Page 87 of Not That Ridiculous

“I’m sort of in debt up to here—” I held my hand as far over my head as I could reach, then went up on tiptoe, “—because I got a mortgage for the dream fixer-upper, which is currently the dream in stasis, and right after that, I had to get a loan to buy out the parents. They needed the cash for retirement.”

“Shit timing, though.” He made a thoughtful noise. “What about your sister?”

My jaw tightened. “It was always the plan to go in together on the coffee shop. The parents’ retirement brought it forwards a bit, which was unexpected but doable. And then at the last minute, Amalie decided she didn’t want to be tied down so young, and fucked off to Belize.”

“Leaving you in the hole?” Kevin said indignantly.

I brushed it off. “It’s not her dream.”

“Wow,” Kevin said. “That’s bollocks.”

“Yeah.” I sighed. “So that’s why I’ve still got the previous owner’s junk fighting for space with mine in the garage, and my house is falling down around my ears. Don’t even get me started on the loft.”

Kevin’s eyes brightened. “What about the loft?”

“I have no idea. I’ve never been up there.”

“Whaaaaat?”

“I’ve never been up there.”

Kevin stuffed the rest of his brownie into his mouth and brushed the crumbs off his t-shirt. “Let’s go and have a look,” he said, taking my hand and tugging.

“Nope,” I said, refusing to move.

His fingers flexed around mine. “Aw. Come on.”

“No. I’ve managed not to look for two years straight, I can manage one more night.”

He stared at me. “How can you not have looked? In all that time?”

“Easy. I am a one-man business with a mortgage I’ll be paying off from beyond the grave. Also, I don’t care.”

Mostly though, it creeped me out—not that I was about to share that with the pragmatic Kevin.

I’d heardthingsscurrying about the very first night I slept here. I woke up in the morning, flipped the catch on the ceiling hatch shut, and hadn’t given it another thought.

Kevin boggled at me. “But?—”

“It’s just a loft!”

“You don’t know what could be up there, though.”

“I doubt there’s anything all that interesting.”

He gave me a crafty look. “There could be treasure.”

“Kevin. Really?”

“Yes, really!” He picked up my other hand and tugged again.

I dug in my heels. “Like what? Loot? A big wooden chest full of ill-gotten coins and jewels?”

“You never know what you might find.”

“True. But the previous owner was a frail little old lady in her nineties. Pirate treasure seems unlikely.”

“You realise you’re judging her based on how old she was when she sold you the place. Her nineties? That’s fucking amazing. But to get to her nineties, that means she was once twenty-four, like me, or thirty-one, like you. You don’t know what she was into in her thirties. People keep stuff from their whole lives, not just the last year or two. I’d know. I’ve been in loads of houses. Garages and lofts, too.”

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