Page 17 of Hang the Moon
If, on the off chance, something more came out of this plan? He wasn’t going to complain. What was meant to be would be.
“And you don’t think—” Margot pinched her lips together.“You know what? Never mind. There’s no point trying to reason with you when you get like this.”
“What?” He grinned. “When I’m right?”
Margot shook her head. “One of these days, your hero complex is going to bite you in the ass. AndIam going to have to bite my tongue to keep from saying I told you so.”
Chapter Four
Thanks to bouncing from one time zone to another for work, Annie’s internal clock was utterly botched. She had no problem falling asleep; the problem was staying asleep. Between overly firm hotel beds and early checkout times, seldom was she able to stay in bed past dawn.
To combat her insomnia, she’d taken up the highly masochistic hobby of early morning running.
Feeling thoroughly punished yet also a little loopy on endorphins, she used the bottom of her ratty old shirt to mop the sweat from her forehead and toed her way out of her running shoes, before padding into the kitchen with a single-minded purpose.
Coffee.
Her eyes swept the counter in search of Darcy’s—no.
Eating up half the space beside the stove was a silver monstrosity with a wheel of buttons and more knobs and spouts than she could begin to guess what their function was.
Thiswas not a coffeemaker, this was a contraption, one shewas pretty sure she wasn’t qualified to operate. There were too many buttons and no words, only symbols whose meaning was far more ambiguous than the manufacturer assumed. A coffee bean. A droplet of water. Two squiggly lines running parallel to one another, looking an awful lot like the zodiac symbol for Aquarius. A plus and minus sign beside one wheel, dots increasing from small to large beside another.
She squinted and scowled. Caffeine was not supposed to be a prerequisite to operate a coffeemaker... espresso machine...whatever.
Beside the professional-grade gadget were Darcy’s mugs, bowl sized, white, and stacked upside down within their silver stand, no doubt to keep dust from gathering inside. She grabbed the top mug and clutched it in front of her chest, staring at the coffeemaker with disdainful eyes.
She could figure this out. She’d watched the baristas at Starbucks pull shots of espresso countless times. Worst-case scenario, she’d wind up with a too-strong brew she could doctor with cream and enough sugar to render the caffeine superfluous.
She set the mug beneath the spout to the right, her finger hovering in the air in front of the center wheel. She pressed the button with the cup-shaped symbol beside it and the whole machine came to life, the buttons on the front lighting up bright blue, the appliance whirring and churning as beans from the back cascaded down into the bowels of the machine and—
The nozzle at the front sputtered and a rich dark brew streamed down the front of the machine, down the cabinets, and onto the floor.Fuck.She fumbled for the mug and slid it beneath the proper spout before she made a bigger mess.
At least she’d figured the coffeemaker out. It hadn’t beenthatdifficult, just a little—
She had spoken too soon. Coffee reached the rim of the mug and sloshed over the sides, pooling on the counter and dripping onto the floor, the puddle growing. Hot espresso reached her toes, her feet slipping and sliding on the tile.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
She spun the knob in the center of the machine like she was onWheel of Fortune, but the only change was that the coffee coming out of the spout was darker, blacker,sludgy.
Hands braced on the counter, her legs in a split around the puddle, she reached behind the coffeemaker, tugging the cord from the wall.
All at once, the machine cut off, not even powering down. Everything just stopped, the whirring and grinding and sloshing and sputtering giving way to blessed silence save for the thrum of her heartbeat inside her head.
The place was a wreck, a coffee-splattered war zone.
She sighed and grabbed a fistful of paper towels. Starbucks, it was.
One steamy shower later, she was dressed in a pleated maxi skirt in her favorite shade of blush, a white cropped T-shirt, and a sensible pair of gladiator sandals, her weather app promising sunshine and a high of seventy-four degrees. Flipping over to her web browser, she started to type.
Top ten things to do in Seattle—
Alone, autofill suggested.
“Thanks, Google,” she muttered into the quiet of Darcy’s living room.
Armed with an agenda of places to go and landmarks to see, a map of the downtown area bookmarked on her home screen, she shot one last glare at Darcy’s coffeemaker. She snagged her keys from the entry table and opened the door.
