Page 4 of Until the Storm Breaks (The Midnight Men #1)

I step inside the house, Midnight Manor as my mom used to call it with a wink, and let my eyes adjust to the dim interior.

The living room furniture sits under sheets like ghosts.

The kitchen is a graveyard of good intentions.

There’s a newish refrigerator with the Energy Star sticker still attached, but the stove’s been disconnected and pulled away from the wall.

The window over the sink is cracked in three places, held together with duct tape.

I test the stairs going up. The third one’s gone soft, probably from the water damage after the fallen tree caused a burst pipe.

At the top of the stairs, I start checking rooms. Dominic’s old room is first. This is where the tree fell through the roof. They’ve covered the hole with OSB board that’s buckling from a year of rain. The smell of wet particle board hits me before I even fully open the door.

The other rooms aren’t much better. Two are packed with boxes from after the storm, sealed and labeled in Dominic’s handwriting.

I step through the doorway of one and lift the flap of the nearest box. Mom’s good china wrapped in newspaper dated thirteen months ago. The day we packed everything so the contractors could start work. We’d moved Mom to the cabin, thinking distance would help.

It didn’t. That first morning, she got past the nurse and showed up in the doorway crying that strangers were destroying Dad’s house.

The crew just stood there, hammers in hand, watching this confused woman beg them to stop.

Dominic called it off. Any construction sound after that would set her off, even from the cabin.

Now she’s gone and the house is still waiting.

I rub my face with one hand and move on, walking past what used to be my bedroom, converted to Mom’s sewing room after I left for college. No bed there, and I’m not sure I want the memories.

I check the room at the end of the hall, the one Theo and Alex used to share.

Jack’s leather jacket is lying across the bed—the only bed now, since Alex took his when he moved out years ago.

His boots are kicked off by the door, sheets tangled, a half-empty bottle of tequila on the nightstand next to someone’s earring.

There’s no sign of his bike out front, so he must’ve taken a ride somewhere.

Typical Jack. My youngest brother showed up before me even though nobody knew where he was. He staked his claim, then vanished.

The master bedroom door won’t budge when I try it.

Swollen shut from moisture. I shoulder it twice, then stop.

I don’t really want to sleep in my parents’ room anyway.

Something about keeping that door closed lets me imagine they’re still in there.

Mom reading one of her mystery novels, Dad already sound asleep after a long day at Midnight Boxing, the gym that had kept this family fed for years before mom opened the Black Lantern.

I stand in the doorway, taking it all in. The house I grew up in is dying. The place where Mom made blackberry jam every August, where Dad taught us to throw punches in the basement, where I wrote my first terrible stories at the kitchen table.

“Shit.” I pull out my phone and call Dominic.

He answers on the second ring. “What?” He sounds exactly like Dad used to when we’d interrupt him during a big fight on TV.

“The house is completely fucked,” I say, with more bite than necessary.

“Yeah, no kidding. Why do you think we’re selling? Jack already claimed the only working room upstairs. You’ll have to take the right cabin.”

“The cabin? Where Mom lived?” And just died. But I don’t say that.

“I know, I know. But I need you on the property to deal with house and estate stuff, and it’s the only spot that works.

We had it cleaned out. Maren helped a lot.

Shared bathroom and kitchen in the middle, Maren’s on the left.

” He pauses, takes a breath. “I know you hate being here, but try not to be a dick about it. She’s the only reason those cabins are even livable.

She’s been maintaining them for free in exchange for cheaper rent. ”

He hangs up before I can tell him I already screwed that up.

I stand there for a moment in a house that’s literally falling apart around me. The metaphor’s so obvious it’s embarrassing. Published writer, and this is the best symbolism I can get? My childhood home falling apart as the family breaks up? Damn.

Through one of the windows, I can see the sun starting its descent toward the water, painting everything gold and pink. It’s beautiful in that aggressive way the Pacific Northwest does beautiful, like it’s daring you not to be moved by it.

I grab my duffel and Mom’s urn from the porch and head toward the cabins.

From the outside, they look better maintained than the main house.

The cedar siding still looks good, and string lights hang along the porches.

Someone, Maren I assume, has added a gas grill off to the side next to a couple mismatched chairs.

It’s actually... nice.

