CLARKE i!” I said to Leith a little too brightly, I think, because his eyes widened—like I’d frightened him. Good. Maybe I could scare him off. “What can I do for you?” Even though I knew damn well what he was here about—what both of the Wilkes men were here about. My gaze flicked to the ghost of his dad standing next to him. Wilder looked relieved, and... hopeful, maybe? I didn’t like that one bit. Wilder had a bad habit of causing problems for me—problems that could be avoided if I simply said no. I looked away from him. “So what gives?” Leith asked and slid the baseball cap he was holding back on his head. My gaze snagged on the skinny silver hoop in his left earlobe as he did so. Why did hats make men hotter? It wasn’t like Leith needed any help in that d epartment. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, still trying to ke ep my voice light and easy. “Yes, you do, Clarke,” he said. Well, he was very sure of himself, wasn’t he? “Can we talk?” “About what?” I asked, feigning cluelessness. Innocently, I hoped. Leith rolled his eyes. “About that shit you said at the bar.” “I was drunk,” I r eplied then immediately regretted it. Me admitting that I said anything to him at the bar was going to give him inches, and the determination in his face told me he was ready to take miles. I should’ve relegated all my answers to a good, solid I don’t know. Isn’t that what lawyers told people to do? Or maybe that was I don’t recall. “I don’t remember.” Close enough. Even though I remembered. Vividly. And I wished I hadn’t said it—that Leith should take a closer look at his dad’s will—information that his dead dad had been hounding me about for months but telling Leith anything about that was against one of my rules.
I liked having firm boundaries with the spirit realm. It helped with the frequencies, allowing me to turn them up and down as I needed to. Honestly, I liked having firm boundaries in general. Collins would say that I had walls, but she didn’t really have room to talk there. Her walls were indiscriminate, where mine were strategic. I never approached the ghosts first. If they approached me, I k ept our interactions as brief as I could. I didn’t want a long list of ghostly familiars. And, most importantly, I didn’t pass information between the living and the dead. I treated it like the movies treated time travel: Don’t do anything that’s going to alter reality as the normies know it. Until that night at the bar. I didn’t even know why I did it. I wasn’t drunk. Tipsy, maybe. But not drunk enough to break one of my rules and forget about it. Maybe it was the way Leith was looking at me or the incandescent light of the bar. It was the same way I used to feel him looking at me when I was taking notes in history, like he wanted to figure me out. I didn’t know. But whatever the reason was, it wasn’t good enough to justify what I did. It was just stupid. “I don’t believe you, Clarke,” Leith said. “That’s your problem.” I shrugged. I walked past him—carefully avoiding walking through Wilder—most of the time, walking through ghosts was unpleasant at best and de eply uncomfortable at worst—and went to unlock my front door. “Please, Clarke,” a different voice said behind me. It was Wilder. He sounded like he was talking to me over the phone. I knew the look he was giving me; it had been on his face since he figured out I could see him and talk to him. It was a look full of both desperation and hope—like I could make everything right for Wilder and for his family, but I could also take it all away. It was a lot of pressure. I could choose to ignore him—turn him down and tune him out like I did to nearly everyone else who stood where he was now: between the living and the dead. I didn’t know what was in the will, but I could tell it was important. Wilder’s distress permeated every word he said to me. He couldn’t hide it— not even as a ghost. His heart was on full display, and it was filled to the brim with Leith. Just like how I imagined my dad’s and Boone Ryder’s were with Collins and me. My hand was on the doorknob. I took a de ep breath before turning back to Leith, whose winning smile had faded, and a look of defeat was rising in its place. His posture had shifted, and a soft line appeared between his brows. I was going to regret this. De eply. “Okay,” I said after a few seconds. “You can come in.” Leith brightened again, and I was momentarily frustrated at how pleasant it felt to contribute to that glow. I wondered how it would feel to bask in it. “Really?” “Really,” I said, sparing a glance at Wilder, who looked like he could fall to his knees at any moment. In relief, I assumed. “Can Bill come too?” “Who’s Bill?” For a split second, I wondered if Bill was someone or something I couldn’t see, which would’ve been quite a plot twist. But then I heard a bark from Leith’s truck. How did I not notice the truck when I was walking home? If I did, I would’ve snuck to my back door through the woods. Leith brought his hand to his mouth and let out a loud whistle using his thumb and pointer finger. Bill—who just looked like some variation of a farm mutt—opened the truck door and scrambled out. “Did he just open your door?” I asked. “Yeah, he’s a nightmare,” Leith said cheerfully. The dog might have been talented enough to open the door, but he didn’t close it. It didn’t seem like Leith minded. “What if I said no?” I asked.
