Page 43 of Bed and Breakup (Dial Delights #15)

Molly

“Molly!”

I jump at Robin’s yell and bang my head on the brick front of the fireplace. I’m still seeing stars when she bursts into the dining room.

“Molly, I need you!”

“I’m busy,” I say irritably as I push the goggles from my eyes and rub the growing lump on my forehead.

Clint and his posse of advisers and assistants are scheduled to arrive at eleven, and we must be cursed, because things keep going wrong.

After we polished the dining room’s centerpiece chandelier and changed out the bulbs two weeks ago, it wouldn’t light up, so we had to take it to the electrician to fix whatever was wrong with the wiring.

They didn’t finish it until this morning, and Robin has to pick it up so we can rehang it before Clint arrives.

And now the fireplace damper, which was working fine when we tested it last week, won’t stay open.

Clint’s realtor specifically requested we have a fire going when they arrive to prove it’s in working order, so I’m teaching myself to repair it under duress.

“It’s an emergency,” Robin says, frantic. “I must’ve run over a nail or something yesterday and now I have a flat tire. I need to get to the electrician fast if we’re going to get the chandelier hung before Clint gets here.”

Seriously? Is the universe playing another prank on us?

It’s a cruel reminder of the morning in 2018 when Robin abandoned the inn.

She loaded her suitcases and boxes into her car, only to realize the front passenger-side wheel was flat as a day-old Coke.

I refused to make it easier for her to leave me.

Instead, I watched her struggle from the porch, getting some perverted kind of satisfaction from her frustration.

Now I pull my hand from my forehead, my fingers smeared with soot. “I’m dealing with my own emergency at the moment,” I say, reaching for a can of WD-40. “Just take my car.”

“The chandelier’s too big. It won’t fit in your car.”

“Then change the tire yourself,” I say, sliding my goggles into place and leaning back into the fireplace. “You’ve done it before.”

“But you can do it so much faster,” Robin whines. I know she’s right; I’ve changed about a million flat tires since learning how on Gram’s clunker before I was old enough to drive it myself. “Without the chandelier, the dining room will look dark and sad. Please?”

I take a deep breath in and out, staring up at the accumulated ash and rust above me.

The stressful lead-up to our walk-through with Clint and his team has made for a tense week at the Hummingbird.

We’ve been fighting almost as much as when we first arrived at the inn in June.

I keep telling myself it will be better once we’ve gotten past this step.

I hope I’m right, or else we’re going to end this thing the same way as last time: hating each other’s guts.

“Fine,” I say, emerging from the fireplace. “But you’re helping me.”

We bicker our way through putting on the spare, an activity sure to escalate an argument between any couple, but especially us, especially here.

Robin gets annoyed at how long I spend reading the manual, which is obviously always a good idea.

I yell at her for stupidly resting her leg under the jacked-up chassis, which could lose her a limb.

I’m still muttering under my breath when she pulls out of the driveway and I return to freeing the jammed hinges of the damper.

I manage to finish and get a fire started just as Robin returns with the antique crystal chandelier.

I wipe the muck off my hands and rush to rehang it in its place at the center of the dining-room ceiling.

Robin hands me tools while unhelpfully reminding me Clint is due to arrive at any minute.

Right when I connect it and the bulbs flick on, there’s a knock at the door.

“Ladies! So good to see you,” Clint says as soon as we answer, both breathless and high on adrenaline. He wraps Robin in a hug, then freezes before he can do the same to me. “Oh my god, are you all right?”

“What? Yeah, of course,” I say with a too-big smile.

He reaches toward my face but stops short of touching it. “Are those bruises?”

I rub my face and come away with a smear of soot. “Oh. No, just some gunk from—um, car trouble,” I say, deciding that admitting to fireplace issues is a bad way to sell a house. “Excuse me,” I add as I run off to the hall bathroom to wipe my face.

When I return, Robin has shown Clint and his team into the entryway. I shake hands with his lawyer, his realtor, his assistant, and his financial adviser/life coach, all of whom are expensively suited gay men who make this whole ordeal feel very formal.

“It looks just like I remember it,” Clint says, spinning with his arms spread like Maria in The Sound of Music. “Isn’t it gorgeous, y’all?”

“So charming,” Clint’s assistant says, not looking up from his iPad.

Clint walks over to the grand staircase and strokes the banister. “I helped strip and polish all this natural wood back in 2012. Remember, Molly?”

“Of course I remember,” I say, trying not to get distracted by Clint’s life coach peeking into a closet we forgot to organize. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Clint’s realtor leans all the way down to the bottom stair. “These look awfully tall,” he says. “Is the house ADA compliant?”

