over a stack of whittling tools on her way down the stairs as she checked the time.
6:59 a.m.
“Shoot. Shoot. Shoot. Shoot. Shoot. Shoot.”
Her advertisement said to come at seven.
She yanked the door open and ran out barefoot. The gravel dug into flesh as she jogged toward an old red pickup. She grabbed the driver’s side mirror as the door shut. Lifted a finger to the man in Carhartt overalls in need of a good wash.
“Sir, I think there’s been some mistake.” Her head jerked up to Chip’s second-story window as if expecting his glowering face to tower over them. But there was nothing. Nothing besides the lingering note saying SLEEP WELL in the window.
She glanced back to the farmer. “If you could move out of my driveway, and quickly, please—”
With a bit more prodding the farmer gave up and got back in his vehicle. The engine turned and he backed up, but just as Evie was hopping into her car, another car smelling of dozens of freshly baked strawberry swirl, chocolate chip, and asiago bagels swerved in like a shopper taking the last Macy’s parking spot on Black Friday.
“Ma’am,” Bree said, knocking on the person’s window. The woman had apparently decided to pretend this wouldn’t be a problem. “Ma’am, you need to move. My housemate needs to leave.”
The woman—looking everywhere but at Bree—started digging in her purse. She pulled out her phone and put it to her ear.
“Ma’am,” Bree said, knocking again at the window.
The woman nodded and started talking.
Bree exhaled impatiently. “I saw your phone. You. Aren’t. Talking. To anyone.”
A hum of commotion grew behind her, and Bree whipped her head around to see the crowd forming into a pushy sort of line to his front door.
A woman on his porch peeked through his living room window.
Panic rising, Bree heard a door slam and swiveled her head to see that the bagel woman had slipped out the passenger door and was now running toward his yard with her basket of bagels.
“Hey!” Bree yelled after her, just as her eyes glimpsed a man raising his fist and knocking heavily three times on the door.
Oh no.
No, no, no.
Bree felt herself slipping toward her own porch, but Evie just stood there, arms crossed with her keys dangling from her clenched fist.
Bree moved backward toward the bagel woman.
“Ma’am!” she called, but the woman either didn’t hear her as she pushed her way to the front of the crowd or—and Bree would’ve wagered her own house on this—was ignoring her with the deftness of a toddler wielding a cleaver.
Bree slipped past two men holding chickens.
Maybe she could just yell to everyone that this was a mistake. All a terrible, terrible mistake and they needed to go on home. There was nothing to see here. Just a typical, neighborly spat gone wrong.
Hi, everyone. Let me take a moment to explain. I’m Bree Leake, totally out of my mind and accidentally terribly clever, a person who will manipulate the lot of you to get back at my neighbor with my seditionist needs. Now, please, if you could just pack up your cattle . . .
Or maybe she just needed to go back inside and feign ignorance.
Yes, that was it. She had no idea what this was all about.
Nobody had seen her do the Craigslist post.
Nobody knew it was her.
This was all just a mistake. A bizarre little mistake. Just one of those funny things.
They could laugh over it during breakfast.
She’d stay inside until the last car was leaving, walk out onto the porch, and pretend she’d slept through the whole thing. Listen with dismay and pent-up amusement while he reenacted the bizarre morning. Eventually coax him to calm his nerves over breakfast. Because . . . perhaps she would ask him to breakfast.
She could.
He’d fed her dinner after all.
Just a few hours before.
Bree started inching her way toward the front door. She avoided Evie’s furious gaze as she started to cross the driveway, tiptoeing on gravel.
But then his door opened.
People started shouting.
“I have a 2010 John Deere 3520 tractor, only 480 hours on it!”
“I can make you a custom board-and-batten, seven-by-sixteen chicken coop. You pick the color. And I’ll throw in twenty-five beautiful Rhode Island reds like the one here for you.”
“Care for a bagel, sir? We have plenty!” the shrill woman who had parked in Bree’s driveway said, holding up her basket.
The crowd surged and Chip—holding a coffee mug and looking clearly undercaffeinated—sloshed coffee all over his hand as he stepped backward.