Page 1 of Challenged By the Ex-Military Lumberjack
Chapter 1 - Jade
The house smells like dust and decades when I push the front door open for the first time with the actual key in my actual hand. Not rented. Not borrowed. Mine.
I stand in the doorway and let that sink in for a second, because it's the first thing that's been entirely mine in longer than I want to admit. The real estate agent is already backing down the porch steps, clearly eager to escape before I change my mind or discover whatever structural nightmare is probably hiding behind these faded floral wallpapers.
"You've got my number if you need anything," she calls over her shoulder, which I'm pretty sure is code for *please don't call me when you realize what you've done.*
"Thanks," I say, but she's already in her car.
I watch her taillights disappear down the long driveway, then turn back to survey my new kingdom. And it is a kingdom, in the way that all slightly decrepit, questionably wired, definitely haunted-looking houses become kingdoms when they're yours and yours alone.
The living room is bigger than I expected. Hardwood floors that might be beautiful under the grime. A fireplace that probably hasn't been used since the nineties. Windows that look out onto trees, so many trees I can't actually see where they end.
It's perfect.
It's also a disaster, but that's fine. I've become very comfortable with disasters lately.
I drop my bag on the floor and the sound echoes. *Empty house, empty house, empty house*. I should hate that echo. I should feel the weight of it, the loneliness of it. But instead, I feel something that might be relief.
No one here knows me. No one here knows about Mom, or the hospice, or the apartment I couldn't stand to stay in after she died because every corner of it still smelled like her lavender lotion. No one here has that look, the one people get when they're trying to figure out if you're coping or if you're about to shatter across their shoes.
Here, I'm just the new girl who bought the old Porter house.
I can work with that.
By day three, I've scrubbed the kitchen within an inch of its life, discovered that two of the four burners on the stove actually work, and learned that the water pressure is what I can only describe as optimistic. I've also introduced myself to exactly nine people, including the mailman, the woman who runs the new coffee shop on Main Street, and a very enthusiastic golden retriever named Biscuit.
Blackwater Falls is the kind of town that probably looks exactly the same as it did thirty years ago, and I mean that as a compliment. There's a main street with a hardware store, a diner, a post office, and a bar that I haven't worked up the courage to enter yet. Everyone waves. Everyone asks where you're from. Everyone has an opinion about the weather.
It's aggressively charming, and I'm trying very hard not to love it too much too fast, but I'm failing miserably.
The problem, and there's always a problem, is that the house needs work. Real work. The kind of work that involves pipes and wiring and things I know absolutely nothing about. I can paint a wall. I can assemble furniture using only rage and determination. But I cannot fix a kitchen sink that's currently dripping in a way that sounds like a slow, judgmental countdown to disaster.
Which is how I end up at the hardware store on a Thursday morning, staring at a wall of pipe fittings like they might start making sense if I just glare hard enough.
"Can I help you find something?"
I turn to find a man in his sixties wearing a name tag that says *FRANK* and an expression that suggests he's already resigned to whatever chaos I'm about to bring into his life.
"Yes," I say. "I need to fix a sink."
"What's wrong with it?"
"It's dripping."
"From where?"
"The…sink part?"
Frank sighs the sigh of a man who has had this exact conversation a thousand times. "Let me get you a washer kit."
I follow him down an aisle that smells like metal and sawdust, asking approximately seventeen questions about things like water pressure and pipe diameter and whether it's normal for a house built in 1987 to sound like it's sighing every time I turn on a faucet.
Frank answers about half of them. The other half he just sort of shrugs at, which I'm choosing to interpret as *that's just old houses, kid.*
"Now, if it's leaking from the base, you're going to want to—"
"That's not right."
