Page 16 of Screwed by the Minotaur in Hallow’s Cove (Hallow’s Cove #6)

Chapter eleven

Lea

The drive to the city felt endless, a slow crawl through mist and uncertainty. I tried to focus on the road, the skyline, anything other than the pounding questions in my head.

My hands were shaking by the time I found parking outside the shop.

It was cold, drizzly, the sidewalk slick with a thin film of ice and city grime.

I stood in front of the door for a full minute, just staring at the peeling gold letters on the glass—THOMPSON & DAUGHTER—a little smudged but still legible.

Britt was waiting inside, face pinched and eyes red-rimmed.

She’d beaten me by an hour, probably, and had already picked up coffee and a box of donuts, like she could bribe the universe into giving us a softer landing.

The bell over the door still jingled when I stepped in, but it was a pitiful sound, like the whole building had caught a cold.

The air inside was a punch: mildew and scorched electrical, the sharp tang of rotted wood and wet, ancient carpet.

My sneakers squished as I walked. The floor behind the register, once soft and faded from years of standing, was buckled and warped, a sea of blistered laminate undulating under each step.

The counter—my mother’s counter, the one I’d sat behind and traced names into with a ballpoint pen while she did payroll—was bloated and stained, rising at the seams like a corpse.

Britt stood in the wreckage, untouched cup of coffee in her hands, and tried for a smile. She wore her old work boots and the green hoodie she’d lifted from the soccer team in college, and the sight of her in that uniform almost did me in.

“Welcome home,” she said, voice hoarse, and I just nodded, because there was nothing left in my own throat.

We moved quietly, surveying the damage. The storeroom was the worst. The shelves had collapsed, spilling a sodden rainbow of packets and seed tins into the water that still pooled ankle-deep.

My boots quickly soaked through, the icy chill climbing up my calves before I even reached the back wall.

The inventory—months, maybe years of it—was useless now.

I picked up a fistful of seeds, once so carefully counted and catalogued, now washed to a clump of mulch in my palm.

My mother’s neat handwriting on the labels was smudged, the ink bleeding out like the memory of her voice.

I sank onto a crate near the ruined shelving, brittle plastic giving way a little under my weight, and let my head drop into my hands.

I’d braced for this on the drive over. I’d told myself it was all just stuff.

I knew that, and it didn’t matter. Everything here was haunted, and now it was rot, all the history blurring into a sopping, ruined mess.

Britt crouched beside me, her usual armor of sarcasm gone.

She didn’t reach for me, just sat, mirroring my posture, squinting into the same dark corners I was studying.

“It sucks,” she said at last, with a kind of reverence, like she didn’t want to break the spell of the silence.

“I was hoping it’d be less bad, but, uh. Nope. Just garden-variety apocalypse.”

I coughed out a laugh, surprised to find I still had one in me. She smiled at that, a real, small thing, and then rested her chin on her knees, huddled in against the cold and wet.

“I guess we’ll have to pull everything,” Britt said, surveying the ragged remains of the back room. “Drywall, shelving, the whole nine yards. And the insurance guy is coming at two. Just so you know.”

I tried to answer, but my voice had gone sticky again, too weighted down with grief and mess to say anything. I picked at a loose thread on my jeans and stared at the warped ceiling tile above, counting the slow drip of the brownish water that still leaked, weeping for what it once was.

Through that haze, I heard Britt get up, boots squelching, then come back with a couple of towels from the front closet.

She draped one over my shoulders before wrapping herself in the other, pulling it tight like a cocoon.

“Look, we’re gonna need at least a dozen fans and maybe a priest to exorcise the place,” she said, voice dry but kind.

“But we’ll get through it.” She nudged my knee with hers.

“You want to crash at my place tonight? No way in hell you’re fit to stay at your mom’s house, and I made up the guest room.

It’s got blackout curtains and a weighted blanket. I even bought you the fancy oat milk.”

I tried to say no, tried to insist that I was fine, but the last twenty-four hours had left me hollowed out, running on pure survival and muscle memory. “Yeah,” I said, the word as limp as my spine. “I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

Britt’s mouth went soft at the edges, a comfort I hadn’t realized I was looking for. “You’re never alone, you idiot.” She slid her arm around my shoulders, holding on just long enough that I could feel her pulse, her warmth, the stubborn thrum of life that refused to be drowned by the mess.

The insurance guy arrived precisely at two, with a clipboard and a bureaucratic frown.

By the time he left, the shop was colder, darker, and I was shivering.

Britt locked the front door and turned to me with a look that said she’d carry me if she had to.

Instead, she just made me stand and follow her out to her car—the ancient, rusted Corolla that had ferried us to college and back a hundred times.

It smelled like old coffee and lemon air freshener, and as she cranked the heater, I let the hum lull me into the closest thing to peace I’d felt all day.

At her place—a cozy, second-floor walk-up above a laundromat—she hustled us inside and turned on every lamp, banishing the gloom.

I barely remembered to unlace my boots before collapsing onto her couch, towel still wrapped like a shroud around my shoulders.

Britt set water to boil, then rummaged in her cabinet for the chamomile tea I hated, but which my mom had always insisted on in times of crisis.

I almost cried again just seeing the blue box.

“Take your time,” Britt said from the kitchen. “We don’t have to talk about it right now.”

I nodded, staring at my knees, wrung out and raw.

The tea was steeping when she returned, the mug pressed between my hands.

I could barely feel the heat, but the gesture landed.

