Saltwater Secrets - Amelia Addler Page 0,36

Morgan tried not to crack a smile. “She’s right.”

“You can stay with us,” Jade said. “Chief Hank is letting us move into his old house. How long is your visit?”

Tiffany shrugged her shoulders. “I haven’t decided yet.”

What? Were they living in the twilight zone right now?

The house burns down and Tiffany just shows up and encourages Jade to be reckless? And doesn’t know how long she’ll be here? Did her house burn down, too?

That was an odd way to frame a visit, but neither Jade nor Margie questioned it. They were just excited that Tiffany was there.

Morgan didn’t know what her game was, but she’d find out eventually. In the meantime, she had to keep Jade alive. It seemed that it was going to be no easy task to keep her beautiful, stubborn goat of a friend out of trouble.

Morgan let out a sigh. This was going to be a long four weeks.

Chapter 14

As excited as Jade was about seeing Tiffany, it didn’t feel like they had time to catch up – there was so much that they needed to do at Chief Hank’s place. For the past few months, he’d been slowly working on improvement projects – both on his own and with various contractors. The projects were mostly done, but nothing was cleaned up, and the house wasn’t exactly livable yet.

On top of that, Jade felt anxious that their insurance policy might require them to file a claim within twenty four hours or something. She’d lost everything in the fire, though, so she had no way of even finding their policy. Luckily Morgan still had her computer and promised to take care of it.

“I’ll figure it out and then we can send them a list of all the stuff that we lost.”

Jade frowned. “Do you think it’ll be that easy?”

“I don’t know,” Morgan said with a shrug. “It doesn’t matter though. We’ll figure it out. Don’t worry.”

Jade had to force herself to smile. She still felt awful. If felt like the fire was her fault – maybe she did accidentally cause the fire to start somehow? This idea that someone started the fire was…terrifying. She’d much prefer if it was just a freak accident, even if it was her own fault.

In fact, there was a good chance that it was an accident. She decided to wait for the final report from the specialists before she would worry.

Being able to put that out of her mind was helpful in planning the rest of the day. Her goal was to get Chief Hank’s house to the point that they’d be able to spend the night there. She didn’t want to impose on her hosts’ hospitality too long – though her mom seemed thrilled to have them visiting, maybe Chief Hank didn’t feel the same?

Jade just remembered how angry Brandon would get if she had anyone stay longer than a night – he’d never say anything to the guests but would stomp around the house until they left. It made everything tense.

Not that Chief Hank was like Brandon but…it still worried her. The last thing she wanted was to be a bother, and it felt like that was all she’d been to anyone recently.

After telling her mom her plan to move to her “new place” as soon as possible, they argued for about half an hour until Jade agreed to spend at least one more night at her mom’s.

“Can’t you give your old mom one night?” she insisted. “It’ll be fun!”

“I know it’ll be fun Mom, but we really need to…”

“Oh hush!” She stopped and pointed a finger at Jade. “And one more thing. You are not moving into that house until there are cameras installed and running. I don’t care how long it takes and I don’t want to hear any complaints!”

Jade put her hands up. “Okay, okay! I won’t fight you this time.”

The first step was going to the house to assess what needed to be done and to make a list of things that they wanted to buy. There wasn’t much – Chief Hank had the basics.

Morgan wanted some blackout curtains for her room and a new duvet set for the bed. Jade decided that it might be nice to get her own bed set as well, just to make it feel a little more like home. Even Tiffany decided to get in on the fun and buy some decorations.

After that, they spent a few hours shopping before returning to face the task of cleaning Chief Hank’s house.