He hadn’t sold a patent. He hadn’t sold anything. Why hadn’t they shown up, these people he invited? It didn’t make sense. Had he given them the wrong date? The wrong address? Anything was possible, anything at all. Until you thought for just one second about the coffee. Then everything unraveled into the explanation I’d been hiding from for too long.
Adam’s behavior had slipped beyond eccentric long ago. He had bridged over into insanity.
–7–
Rise
Plan B Is for Sissies
Every night after the kids went to bed, I worked on a book I’d been trying to write for too long. I had sold a couple of middle-grade novels, but I wanted to break into the adult mystery market. The goal gave me hope for a completely new future.
I was exhausted after doing the laundry and unpacking from our Thanksgiving trip and decided the book could rest for another night. I stacked my hoard of mystery novels on the other side of the bed just under the pillow, where I was pleased to know they would remain undisturbed. It was now the empty side of the bed, not someone else’s side, and that reminded me to breathe easy. I climbed in with a notebook, a pen, and a remnant of the smile I’d taken to bed in the cabin.
I started making a short to-do list of errands to complete before we built a life-size version of our stick house. I really meant to do this, and it felt good. It felt big and loud and real. It felt alive.
The list filled the first page, then the second, and was well on the way to flooding the third when I dozed off. Even though it was already apparent that we were in over our heads, I had no intention of backing down. A woman stubborn enough to stay with an abusive man is not a woman who gives up easily. We would do this. We’d dive in and keep working, eyes straight ahead.
At the top of page four, I wrote, “Plan B.” I stared at the blank page, imagining the depressing alternatives. We could buy a tiny house and stack bunk beds in the corners. I could write in a closet or just give it up and keep programming. The kids would go off to college feeling as low, afraid, and small as they did today. I ripped the page out, crumpled it, and threw it on the floor.
Backup plans were for quitters. They were for people who were scared. They were not for people brave enough to hang red curtains and wear V-neck shirts. I told myself we had faced our worst fears and had nothing more to be afraid of. I pretended I believed it. “It’s do-or-die time,” I whispered. “Do or die.” And then softer, moving my lips with nothing more than a hiss coming out to warn away the nightmares that turned out to be inevitable whether I whispered or shouted, “It’s a figure of speech. Do or die. It’s figurative, not literal.”
The next week was crazy busy, and I wasn’t one to use the “c” word lightly. I spent Monday and Tuesday patrolling a thirty-mile radius from our house, looking for land. Several promising properties were eliminated by the cost, one by a den of snakes, and several more by the strict neighborhood rules that required I use an approved, licensed contractor. I had already checked with the city and learned I could pull my own building and plumbing permits, and act as my own contractor. But that didn’t mean neighborhoods had to approve me as a builder.
At sunset on Tuesday, a flood of texts came in from Drew while Roman and I were half lost and scanning ditches for realtor signs.
Drawing house plans? Drew asked. Where’s the oversize paper? Drafting ruler? Mechanical pencil? Where are you?
“Time to go home,” I told Roman, who had fallen into a sleepy trance. I stopped on the narrow side street I had wandered down and started a three-point turn that doubled to a six-point turn. When I shifted back into drive the final time, I spotted a handmade sign on a tree. Sloppy cursive writing announced one acre, with a barely legible phone number at the bottom. The acre looked like a park, with beautiful hardwoods trimmed high. It was on a hill with a pond on one side and a dense forest behind it. I pulled the passenger-side tires into the grass and got out, half expecting something terrible to appear—another snake den, skunks, vampires. But the land couldn’t be more perfect.
I let Roman climb out, and I called the number while we hiked through the tall grass. “The number you have reached is not in service. Please check—” I redialed, changing the uncertain 0 into an 8.
“We just posted the sign this afternoon,” a woman said, her Southern accent strong enough for a country song. “My daddy gave me that land when I turned eighteen, even though I said I wouldn’t never live next to him. That was thirty years ago now. I decided on a whim to sell.”
I made an offer on the acre over the phone. It was ten thousand less than they were asking but still ten thousand more than I had. Less than an hour later, we signed a basic, handwritten agreement on the hood of my car. When I flipped the paper over at a stop sign, I discovered that it was their receipt for four new truck tires and an alignment at Tire Town. I giggled until a few tears flowed. The entire thing was absurd. Maybe I really had traveled through Drew’s portal to an alternate reality. I wasn’t the sort of girl to buy an acre of land on a tire receipt. Roman laughed with me from the backseat, and I wiped away the tears, sobering. Today, I was exactly that sort of girl. The spontaneous girl in the rearview mirror was me after all.
Drew and I sketched preliminary plans at the dining-room table on giant sheets of paper, glancing over at the stick model for inspiration when things got tedious. We kept our pencils sharp and our lines straight, working into the early-morning hours to make sure the staircase width met code and the landing had enough room to swing around a king-size mattress. Roman slipped by in stealth mode, stealing our erasers and hiding under the table to gnaw on them like a teething puppy. The tenth time I pulled a fat pink eraser from his slobbery fist, I lifted him up to see the stick house. “This is what we’re drawing. We’re going to build a big house like this. One we can live in.”
“Yup,” he said, nodding his head until his eyes jiggled. His feet were running before they hit the floor. He skidded into my mostly empty office, where Hope and Jada were googling energy-efficient building ideas from the PC propped on my great-grandmother’s trunk. When they came up with something good, they shouted it out for us to incorporate. I could have moved the computer to the table, but the chaos of their conversations swinging from excitement to bickering and insults would have driven Drew and me nuts while we struggled to play amateur architect.