull off the little door on the side, something in the way the light hit my back and tossed my shadow across the floor made me freeze.
For a second, I was standing at the hood of the Mustang, firelight at my back, while beautiful brown eyes stared up at me in the dark.
I fell back on my heels as a sharp pain shot through the base of my skull. I’d been dealing with migraines my entire life and I was usually able to stop them before they knocked me out, but between the hangover and the memory of the way Esther had looked at me before she’d realized I was an asshole—it was game over.
I barely made it up the stairs and out the back door before puking up everything Emilia had brought me for breakfast.
Chapter 3
Esther
Unsurprisingly, a person can get used to almost anything given enough time. Even a cabin with no electricity or running water in the middle of nowhere.
The first night was the worst. I’d panicked once I realized that I had no light, my heart racing, too scared to leave the couch, afraid that if I got up I’d somehow get lost in the tiny room. As the night grew colder, I’d stayed on the couch, pulling clothes out of my suitcase to layer on top of what I was wearing. I’d stared out the window, watching the trees sway in the wind and listening for sounds of wild animals or serial killers.
The next day hadn’t gone much better. That was when I’d finally looked into the bathroom to find that it was nothing but a minuscule room built on to the back of the cabin, a crude wooden seat open to a hole in the ground. There was no sink or shower, for obvious reasons, and the thought of never being able to clean myself somehow seemed worse than spending another night in the dark.
The cabin was situated with an old couch facing a small fireplace and I spent my second morning trying to get a fire started with napkins and a lighter I’d found in the kitchen, praying that the chimney worked and I wasn’t going to burn the entire building down around me. I ignored the intrusive thought that if I burned the place down it would constitute an emergency and I’d be able to call my parents to pick me up. Instead, I focused on the fact that if I got the fire started during the day I wouldn’t have to try and figure it out in the dark. The heat it would put out was just an extra bonus, I was initially just hoping for a little light.
The kitchen was stocked with large, blue, hard plastic barrels of water, random cans of vegetables and soup, and more dehydrated food than I’d ever seen in one place. There was a propane camp stove inside one of the cupboards that I was afraid to use in case I accidentally blew myself up, but after a few days of eating room temperature cans of soup I figured it out. It made things a little easier.
I spent the first two weeks waiting for my parents to change their minds and come get me. They couldn’t really leave me out there for an extended period of time since they knew I was pregnant and eventually I’d have to see a doctor, so I treated the situation like an extended camping trip. I assumed that it wouldn’t take long for them to cool down and realize that my pregnancy wasn’t the end of the world.