Page 16 of Like A Moth To A Flame

Sighing, I quickly got dressed—a simple black tank top and black biking shorts—and hung the towel over the shower curtain rod, as Dad had always taught me. It was weird how old habitscame right back when I stepped into this house. In a lot of ways, it was like I never left. Still, I couldn’t wait until it was over.

I needed out of this house, and out of this town. Too many memories.

Just as I opened the medicine cabinet to search for a comb, I heard a knock on the door.

Fuck.

I grabbed the first brush I could find—my mom’s old sea shell brush.

She’d always said it made her feel like Ariel.

Hurrying down the stairs, I dragged it through my hair as I came to the front door and pulled it open.

Ray Boone stood on the front porch step, looking up at me with a soft smile. He had changed more than anyone else in this town. He was shorter than me, with deep black hair, touched in grey at the temples. He wore a ball cap pulled low over his eyes, and his face was touched with sun spots and burnt across the bridge of his nose. When he reached up to shake my hand, his hand and forearm were covered in scars, callouses, and bruises. The other clutched a clipboard, and I suspected it was the same one Tammy had had the day before.

He had been a heartbreaker upon a time, but now, years of working outside in the heat had taken its toll.

“Hey there,” he said with a firm handshake. “Tammy said you’d be needin’ an inspection.”

“Yes, sir!” I said, stepping back and inviting him in. “She was here yesterday to help me sell, but she said it’d be best to get the old place in better shape before I put it on the market.”

When he turned back to look at me, he nodded.

“Uh, yup, that’d be your best bet,” he said. He looked around much the same way Tammy had. “In a town like this, with a house this old?”

He snorted a laugh.

“This house is older than I am.”

I laughed, but it was joyless at best. It was true, after all.

This house was old when my parents bought it right after they got married, when my dad graduated from the academy. It was old when I was born, and that was twenty-eight years ago. At this point, old was an understatement.

Much like before, we walked around the house, though Ray seemed a little more lenient than Tammy.

“Ceilings fine,” he grunted, clicking his pen and crossing something off. “That’s peeling, nothing a scraper and some new paint can’t fix.”

When we finished with the inside, we walked around the outside. When we made it to the back door, he knelt on the concrete slab beneath it and pulled out a pocketknife.

Something in my chest jumped to life, and I had to remind myself to calm down.

Ray was seventy-eight. What was he going to do to me?

Knife or not, he wasn’t capable of much.

What did I say? Jumpy.

He pushed the blade of the knife into the bottom of the wooden frame, and with a sickening crunch, it sunk up to the hilt.

He grunted, and this one sounded a little more serious than before.

“What does that mean?” I asked tenderly.

“Well, it’s to be expected, a house this old,” he said, cracking and popping as he got to his feet. “Some of the woodwork is gonna need replacing.”

I sighed. I had been afraid of that.

“How many thousands is that gonna cost?” I asked.

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