Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 99748 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 499(@200wpm)___ 399(@250wpm)___ 332(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99748 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 499(@200wpm)___ 399(@250wpm)___ 332(@300wpm)
After kicking Jesse out last night, I’d walked a million miles on a loop from the front door, to the living room, to the kitchen. My brain had been going ninety to nothing, jumping from Jed and Chrissy, to Jesse and Oliver, to Township, and, oddly, to a video I saw of a whining dog who demands to be tucked in every night like the queen she is. Eventually, it was that dog that got me to go to bed. If she could go to bed at seven o’clock with no guilt, I could go to bed at midnight with a clear conscience even with everything falling apart. Still, sleep had been slow to come.
But I did work out some shit during my mental marathon.
Focus on the priority.
It’s the simplest, most important thing right now—Township. Everything else is a distraction.
Like this Post-it note.
I yank it off, wadding it up to toss in the trash. Gathering my laptop, the stack of papers from my desk, and my mind, I head down the hall. I knock on Ben’s door twice and then open it a crack.
“Hey, Ben?” When I see him look up, I jerk my head. “Come on, we’ve got work to do before you escape this place for a life of leisure.”
He leans back in his chair, his brows furrowed behind his glasses. “What’re you talking about?”
I shake my head. “Only explaining it once, so c’mon, unless you’ve already quit on us.”
I don’t close the door, so I hear Ben’s chair squeaking as he gets up quickly and shuffles after me, but I’m already at the base of the stairs. “Going to see Francine if you want to hit the elevator instead,” I suggest.
“I’m not that old, young lady. I can manage a flight of stairs.”
He absolutely can, but this has become a love language of sorts—him calling me young and me calling him old. We end up doing a quasi-race up the stairs—him hanging on to the handrail for dear life as he propels himself up and me trying not to trip in my heels or plant face-first onto my laptop. Ben wins, and I’m glad to see that I only had to let him by a little.
In Francine’s office, her assistant tells us to go on in. As we do, I can feel his eyes following us curiously. Last-minute meetings between the mayor and two city attorneys scream bad news. Add in a very public and particularly sketchy divorce that affects the whole town and it’s likely front-page, headline, awful news.
Francine Lockewood became our city mayor after my dad stepped down a few years ago. She’s a true believer in the magic of Cold Springs, previously serving as our librarian and self-proclaimed town historian. She’s done a great job fostering our community back to a better place, especially through the negotiations with Jed over the Township development. She was the one who said we should hear him out and not squash the idea outright because Jed had a history of shady shenanigans.
Of course, she also said she got that idea from an owl while she was sitting under a full lunar eclipse, drinking hard kombucha. But we don’t hold that against her. In fact, everyone appreciates that Francine is a little bit out there.
She’s sitting behind her desk, her oversize glasses perched on the tip of her nose and her frizzy curls clipped back, which gives her an owllike appearance. I’ve never told her this, and I never will, but Francine reminds me of Ms. Frizzle of Magic School Bus fame. She has the hair, but it’s really more about the knowledge in her head. She knows everything about everything. In fact, I bet she would know if last night qualifies as a threesome. Not that I’m going to ask.
“Well, hiya. How’s things?” Francine says, smiling easily as she waves us in. I’m pretty sure I’m about to ruin her good mood. Maybe I should’ve brought bagels or something to soften the blow.
“I don’t know. Wren hasn’t told me a thing yet,” Ben grumbles as he helps himself to a chair. “Floor’s yours, girl. Get to gettin’, because Francine and I aren’t growing any younger.”
“Buckle your seat belts. This whole Jed-and-Chrissy thing has gone off the deep end,” I warn, and then dive headfirst into explaining my meeting with Oliver and Chrissy yesterday, including Chrissy’s ridiculous appearance and outbursts, and ending with the petition for an injunction to stop the building at Township completely until the divorce is settled.
“They can’t be serious!” Francine exclaims, getting up to stare at the city map behind her desk. “After everything we went through to make Township possible?”
It wasn’t all owl magic to get that deal done. Francine had to meet with Jed numerous times, fighting through the early stages when she called him a “sneaky land shark” to get to a point of actually listening to him enough to evaluate the Township plan objectively. Even then, there were a lot of naysayers she had to deal with too.