“I could get us a room at an inn on the main street,” he suggests, his nice way of saying this place is unlivable for anyone who isn’t a ghostbuster.
“Ryner said I needed to stay here,” I say soothingly, walking up the cobbled path to the chipped, wooden door.
My heart is beating so fast I want to throw up. I’m going to come face to face with Malachy and Kathleen as a couple. They’re going to be all loved-up in my face, and I will be working under their roof.
I knock on the door.
“Do they know we’re coming?” Callum asks behind me.
“Yeah. Whitney said she sent Mal an email with our flight schedule.”
Not that Mal cares, I assume. A knot is forming in my stomach. Is he going to make my life hell here?
“You should text your mum,” Callum points out.
I don’t turn around to face him. “Uh-huh.”
“She’s heartbroken over the fact you didn’t stop to say goodbye.”
“We celebrated Christmas with her,” I grumble.
I wasn’t in the mood to listen to more of her begging me to cover my birthmark with more makeup, pleading with me not to go to Ireland—her most loathed country in the universe—and generally making me listen to her gossip about people I don’t know.
There’s no answer, so I knock again, this time harder. It’s freezing outside. Callum is shifting from foot to foot next to me. He’s wearing a pea coat and a powder blue dress shirt.
He snakes his arm around me, rubbing my shoulder. “Relax, love. It’s going to be fine. It’s been eight years, he’s married, and then there’s the matter of you being madly in love.”
He says that as a joke, but I can hear the question in his voice. Before I officially signed the contract for this project, I told Callum about what happened with Mal eight years ago, hoping to hell he’d make the decision easy for me and express how uncomfortable he felt about it. I’m not much of a Mary Sue who likes to be told what to do, but it would’ve been a much-needed nudge in the right direction if Callum wasn’t so smugly confident he’s the shit.
Okay, so also, maybe I wasn’t one-hundred-percent honest.
I left one thing out. A teeny-tiny thing. So tiny, in fact, you could fit it in your back pocket. More specifically, the napkin. The contract. But for a good reason: it doesn’t matter. Mal clearly hasn’t kept it. He’s happily married. Plus, it’s just flat-out embarrassing.
I knock on the door a few more times, but it’s clear no one is home. How fitting of Mal not to be here just to spite me. Of course, Kathleen played along. I decide two (or rather, three) can play this game. I will not be standing outside getting pneumonia just because he has some illogical vendetta against me. The main street is far enough that we’ll have to call a cab to take us there if we want to warm up in a pub or an inn, waiting for his highness to arrive, and by the time a taxi gets here, we’ll be freezing.
I press my shoulder against the door and take a deep breath.
“Rory?” Callum asks behind me, his voice laced with worry.
“Promise not to judge me, Cal?”
“Promise.”
With a shove, I push the door, knowing damn well it isn’t locked, because last time—eight years ago—it wasn’t, either.
We spill into the house, which also looks a thousand times worse inside than it did before. Callum’s lips purse as he walks around, observing the old, ragged furniture and strewn-about newspapers, CDs, and vinyl records. There are poetry books and half-rolled, wrinkly notebooks on the couch and a coffee table and breakfast nook buried under piles upon piles of junk, dust and dirt everywhere.
I look around in shock, trying to spot one inch on the floor that’s not suspiciously sticky or covered with something.
I turn around to Cal, and his throat bobs, but he says nothing.
“I’m sorry you have to sleep here tonight.” I bite my lower lip.
It is a dump. Not because it’s small or old, but because it’s messy and filthy. It looks like no one has lived here in a while. Cobwebs adorn every corner of the room. Doesn’t matter that it’s freezing outside, I still find myself cracking a window just to get rid of the stale scent of a thousand takeout boxes left to rot somewhere in this place.
“It’s fine.” Callum tries to sound calm and collected, even though I know he pays his cleaners extra to come in every day and make sure everything is spotless in his Manhattan penthouse. “Quaint and charming. Besides, a roof is a roof. The people under it are what matters. You’re here. That’s all I care about.”
We spend the next twenty minutes touring the house. We start with the kitchen, where we find the root to the rancid smell: an unattended garbage bag sitting under the sink, a cloud of buzzing flies above it. Even though I don’t want to clean these two’s pigsty on principle, I also don’t want to puke, so I throw it out.