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Martha tolerated my nonstop chatter all the way back to the estate and through the night, retreating to the kitchen to bring me supplies of coffee and doughnuts. I was so excited that I barely tasted them as I scarfed them down. I was too excited for them to be anything but fuel for the whirlwind I was caught up in, calories to burn as my thoughts ignited in a bonfire of inspiration. No sooner had I licked the sugar from my fingers than I was back to work, filling a notebook with my scrawls; my footnotes had footnotes. When I felt like I couldn’t work by myself—Martha didn’t count; she was technically still awake, but her eyes had glazed over hours ago—I pulled out my phone and woke up my art partner Sandra with numerous apologies.
Twenty minutes and several promises that I wasn’t too drunk later, we both had our laptops out and were set to Skype through the whole night—in whispers to keep from waking her son—hammering out artwork and slogan ideas. Sandra pulled up some photos of the area, including a Prohibition-era shot of the very building I had just been drinking in, which Sandra tinted in the colors of Knox bourbon until it looked good enough to drink. We tossed font ideas back and forth, trying out each of my new slogans in different locations—upwards left? Down right? Centered, so as to draw attention to the proud Greek columns in the manor house photo?
I felt like I was soaring, like my heart was a hummingbird beating out of my chest, like my ideas were coming too fast for my breaths to keep up with them. This is going to be my big break!
I hadn’t felt half so alive in years.
When I finally came out of my daze of inspiration and said goodbye to a yawning but excited Sandra, birds were chirping outside the window, which was letting in the warm sun of a day I hadn’t even noticed dawning. The clock read 9 am, and the walls, desk, and floor were covered with so many sheets of paper it looked like they had been buried under an avalanche. An avalanche of less than pristine snow, however, since said pages were crammed full of the ideas that were going to bring Knox bourbon back to life in a way that hadn’t been dreamt of since Mary Shelley. Hunter wasn’t going to believe his eyes!
And, my brain fizzing with too little sleep and too much adrenaline, that thought led me to what seemed like the next logical step to keep the momentum going:
I had to tell Hunter!
I grinned, wide and purely delighted. Oh, I couldn’t wait to see his face! Let’s see how useless he thought advertising was after I knocked his socks off with this!
I bustled out of the library and into the manor house. It was a good thing that by now I was so used to this labyrinth that I didn’t have to pay careful attention to every landmark, because I wasn’t seeing anything this morning but a bright and beautiful future full of promotions.
I could hear him puttering around in the kitchen, and my grin widened to a measure that would have done justice to a Cheshire cat.
“Hunter, I—” I began as I entered.
But it wasn’t Hunter sitting at the breakfast table.
It was Paige.
THREE
“I didn’t stay over!” Paige blurted out before I could say a single word, standing up so quickly she nearly knocked over the creamer. “I just came by to get some old papers and letters for the historical society, and the breakfast was out, and well, Hunter just insisted that I stay and have a bite…”
“Oh. Oh, right.” Of course she hadn’t stayed over. Not my strait-laced sister.
Relief flooded me, but it was doomed to be a short-lived relief as my brain piped up helpfully that Paige’s defensiveness suggested she must have a certain desire to stay over, even if she hadn’t acted on it. My traitor of a brain further added that wait, what was I doing feeling relieved, anyway? Paige and Hunter were consenting adults, they could do what they wanted. My feelings didn’t matter.
They didn’t matter one little bit.
“Well, I’ll just leave you to that snooze-fest of a discussion, then—” I said as casually as I could—it felt like trying to talk around an open wound—while I used all my willpower to walk instead of run over to the counter to grab a bagel before making a dignified retreat.
Unfortunately for that whole ‘dignified retreat’ plan, Hunter came into the dining room at that very moment.
Seriously, what was it with that man and timing?
“Ah, Ally, won’t you join us for breakfast?”
“Nah, I’m good,” I said, starting to back away. “I’ve got a lot of work to do…”
“Really? Martha was just telling me that you’d spent half the night doing work. You ought to refuel before you collapse.”
The man had a point.
He saw me wavering and added, “A shipment of mangos came in this morning…”
Shit. I really loved mangos.
Also, I was this close to fainting.
Also also, if I didn’t tell someone who actually got it about my ideas, I might actually literally explode.