Wake My Heart (Jasper Falls 1)

She lifted the lid of a box and found all of Nash’s socks. Why would she keep these? She sniffed one and scrunched her nose. It didn’t smell like him. It smelled like dust and cardboard. He wasn’t here anymore than he was in the cemetery.

She looked out the glass window of the door toward her house. She and Ryan never slept there. Something about being inside made her feel like the walls had eyes. She had no regrets about moving forward with Ryan. She loved him. But something about her home held her back, entrenched in memories that sometimes weighed her down, when outside of the house she often felt lighter.

A knock on the door startled her. Ryan looked through the glass. “What are you doing?”

“Thinking.”

He opened the door. “Do you want to be left alone?”

She shook her head and scooted over, offering him a place to sit. “No. How was work?”

He rolled his eyes. “My dad needs to retire. At least Uncle Frank stays out of the field and Finn can call the shots. I’m in the office and my dad is constantly micromanaging everything I do. Today, he asked me if I knew how to use a program we’ve been using since I graduated. I installed the damn thing.” He sat beside her on the couch and glanced at the box of socks, as if it were a perfectly normal thing to store. “By the way, he’s coming over tonight to watch the game.”

She laughed. “You do realize that you just went on about how much he’s getting on your nerves at work.”

He shrugged. “That’s work. He’s my dad. We always watch the College World Series together.”

And that was another reason why she loved him. Ryan might get frustrated, but he never stayed angry at those he loved. “You have fun with your dad. Perrin’s coming over to help me with some things.”

“You two are welcome to join us. Luke and Tristan are stopping by, too.”

“How about I come by after Perrin leaves?”

He lifted a brow. “How about you come over right now?” Just then his father pulled up. “Damn it. My parents always have the worst timing.”

She laughed and shoved him to his feet. “You invited him. Go say hello so he doesn’t come looking for you.”

He leaned down and kissed her slowly. “That’s a little preview of what’s coming tonight.”

“Can’t wait.”

When he disappeared, she reached into her pocket, pulling out the printout from the bank. Due to some hard times just after Nash had died and before the life insurance paid, her credit wasn’t as great as she thought. She didn’t use credit cards anymore and she didn’t have a car payment or a mortgage, so there was no way to quickly fix the dings in her record to create better credit. That meant the bank saw her as a risk on a refinance.

But there was still one other option. Maggie didn’t want Perrin’s input or anyone else’s. She hadn’t discussed anything about the bar with Alec at therapy. This needed to be her decision and hers alone. As she stared at her beautiful little home with the firepit in the back and the daffodils dancing along the fence, she knew her mind had been made up.

Perrin’s car pulled up at the street and Maggie stood, closing the lid over the box of socks and carrying it down to the curb. That night, while Ryan was in his basement cheering with his father and cousins, she and Perrin emptied her shed. Maggie kept a shoebox of items she felt were most important. A few of Nash’s guitar picks, his Led Zeppelin T-shirt, his favorite coffee mug, and the last grocery list where he wrote I love you on the bottom.

Seeing her shed empty and all her treasured belongings on the curb filled her with a sense of purpose and certainty. This was moving forward. She couldn’t carry all the pain with her, and she didn’t want to. Funny how keeping the things that made her happy somehow kept her sad. She carried her shoebox into the house and set it on the stairs.

Perrin waited on the couch with her laptop. “You’re sure about this?”

Maggie handed her a beer and took a long sip of her own. “I’m sure.”

“You want to watch?”

She sat down beside her sister and looked at the screen of her computer. Perrin clicked the mouse and the sale went live. A photo of Nash’s Fender guitar filled the auction page with all his other instruments.

Maggie had told Perrin she needed to do something to get over what had happened to her. It had been good advice for both of them. Deciding to buy the bar was both terrifying and exciting. It helped having a partner.

Her decision to sell her house to get the rest of the money wasn’t an easy one, but the right choices are rarely easy.