Heart racing in her chest, she stared at the text unsure what to do. Because she’d pushed him away, and here he was still trying to take care of her. After what’d happened in the bathroom just now, the point of comparison wasn’t a comfortable one. And it meant a lot. It meant . . . maybe even more than it should.
Which made it hard to know how to respond.
She should just delete the message and pretend she never got it. But instead she found herself wanting to keep it, wanting to be able to reread it, wanting to know it was there. She slipped her phone back in her purse and put her car into reverse again.
Maybe Maverick would hear her silence and stay away. Just like she’d asked.
Is that really what you want? a little voice whispered inside her.
It didn’t matter. This was about what was right. Because if Grant ever found out that Maverick had been inside their house, let alone that he was texting her, she was certain there wouldn’t be much she could do to smooth that over.
On a sigh, she deleted that message after all.
FROM OUTSIDE, THE house appeared perfectly normal. A brick-and-siding rancher on a quiet street in a quiet neighborhood. It was a house Grant had bought and renovated to flip—but when the trailer where Alexa had grown up got condemned as uninhabitable, Grant had done what he always did and came to their rescue after Alexa had promised she wouldn’t let his house get so bad. Grant agreed in part because he said he couldn’t stand to see the mother of his soon-to-be wife living in squalor.
So her mother had been living here, rent free, for almost two years. Though part of Alexa felt bad that Grant was supporting her mom this way, his help ensured that she lived in a nice, safe place and allowed Alexa to cover the food and medical expenses her mother’s disability checks couldn’t.
It would’ve been so much harder to support her mom alone, even with her salary and the remainder of Tyler’s small life insurance policy. With that, Alexa covered what she needed for her mom, paid for her own tuition, and saved as much as she could in case of emergency.
At the front door, Alexa took a deep breath and braced herself for how bad it might’ve gotten since her last visit two weeks before—she hadn’t come the previous week because of how fresh the marks from her fall had still been on her face. She knocked twice and opened the door. “Mom? I’m here.”
“In the kitchen,” her mother called.
Alexa closed the door behind her and stepped from the small, tidy foyer—the foyer was always tidy to keep up appearances—into the living room. Her shoulders fell. The piles were . . . everywhere. Piles of stuff. All kinds of stuff. Waist-high and worse. Clothing. Boxes of pictures and keepsakes. Used furniture. Lamps. Pictures and mirrors that weren’t hung and would never get hung. Garage sale and flea market finds, some of them not even taken out of the bag—because it seemed to be the acquiring and possessing of stuff—rather than the actual items themselves—that her mother prized and needed.
Her mom called what she did collecting, and she considered herself a pack rat. But, really, Alexa’s mother was a hoarder. Had been for as long as Alexa could remember. Her mother hoarded everything and anything to fill the empty spaces inside her—empty spaces caused by her mother dying when she was young, her husband leaving her, and her only son dying in a motorcycle accident.
Wearing an old stained house robe, Cynthia Harmon came into the living room from the kitchen on the opposite side of the room. “Don’t look like that. It’s not so bad,” she said. She ran her fingers self-consciously over unkempt shoulder-length gray-brown hair. Wrinkles cut into her plump fifty-eight-year-old face. She walked a little stooped over, the result of being really overweight and having a bad back she always complained was sore. Anxiety and hoarding and irregular stints on antidepressants hadn’t been kind to her.
Queasiness curled into Alexa’s stomach. How had the piles in here grown so much in just the last two weeks? This was why Alexa tried to get over here for at least a few hours every Saturday . . . She shook her head, refusing to get sucked into an argument about the house the second she walked through the door. “Why aren’t you dressed? We need to leave soon.”
Carefully picking her steps, her mother made her way through a narrow path lined with stacks of newspapers, magazines, junk mail, and years and years’ worth of photo albums, to her favorite recliner and sat down. Alexa couldn’t remember a time when her mother didn’t keep herself surrounded by those photographs. “I was thinking I might not feel up to going today.” She sniffed and pushed herself back in the overstuffed chair, almost knocking over a full ashtray resting on the arm.
Alexa wasn’t surprised by her mother’s words—it was normal to have to convince her to do things she needed to do. But offer to take her to a yard sale or a flea market or an after-Christmas sale and she was dressed and ready to go faster than you could blink. “Mom, you need to go. We already canceled this appointment once, and I’ve scheduled off work this morning to take you. I’ll choose an outfit for you if that will help,” she said, moving farther into the room toward the hallway that ran to the bedrooms.
“No, I don’t want you to do that,” her mother said, shooting out of her chair. The ashtray toppled over onto a stack of newspapers. “I don’t want you back there. I don’t need you to pick my clothes.”
Alexa frowned and gingerly stepped out of the way so her mom could get around her, and nearly tripped over the broken poles of a lamp as she did so. Making decisions as simple as what to wear sometimes caused Mom a great deal of difficulty, so her strident refusal to let Alexa help probably meant her bedroom was as bad as the living room. Or worse. Alexa had been so busy getting settled into Grant’s house—well, their house now—that she hadn’t spent the time she usually did over here cleaning and trying to cull through the piles. It was only through Alexa’s constant battles with her mother that the place had remained as livable as it was for as long as it had. Left to her own devices, her mother would’ve filled the place floor-to-ceiling by now. Just like when Alexa and Tyler were kids.
It was why her father had left them when Alexa was almost nine and Tyler was thirteen. Their dad hadn’t been able to deal with the hoarding. Alexa could still remember them fighting about it. After each new loss, it just got worse.
“Have you eaten breakfast?” Alexa asked. Entering the kitchen, she cursed under her breath as a rancid smell hit her smack in the face. Dirty dishes filled the sink and spilled over onto the adjacent counter. She hoped it was just days’ old food causing the smell and not a dead mouse somewhere.
“Yes,” her mother called back.
Alexa opened the refrigerator, which was emptier than she usually let it get. She mentally added a grocery trip to her to-do list for the weekend. “What did you eat?” she asked loud enough for her mother to hear.