Leith gave me a look. “You love dogs,” he said just as Bill’s head made its way right under my hand. I fought the urge to kneel and give him a good rubdown. “What makes you say that?” “I’ve known you my whole life, Clarke.” The sense of familiarity in his voice annoyed me. Everything about him annoyed me. It always had. As a kid, Leith was kind of a perfect match between golden retriever and troublemaker. He was talkative in class, and teachers constantly sat us next to each other in the hopes that my studiousness would ke ep him on task. In adulthood, I realized how messed up it was that being a good student somehow made me responsible for both mine and Leith’s academic success. I developed a massive, ridiculous, and embarrassing crush on Leith that lasted from the age of five. It had annoyed me that he always could find a way to distract me. It annoyed me how warm I felt when he brought me the jar of honey on Valentine’s Day, and how much I liked it when he started occasionally calling me “honey” afterward just to see how I’d react, even though I knew it was a joke. After all, I was half of the Cartwright weirdo duo, but not in a cool, mysterious way like my sister. I was the one who worked too hard but couldn’t seem to work hard enough to control the noises in her own head. I cussed him out after that. My temper had flared around him more than anyone else. Crushes in general made me feel out of control—I didn’t like that. And with Leith, I felt even more off-kilter. Maybe because he was my first one or because it lasted way too long, considering he never liked me back. I wanted my feet to be firmly planted on the ground or even below the ground—like roots that k ept me in place. So sure, we had known each other all our lives, but he only knew the small parts of myself that I let him see. Because I had always been scared of what he might think of me if I showed him too much. Or that I might want to give him everything. “Right,” I said sarcastically. I unlocked the door and pushed it open. Leith shook his head. “Always so nice to everyone but me.” I whipped my head around to face him again. Leith looked amused. “That’s not true,” I said. “Right.” Leith winked, and I hated that too. I swear, he learned how to wink in, like, the second grade and never stopped. But I had matured in adulthood, learning how to control my teenage hormones and angst toward Leith into perfectly pleasant civility! At least, I thought I had. And that had been mostly easy because he had maintained an on-again, off-again girlfriend for the better part of a decade. But that didn’t mean I didn’t still think Leith was good-looking. Almost too good-looking. He was the definition of a pretty boy—an unnervingly symmetrical face, blue-green eyes, and a sharp jawline. Growing up, his hair was blond. All the kids used to call him golden boy when we’d go swimming in the river. Now it was an earthy brown. But it still got lighter in the summer. It was unfortunate that I knew that. He was clean-cut in the way that made you wonder what he’d look like if he got a little dirty. Not me, though. I didn’t wonder that. Obviously. She finally decided to move on. Of course, that was when the letter arrived. Generally, I didn’t rattle easy, but I think my consistent stress levels over the past few months were wearing me down.
Bill bumped my legs as he ran into the house with no hesitation. It seemed like he was still a puppy. That was good. My senior dog, Pearl—a mastiff mix—loved puppies. And human babies too. Oh, and elderly people. Frankly, she seemed thrilled with any company that wasn’t me. “Take your shoes off, please,” I said as I slipped off my own and walked farther into the house. I loved this house. I bought it a few years ago. It was exactly what I wanted my space to be: warm, cozy, and colorful. I loved my pink couch, my purple armchair, and my side table that was painted to look like a strawberry. I loved all my knickknacks and treasures and mismatched pillows. I adored whimsy. Bill was already jumping on Pearl and going for her ears. She didn’t mind at all. “Outside,” I said. She did let out a groan before she got up from her spot on the couch and led the little terror through the dog door to the backyard. I turned to face Leith and started racking my brain about what to tell him. It seemed important to Wilder, but it didn’t look like he’d stuck around to support me in whatever the hell I was going to tell his son. The least he could’ve done was wish me luck. “Your house is nice,” Leith said. “It’s very... you.” “Because you know me so well?” I asked. “Does it irk you that I think so?” “No,” I said quickly. “It doesn’t have any bearing on me.” Leith tilted his head, and he looked like he was trying not to smile. “Not a single bearing?” he asked. God, he was pretty, though. “Your socks don’t match,” I pointed out—looking at his one taupe and one navy blue sock. “Bill,” Leith puffed, “went through a pretty severe chewing phase. It’s better now, but most of my socks didn’t make it out alive. Did Pearl ever do that?” He walked over to my couch and sat