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Monday afternoon Matt balanced a cardboard drink carrier in one hand as he reached for Rachel’s doorbell with the other. If it could even be called a doorbell. More like a cracked fixture that promised electrocution.

Yeah, maybe not.

He opted to rap his knuckles on the door instead. A very gentle rap, since it looked like one solid pound could very well knock the warped door off its hinges.

“Rachel,” he called out. Shoot, the sound of his voice alone might knock the door off its hinges.

He glanced toward the windows, searching for signs of life. Every curtain remained closed. Not that he would’ve been able to see anything past the condensation fogging up the panes.

“Wow, Rach,” he muttered under his breath. “Lovely place you’ve got here.”

His gaze wandered down to the gaping holes in the porch. The rotting floorboards. The uneven stairs.

Man. If he thought the house had looked run-down when he dropped her off late Saturday night—or early Sunday morning, rather—seeing it now in the full light of day made him half-tempted to call Wombat and ask him to tow it off to wherever he’d taken Rachel’s mangled car.

What in the world had Rachel been thinking, moving into a dump like this? She mentioned getting it for a steal. Well, no wonder. Reminded him a little of how Aunt Gracie described her and Noah’s house when they’d first moved in. Except without all the charm and potential.

Mindful of the holes in the rotting porch, Matt stepped down the stairs and set the drink carrier on the front hood of his truck. How long should he wait before he busted the door down to make sure she hadn’t been murdered in her sleep? Because if ever there was a place a person got murdered in their sleep, this was it. On a lonely country lane that gave off vibes of Deliverance .

He glanced at his watch. Sent her a text. She had asked him for a ride to work this afternoon, right?

Since this time of year was his downtime in between mowing season and snow removal season, he’d assured her that he could chauffeur her around for the next few weeks or however long it took to fix her mangled-car situation. Surely he hadn’t dreamed that entire conversation up.

He checked his watch again. All right. It’d been long enough. She wasn’t answering his texts. Time to do something. But since he didn’t actually want to bust down the door, he’d try the back.

After a quick tromp through tall overgrown grass that was definitely in need of his lawncare services, he found two cellar doors in the back. Two creepy-looking cellar doors. The kind that descended down to creepy basements with creepy skeletal remains chained to creepy walls.

His mom never should have let him watch so many horror movies growing up.

Yeah—no, thanks. He’d try a different door.

Climbing up the back porch stairs to the only other door available, he peeked in through a little window that must be above the kitchen sink. Because what he saw was an actually not too terribly creepy kitchen. A little glass mason jar of flowers sat on a small round table, proof that Rachel was at least trying to brighten up her decrepit little homestead.

He knocked on the door. “Rachel?” Tried turning the handle. “Rachel.” Started pounding with his fist. “Rachel!”

Okay, really. She should’ve answered the door by now. Or texted him back. She didn’t have a car. They were at least four miles outside of Alda. Not like she could’ve gone anywhere.

An uneasy feeling settled into his chest like that time he had pneumonia in middle school, making it hard to breathe. Had something happened to her? “Come on, Rachel, it’s me—Matt. Answer the door!”

When he couldn’t hear anything for several seconds other than the hollow plunk-plunk sound of her wind chimes, he gave in to the panic. Something was wrong. Way too quiet. Time to bust in.

He shouldered the door with all his might. It splintered. He rammed into it again. This time it cracked. Once more, and it snapped off the hinges.

After nearly falling onto the floor, he regained his balance and rushed through the kitchen, down the short hallway to the living room. Checked inside a small bathroom. Then headed up the staircase.

“Rachel!” he shouted, taking the stairs two at a time.

He rounded the top of the banister just as he heard a scream.

Which made him scream.

Rachel jumped out of a room, holding a baseball bat. They both screamed again.

It took Matt several seconds to realize nothing bad was happening, except maybe to their eardrums, as he and Rachel continued to stand at the top of the stairs, screaming.

Matt recovered first. “What is wrong with you?”

Rachel dropped the baseball bat and collapsed against the wall, clutching her heart. “Me? What is wrong with you ?”

“I thought you were dead.”

“What’s with you always thinking I’m dead?”

“You didn’t answer the door.”

“I overslept.”

“Overslept? Rachel—” Matt yanked his phone from his back pocket and held it right in front of her face. “Do you see what time it is?”

“Not when you hold it that close.”

“It’s the middle of the afternoon,” he said, sliding the phone back into his pocket. “That’s what time it is.”

“I haven’t been sleeping that well at night. I thought I’d take a little nap. Guess I fell asleep harder than I expected.” She picked up the baseball bat from where it’d rolled next to Matt’s feet.

“Guess you did. It’s almost two-thirty. Don’t you have to be to work by quarter to three?” The hospital was on the other side of Alda.

She must’ve done the math. Her eyes widened. She spun away from him, only to spin back and give another jab with the bat. “Did you break my kitchen door? I heard lots of noise.”