“It meets all historical property requirements. We can share that paperwork with you after the tour,” Robin says quickly.

Meanwhile, I silently wonder if we made the wrong choice by not hiring our own realtor. We already had a buyer in mind and didn’t want to lose out on a percentage of the sale. But what if Clint’s realtor hits us with a question we can’t answer?

“Speaking of tour,” Robin says, “shall we begin? This is the main floor, and our check-in desk is just down the hall.”

The group starts walking farther into the house, and Robin and I catch sight of the tall ladder and tools still set up in the dining room at the same moment.

Her eyes widen, and she tilts her head toward the room in a gesture that I’m guessing means she expects me to handle it.

I know she’s better with people, but why do I always get stuck with the dirty work?

“This wall here is where we used to have a gift shop with Hummingbird Inn merch,” Robin says, drawing the group’s attention away from the dining room.

I rush in to shove the tools under a tablecloth. But when I collapse the ladder and try to heave it toward the basement, I accidentally knock over a chair.

Clint’s head appears in the doorway. “Everything all right in here?”

“Better than all right,” I say, shoving the ladder in a corner and righting the chair. “Just forgot to put this ladder away after some last-minute cleaning.”

“So cozy!” Clint says, spotting the roaring fire as he leads his group into the room. “I’m glad it still works.”

“Good as new!” Robin says brightly. “As is our chandelier, refurbished and ready for a new generation of guests.”

Robin’s using her TV voice, which, considering how much we’ve already been butting heads today, gets under my skin. But Clint and his posse are eating from the palm of her hand.

“Look at how shiny the crystals are!” Clint says, delighted. “So much better than that ugly modern garbage the management company put in here.”

Robin stands tall. “We’ve worked hard to bring back the inn as you remember it. Shall we look at the kitchen?”

Even if her schmoozing is driving me bananas, I know it’s what the moment calls for, so I stay quiet.

The tour continues, with Clint delighted by Key’s murals, his realtor and lawyer skeptical of every detail, Robin countering that the inn is a one-of-a-kind treasure, and me rolling my eyes whenever the group is looking the other way.

I know I need an attitude adjustment, but I’ve got soot under my fingernails and I haven’t eaten anything all day and, honestly, that flat tire situation has me remembering the worst day of my life.

An hour later, we’re back in the entryway answering final questions when I hear a suspicious clank.

Everyone else politely ignores it, but I’m racking my brain to figure out what it was when I start to smell smoke.

“Shit,” I mutter, running to the dining room as smoke starts billowing into the hallway.

“—fine, I’m sure, just a log readjusting—” I hear Robin saying to our guests’ concerned questions before she’s cut off by the fire alarm.

Coughing, I cover my mouth and nose with my shirt, then slide the handle of the damper back to open, but it won’t stay put.

I hold it in place with one hand and start scooping sand from a decorative bucket onto the flames.

Meanwhile, Robin escorts Clint and his team outside, presumably convincing them all that everything is totally fine, spitting out a bunch of smoke is just something working fireplaces do sometimes.

“What the hell, Molly?” Robin says when she returns, immediately dropping the friendly tone she’d been using for guests. “I thought you fixed it.”

“I thought so too,” I say, moving to open windows. “But I was rushed because you couldn’t handle a flat tire on your own.”

“Well, it nearly ruined the whole tour,” Robin says. “Now Clint’s realtor is on high alert. I promised him we’d get a professional out to look at it before the inspection, but this fiasco could lower their offer.”

I honestly do feel terrible for putting the inn at risk by lighting a fire without being completely certain the damper was fixed.

And I know that this time has truly been different, that we’ve shared the load instead of all the messy work falling on my shoulders.

But my guilt and logic are no match for my anger, which is sparking into its own poorly contained flame.

Robin blaming me, even if it is actually my fault, pushes me into old patterns.

I can tell I’m having an outsize reaction to carrying this responsibility, to having to frantically google how to fix a fireplace, replace Robin’s tire, hang a chandelier, and then having all our hard work literally and figuratively burn up in our faces.

Unfortunately, knowing I’m overreacting doesn’t mean I can stop it. If I open my mouth to respond, I’m afraid I’ll either scream or cry. So instead, I stomp out of the room toward the stairs.

“Where are you going?” Robin says, following me.

“To lie down,” I grumble, knowing my exhaustion is clouding my judgment.

“Now?” Robin scoffs. “What about all this smoke and mess?”

“You clean it up,” I reply, halfway up the first flight. “I’ve done enough.”