We sat side by side in the hush, and it was only after I’d drained half the mug that Britt finally asked, “Are you going to stay in the city, or head back to Hallow’s Cove? ”

The question was soft, but it cracked open the tremor I’d been holding on to for hours.

“I don’t know,” I whispered, cheeks burning. “I need to stay here and fix this—but I am knee deep in demo of the shop in Hallow’s Cove. I can’t be both places at once. I don’t know what to do. I feel split in two…” I trailed off pathetically.

Britt made a tsk sound. “You don’t have to decide today. Just get through the next five minutes, and then the next, and the next. Hell, I’ll stage a sit-in if insurance gives you any more grief. I’m still flexible from yoga class.”

It was supposed to make me laugh, and it almost did.The next morning, I rose early.

While I hadn’t figured out long term, I couldn’t leave Britt and the shop as it was.

It wasn’t her responsibility. We spent the next two days in a fog of triage.

Britt made it her mission to salvage whatever we could: old photos, a handful of undamaged books, the battered sign from the window.

I called the plumber, the insurance rep, the disaster cleanup crew, and my landlord, and tried to sound like a person who had their shit together.

The shop emptied out box by box, the shelves stripped bare and left to warp in the cold.

I boxed up the smallest things that mattered: a tin of my mother’s favorite tea, a bundle of dried lavender she’d hung from the ceiling, a handful of polaroids from the first year I worked there after college.

The rest was junk by comparison, a loss I could live with.

But the rest—the history, the love, the literal blood and sweat—was gone.

That night, I lay awake in Britt’s guest room, limbs heavy, brain picking over the wreckage with the slow, endless precision of a forensic accountant.

I kept thinking about what Maisie said, about how you do all the things you put off once death has stripped away your excuses.

I tried to imagine my mother, hands on her hips, surveying the mess and deciding it was time to start over.

She’d probably crack a joke about biblical floods, then make me sweep out the mud while she called the neighbors to see who wanted sopping packets of discount nasturtiums.

I missed her so much. The absence was a living thing, clawing at my insides.

I wondered if it was stupid to miss her more now, when she’d been gone for months, than in the first weeks after her funeral.

Maybe because before, I had been so busy keeping the shop above water—literally and figuratively—that there hadn’t been time for grief to get its hooks in so deep.

Now, with nothing left but the bones of her life and my own empty hands, the loss felt fresh all over again.

The next morning, Britt was up early, boiling eggs and lining up phone calls with the precision of an air traffic controller.

She pressed a cup of coffee into my hands, then nudged me toward the shower with a gentle, bossy hand.

“You’re not going to solve everything before lunch,” she said.

“But you can put on clean underwear and eat breakfast like a human being.”

I did as told, sitting in the puddle of sunlight that spilled through Britt’s kitchen window, and let her mother me. For the first time since the call, I felt a little less like a ghost haunting my own life. I made it through two eggs and half a banana before the silence got uncomfortable.

I pushed away from the table and wandered into the living room. The city morning was muffled: a constant, distant hum of traffic, the occasional siren, the slow, predatory prowl of the garbage truck. I checked my phone—no new messages. No calls from Rick.

I hated that I hoped for one even though I told him I needed to do this on my own.

Quietly, I left Britt’s apartment and walked the ten familiar blocks to my mom’s old house.

It stood at the end of a dead-end street, a pale yellow two-story with a crooked mailbox and a porch swing that still creaked in a breeze.

I’d spent my whole life in this house, every inch of it mapped into the muscles of my body.

I unlocked the front door and stood in the entryway, letting the heavy smell of old air and lemon cleaner hit me in the face.

I still didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to leave the city without addressing the house I grew up in.

Nothing had changed. Her shoes were still lined up in the entry, practical and well-worn.

Coats hung in the closet, including one I’d outgrown a decade ago but she refused to donate because “it made me look collegiate.” The living room was set for the ghost of a party, the runner on the table pressed crisp and flat.

I walked from room to room, checking for ghosts, finding only the same aching stillness.

In my old bedroom, the twin bed was made tight, complete with hospital corners just as my mother had taught me.

I opened the closet, half-expecting to see some relic of my childhood—a box of graded papers, an old soccer trophy—but it was empty, except for a single wire hanger and a forgotten scarf.

I sat on the bed, hands folded in my lap, and tried to think of some reason to stay.

There was comfort in the familiarity, in the way the air bent around me, settling in all the old grooves.

But it didn’t feel like home anymore. It felt like a place I’d already left, like a chapter I’d reread so many times the pages had gone thin.

The plan, originally, was to rent out the house—to hold it as an escape hatch, a safety net if the flower shop in Hallow’s Cove failed. But now, surrounded by the echo of my mother’s life, I knew that was a lie.

I wasn’t coming back. I’d changed more in the last week than in the past year of mourning, and the idea of folding myself back into this house—of pretending the old patterns still fit—made me feel sick and small.

I was going to have to sell it. Not yet, maybe, but soon.

The thought was brutal, but right. I needed the money if I was going to fix up the shop in the city, if I was going to have a chance at making the Hallow’s Cove thing work.

The logical, adult part of me wondered why I hadn’t come to this conclusion months ago, but the rest of me—the soft, stubborn, petulant daughter—still clung to the memory of my mom’s hands on my shoulders, telling me I’d always have a home to come back to even after she was gone.

I let myself cry for her, for the house, for every ugly and beautiful thing that had ever happened under this roof.

The tears felt cleaner this time, more final—like a storm that, when it passed, left the sky clearer than before.