“Just get dressed.” Please. She was wearing tiny little gray drawstring sweat shorts and a form-fitting pink tank top. He was fairly certain that wasn’t Florence Nightingale-approved nursing wear. Plus, he didn’t know how much longer he could keep his gaze focused above her neck. The sooner she got dressed, the better for both of them.

“I’ll wait for you downstairs. And yes, I completely demolished your kitchen door. Sorry about that. Get dressed,” he said again when it looked like she was going to start arguing about the kitchen door.

The wooden floorboards groaned beneath his weight with each step he took down the stairs. “Overslept,” he muttered.

“I heard that.”

“You hear that, but you don’t hear me pounding down the door and screaming your name,” Matt muttered as he entered the kitchen and set about fixing the door.

“Yes,” she called down to him.

He lowered his voice to a whisper. “What about this? You hear this? Yeah, didn’t think so.”

“Are you still saying something?”

“Just get dressed,” he shouted.

After getting her door back on the hinges best he could—he’d swing back and fix it better later—he retrieved their coffees from the hood of his truck and returned to the kitchen.

Her creaky steps bounded down the stairs. “Kind of grumpy early in the afternoon, aren’t you? Ready to go?” Rachel entered the kitchen in a pair of dark blue scrub pants and a white sweatshirt with a pink stethoscope in the shape of a heart on the front. Her gaze dropped to the coffee he was holding as she tightened her mass of dark curls in a ponytail.

“For me? Thanks.” She grabbed it before he had time to respond and took a sip. “Ooh.” She wrinkled her nose. “I take mine with extra sugar for future reference.”

“And I don’t typically share mine for future reference.” Matt took the cup back from her hand and switched it out with the other cup in the carrier.

“Oh. Sorry.” She giggle-snorted. Between that and her ponytail, she was just as adorable as she’d always been in high school. And apparently just as scatterbrained. Because when he asked if she was ready, she merely took a sip of her coffee and said, “For what?”

“Work.”

“Ah! Why haven’t we left yet?” She started opening cupboard doors and banging them shut.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting more sugar for my coffee. They never put in enough. This’ll only take a second.” Another bang. “Where’d I put the sugar?”

“Rachel, we don’t have time for more sugar.”

“There’s always time for more sugar. Here it is.” She tugged a bag of sugar from the cupboard. A giant hole on the bottom corner leaked granules all over the counter.

“Now why is there a—” Her scream erupted the same moment Matt saw it.

Brown fur. Long whiskers. Pink tail. Rachel continued screaming as the mouse dashed from the sugar bag across the counter and onto the floor. Then it ran into the living room and disappeared through a sliver of space in the wall. But apparently that wasn’t far enough away for Rachel. She had swung herself up onto Matt’s back, circling her hands around his neck in a death grip.

“Rachel.” Matt tapped her hands. “Can’t really breathe when you grip my throat like that.”

“Sorry.” Her hands loosened and dropped to his shoulders. “I hate mice. Really hate mice. Hate ’em, hate ’em, hate ’em. Did you see that tail? I’m never sleeping again. All I’m going to see is that tail every time I close my eyes. Oh, I hate mice. Why aren’t all mice dead? God never should’ve created such detestable little beings.”

Matt didn’t know where to put his hands while Rachel continued to rant over the inhumanity of mice. On her legs? They were completely wrapped around his waist. Pretty sure that made them fair game. He reached for his coffee. That seemed the safest place to direct his hands at the moment. “Think you’re ready to get down now?”

“You kidding? I’m never setting foot on this floor again.”

Matt nodded. “Reasonable. I mean, you bought a creepy, foreclosed house in the country. One that probably sat abandoned for months before you moved in. Why would you expect for a mouse to show up? That mouse should have known better.”

Her hands moved back to his throat. “Keep up the jokes, pal. Not like I had a lot of options with a bank account of zero. Now get moving.”

“When I said I’d give you a lift to the hospital, this really wasn’t what I had in mind.”

Her grip tightened.

“You do realize if you make me pass out, you’ll be on the floor with the mouse.”

Her hands dropped to his shoulders. “Don’t even joke about such horror.”

Matt downed another gulp of coffee and stopped worrying about what to do with his hands since she clearly had no inhibitions about plastering herself to his back. Grabbing beneath her thighs, he hoisted her further up his back for better leverage. “Got everything you need?”

“Can you put it in reverse a little?”

He took a step back. Rachel leaned down enough to grab a bag and stethoscope off the kitchen table. “Now I’m ready.”

Matt shook his head. “You’re lucky my grandpa likes you.”

“How lucky?”

“Lucky enough I’ll fix your door. Not lucky enough that I’m carrying you all the way to my truck.”

“What about lucky enough to set two thousand mousetraps and get rid of all the dirty carcasses for me?”

“Depends.”

“On what?” She hopped down from his back after they stepped out of the house.

“I get it that you don’t like mice, but...” He touched her lower back and guided her to his truck. “How do you feel about cats and dogs? Because I know for a fact the animal shelter could always use some extra hands.”

And maybe while they were volunteering together, she could tell him what happened in Florida and why her bank account was sitting at zero.