down. He stretched his arm over the back of my sofa like he owned the place. “I rescued Pearl when she was probably five or six,” I said. “I’m grateful all my socks and furniture are intact.” I remembered that Brady Cooper had to reupholster a chair for Leith because of Bill’s chewing. “Do you want anything to drink?” I asked. Leith shook his head. “We won’t be here very long. I just want to know why you said I needed to look at my dad’s will.” Well, straight to the point. I had to appreciate that. I sat in the armchair that faced the couch and tucked my legs up under my chin. “Honestly,” I said, sighing. “I don’t know. It was just a feeling.” “Just a feeling?” Leith asked. “Are you a psychic or something?” God, if only it were that simple. “I’ve just been hyperobsessed with legal stuff lately,” I said. I wasn’t as good of a liar as Collins, but I could dish a little fib with the best of them. “A developer tried to buy Toades a few months ago and almost got it based on some fine print. We’re still not out of the woods. So now I feel like I’m going to be worried about the fine print for the rest of my life.” The best fibs had a little truth. “I heard about that,” Leith said. “Brady told me to be careful if that company—Sullivan something, I think—came sniffing around the farm.” “Good advice,” I said. “It’s been hard on my family.” That’s right, Clarke. The pity card always works. Make him feel bad for you, and then maybe he’ll leave it alone. “And I just don’t want something like that to happen to you.” “Why?” Leith asked. “Um, why?” I parroted. I didn’t expect him to ask why. I didn’t have an answer. “Yeah, why do you care if something like that happened to me?” Leith was looking at me intently.
“Your family’s farm supplies over half of Sweetwater Peak’s produce,” I said after a few seconds. It was a logical answer. Leith nodded. “So it’s not about me,” he said. For some reason, I felt like I was tiptoeing on something I didn’t quite understand, so I just nodded. “Got it,” Leith said. He sounded disappointed. I didn’t know if it was directed at me, my answer, or something bigger than both those things. But I immediately felt bad. “U-um...” I started to say without any clear map of where I was headed. I was good at talking. I just had to hope it would come to me. “I have a legacy, too—Toades, you know—and I get what it’s like to worry whether it’s going to end with you.” Leith sighed. “I think you and I have different feelings about our legacies.” That was confusing to me, but I didn’t have time to pry because Leith k ept talking. “So, you think I need to actually see that will?” I took a de ep breath. I had no idea what was in it, or what the consequences would be, but if it was something that put the farm, and by association Sweetwater Peak, in a precarious situation, I would never forgive myself. After everything that happened with Toades, I had developed a bad habit of jumping to the worst-case scenario. “Yeah,” I said on a de ep breath—might as well be truthful at this point. “I do.” “So do I,” Leith agreed. I gave him a funny look. “Then why did you come berate me at my home on a Friday night if you were going to see it anyway?” “Okay,” he said. “First of all, if you think this is berating, then you have lived a very cushy life; second of all, because I’ve already tried to see it, and I haven’t been able to.” “What do you mean ‘haven’t been able to’? “Ron ke eps telling me he’ll get to it, but he hasn’t, so I feel like he’s hiding something from me.” “Yeah, well, Ron sucks.” Ron was the lawyer for nearly half of Sweetwater Peak, which was definitely some sort of conflict of interest considering that most of the legal problems people had in this town had to do with one another. “But isn’t it, like... required for him to ke ep you informed of anything and everything having to do with your father’s estate?” “You would think,” Leith said. “But nothing is actually in my name yet.” Alarm bells went off in my head. “Your dad died four years ago.” “Almost five,” Leith said. “I just... never got around to it.” “But the farm goes to you, right?” “I mean, I think so. That’s what I’ve been told my whole life.” “Have you talked to your mom about it?” I asked. Leith shook his head. “It never feels like the right time. She’s either doing so well, or her grief appears in full force, and I don’t want to bring my dad up in either of those situations. She’s also really thrown herself into her social calendar and into Lainey.” “So what are you going to do?” “I’m going to get my own copy of the will and any estate documents. You have the keys to Coop’s Upholstery, right?” I nodded slowly—Brady and Collins left them with me before they left Sweetwater Peak. “All right, good.” Leith stood from the chair. “Let’s go.” “Go where?” “To Coop’s,” he said. “All the storefronts on that side of the road are connected one way or another.” Ron’s office was the last storefront. The pieces fell into place. “You’re going to break into Ron’s office?”
“No,” Leith said, and I was relieved until he followed up with: “We’re going to break into Ron’s office.”