ached from the two hours he’d spent sanding the floor. Still, the house was slowly coming along.
Russell pushed ahead of him through the door of his room and jumped on his bed, circling as he scratched at the sleeping bag. Chip was on the cusp of telling Russ to stop when the dog dropped with a belly-flop thud, jaw slack and panting.
After double-checking his alarm, Chip set the phone facedown on the table, switched off the light, and lay on his bed. For one solid minute he stared up at the ceiling, replaying the scenes of the day.
Watched the highlight reel fly by.
Captured the key moments.
Smiled to himself as he paused on one moment in particular.
He switched on the light.
Sat up. Pulled out his phone.
One text message to her parents, and he’d secured her email.
Now came the fun part.
Sixty-two blissful minutes later, after signing her up for a variety of e-newsletters, he was clicking Complete on the tenth catalog subscription for a Miss Leake, 425 Stonewall Heights Drive. Within days everything from All About Mastiffs to Potato Review to (his personal favorite) Rage Be Gone! would be making its way to her door. He even started a special subscription for Evie: Beyond Off-the-Grid. With any luck, Evie would yank the AC out of their house just in time for summer.
He scoured under his bed for his journal and a Sharpie, yanked out a piece of paper, and wrote his neighbor a message.
Four minutes later he pushed his feet back into the sleeping bag and flicked off the light. Chip turned on his side, watching her window through his.
He smiled to himself with one final glance at the sheet of paper he’d taped to the window.
And fell asleep.
Chapter 13
Bree
YOU’VE GOT MAIL
It took three times reading through the glass to register the words. She rubbed her tired eyes, peered through the dawning world outside, and read again.
At the bottom of the simple piece of scratch paper, there was a secondary note.
She squinted, and the blurry words came into focus:
PS: THANKS FOR THE SERENADE
Every muscle from her pinky toe to hip flexor cried out as she tenderly made her barefoot way down the stairs and to the front door. Why was she even doing this? Surely this was a trick, some rude power flex. She should ignore that note in the window and walk right back up the stairs.
Bree pressed her lips together. Turned the first lock. The second. The third.
Quietly, she cracked the door open. Peered down at the fraying doormat.
Mail? She had no nefarious packages from him. No evil surprises dropped on her doorstep.
He was just messing with her, per usual. Maybe now his plan was to include mind games.
But thirty minutes later, as she sat at the dining room table and opened her phone email, it clicked.
Her eyes followed the stream of new spamming emails, nearly all starting with “Congratulations! And welcome to our . . .”
Mail.
Oh, she definitely had mail.
Bree munched on her second plate of eggs and sausage as she clicked through the email catalog subscriptions with one thumb, deleting them one by one.
Her gaze shifted, though, with the sound that was becoming so familiar down the street. She stopped. Perked her ears.
“Evie,” Bree called over her shoulder to the kitchen, where Evie was fighting to choke down some kombucha. “The UPS guy is here!”
She danced to the living room window and heard Evie drop her glass on the countertop. Bree opened a curtain and peeked through.
Yes. It was definitely Gerald.
There was an upside and a downside to the UPS man’s appearance these days. The downside was that it meant Evie had ordered something else. Again. There were only so many candle-making kits one could squeeze inside an eighteen-hundred-square-foot-house. The upside was that the interactions between him and Evie were priceless. Bree liked to think of them as a bumbling version of a Hallmark movie on her doorstep. Every single time Gerald dropped off a package, she wanted to hide behind a curtain and watch the awkward sparks fly.
“But I haven’t ordered anything,” Evie said, rushing into the living room like there was a school fire drill, she was in charge of it, and she had no idea where the exits were. She pushed her hair up as though by mere force she could make the high bun higher.
But then—oh. Well, apparently with enough hair spray, she could.
Bree raised a brow as she helped Evie untie her apron. “You haven’t ordered anything, Evie? Really?”