Maren’s sitting on her porch steps now, and she’s changed into yoga pants and an oversized Midnight Boxing hoodie. Dad’s old gym logo is faded but still visible: two gloves crossed over a star. She’s got Laila’s head in her lap, running her fingers through the dog’s fur in long, slow strokes.

The late sun turns her skin and her hair golden. When she shifts, I catch the curve of her neck, the delicate line of her collarbone disappearing into that hoodie.

She looks up as I approach, and something flickers in her eyes. Amusement, maybe. Or pity. “Let me guess. The house is a disaster, and now you’re slumming it with me.”

“Dominic says I’m in the right cabin,” I say.

“Dominic says a lot of things.” She scratches behind Laila’s ears, and the dog’s eyes close in pure bliss.

“Your towels are in the bathroom, blue ones. Don’t use all the hot water; the tank’s small.

Sometimes the pipes knock and screech, especially around 4 a.m. That’s normal.

Oh, and if you hear scratching under your bed, that’s probably just Gerald. ”

I cock my head. “Gerald?”

“The raccoon. He’s harmless and lives under the porch.

Sometimes he finds his way into the crawl space under the cabins.

We have an understanding.” She stands, and Laila whines at the loss of contact.

Maren’s taller than I remembered, and I try not to notice the comfortable way she fills out those yoga pants.

“Oh, and Calvin? The walls are thin. Really thin. Even with the middle section between us, you can hear everything. So maybe keep your brooding to a minimum, especially early mornings. I’m often at the bar from late afternoon until one-ish, so I sleep in.

” She pauses and narrows her green eyes.

“And if you’re planning to bring any of your groupies up from Seattle, well. ..”

She lets it hang there. Groupies. Like I’m still that guy from the viral article—‘The Millennial Hemingway Is Literature’s Sexiest New Voice’ or whatever bullshit headline they ran about me. The fact that she even knows about that, thinks about me that way, is irritating.

She disappears into her cabin before I can respond, leaving me there with the distinct feeling that I’m in over my head.

I stand there another moment before hauling my stuff to the right cabin and pushing open the door.

It smells like cedar, lemon oil and thirty years of Pacific Northwest summers.

It’s one room, maybe four hundred square feet, with a door on the left wall that leads to the shared kitchen and bathroom.

The hospital bed’s gone, of course. In its place, the original bed, a queen with a quilt I recognize as Mom’s work.

Log cabin pattern in blues and grays. A bookshelf holds paperbacks and field guides to Pacific Northwest birds.

Someone’s left a bowl of sea glass on the dresser, colors ranging from white to deep emerald.

They’ve cleared out the medical equipment and the pill bottles.

All the apparatus of dying. Most of her things, too.

But not everything. A coat hook by the door still holds one of her cardigans.

Gray wool, fraying at the cuffs, with tissues stuffed in the pocket.

I touch it, and it smells like her. Like lavender and coffee and that hand cream she special-ordered from France.

I set Mom’s urn on the dresser, still in its velvet bag, not ready to look at it directly. It seems too small to hold a whole person. Too small to hold Susan Midnight, who filled every room she entered, who sang Motown while she cooked, who could still throw a decent left hook at sixty-eight.

The bed creaks when I sit. Through the thin walls, I hear Maren leave her cabin and enter the shared kitchen. The sounds are intimate, domestic. The toaster spring pops, a cabinet opens, a faucet runs briefly. Footsteps move back to her side, followed by the soft thud of her door.

Then I hear her voice from her cabin, low and warm: “I know, baby. I miss her too. She was supposed to teach me how to make her blackberry jam this summer. Said it was time I learned the family recipe.”

She’s talking to the dog. About Mom. About family recipes like she was family. And something in her tone, the genuine grief in it, makes my chest go tight.

“We’ll figure it out, Laila,” Maren continued. “You and me. We’ve got each other, right?”

There’s a soft whine, then the sound of the dog jumping onto the bed. Springs creaking. Maren laughing softly.

“Yeah, I know you’re not supposed to be on the furniture. But I won’t tell if you won’t.”

One summer. Sell the estate. Get out.

But Maren’s in that other cabin, mourning my mother in ways I can’t seem to. Calling Laila “baby” and talking about family recipes. Like she’s more at home here than I am.

And me? I’m sitting on a too-small bed in a too-small cabin, staring at walls that feel like they’re closing in, already knowing this is going to be so much harder than I thought.