Page 8 of My Favorite Lost Cause (The Favorites #2)

She sits upright and places her hand over mine. “Charlie…do you really feel nothing inside there? Nothing at all?”

I feel as if every asset I possess is about to be bled dry .

It’s on the tip of my tongue to say it, but I hold back.

Because this is Maren, who is a burst of springtime in the dead of winter and…

she genuinely loves this house. She loves it in that same gentle, all-encompassing way she loves her mother and her sister and her dogs and perhaps even me, and though I can’t imagine caring deeply about any of those things, I like that she does.

But none of that changes the fact that I don’t need this place and don’t want to be here a moment longer than necessary.

“I don’t know, Maren. It’s hard to see past some stuff.”

“What stuff?”

My jaw shifts. I didn’t want to get into this, but Maren will find a way to force the issue, so I might as well. “That my mom was living like this,” I finally say. “Or more to the point, wasn’t living here at all, and I didn’t even fucking know. I should have come back to see her.”

She leans her head on my shoulder. A whole day of travel and her hair still smells like roses. “Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know.” The words are so quiet they’re barely audible.

“Life got busy. It wasn’t easy to get here, and she always offered to come up.

” Those are shitty answers, but not nearly as shitty as the truth: that I didn’t come because I just didn’t care enough.

My mother suffered about as much as anyone can suffer—she lost an eight-year-old she adored to cancer—and I couldn’t take a week out of my worthless life to visit.

Maren sighs. “I hesitate to say this, because it feels manipulative, but I’m going to say it anyway. I’d say it even if I hated the house: you feel guilty, I think, and you’re going to keep on feeling guilty if you don’t fix it up. ”

“You’re right. That does seem manipulative.”

She laughs and nestles closer. “You know I’m right. If you forget about the time it’ll take and what it might cost, picture yourself back in New York after each outcome and tell me how you’ll feel.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m going to keep feeling like shit either way,” I argue.

“Only significantly poorer in one of those scenarios. And what am I supposed to do with this grand Southern manor after it’s all fixed up?

I’m never getting married. I’m never having kids.

I’m sure as hell not going to vacation here alone .

It’s just gonna sit vacant and decay all over again. ”

“I’m not saying you can’t sell it eventually,” she replies. “But your mom wanted to see it shine again. You can do that much and decide the rest later.”

“We still have no idea what it’ll cost.”

There’s a polite cough from behind us. Elijah stands there, looking somewhat uncertain. Perhaps because I’m sitting here cuddling with the girl who introduced herself as my sister.

Maren lifts her head and smiles at him, sunny and untroubled, because she’s affectionate with everyone and has never noticed that I’m only affectionate with her. “How was it?”

“So, from a structural standpoint, it’s salvageable,” Elijah says, “but there’s pretty significant water damage in the basement—you’ll need to underpin the back left corner, and there’s some necessary remediation to keep it dry going forward.

There’s also a fair amount of water damage in the attic because that roof has been in bad shape for a while.

We’re talking replacing joists and redoing the upstairs ceiling. Plus the roof, obviously.”

“That’s not that bad,” Maren says cheerfully.

Fuck my life.

“Maren,” I growl, “that’s a lot. And none of that makes this a house anyone wants to live in.”

Elijah runs a hand through his hair. “Yeah, it’s far from livable.

You’ve got radiant heat, which is pretty standard for the time it was built, but you’ll need to replace the copper pipes to get it up and running—not that heat tends to be a big issue here.

HVAC is shot, however, and a house of this size really needs two systems, not one.

The bathrooms are in bad shape; a lot of the wiring isn’t up to code. I’ll write it all up tonight.”

“Ballpark?” I ask.

“Basement—forty-five grand. Rest of the structural stuff, maybe another four hundred. Soup to nuts with high-end finishes, somewhere around a million. I can get you a quote if you’re interested.”

“But it sounds like it’s safe for us to sleep here,” Maren urges.

Elijah and I both gawk at her.

“You’re planning to sleep here?” Elijah asks, his voice stained by incredulity, and why wouldn’t it be?

Maren’s got thirty thousand dollars in jewelry on a single wrist alone.

Even if Elijah doesn’t know that the bracelet is Cartier, that the watch is Chopard, that the purse she casually tossed on the porch floor probably costs more than his truck… privilege comes off her in waves.

She’s not someone who sleeps in a house like this.

“No,” I say.

At the same moment, she says, “Absolutely.”

I turn to face her. “Maren, he just said the roof could cave in.”

She hitches a shoulder. “Then we’ll sleep on the first floor.”

I groan. I already know there’s no arguing with her, so I’m not sure why I’m continuing to try. “There’s only one decent mattress upstairs.”

“Then we’ll drag it down here.”

“You seem to be ignoring the part about there only being one mattress. Though if you’d like to sleep here alone and let me go to a hotel, I can be persuaded. ”

She shivers. As much as she loves the idea of this house being possessed by the spirit of a very happy family who threw lavish parties, she doesn’t love its dead inhabitants that much.

“We can share a mattress for tonight and go get some kind of blow-up thing tomorrow,” she argues. “It’s just one night. We’ll see if we can get blankets and pillows in town.”

Elijah glances away, as if he feels he shouldn’t be listening in. Probably because the incredibly hot girl who claimed to be my sister is now talking about sharing a bed with me.

“Come on,” she says, “it’ll be like a campout.”

“Spoken by someone I guarantee has never camped.”

She grins as if she already knows she’s won, and that makes sense.

Of course she’s fucking won.

And if I don’t get her ass out of here, I’ll be playing croquet on this lawn alone next summer, trying to figure out how I just blew a million dollars on a house I never wanted in the first place.