Page 69 of You've Got Hate Mail
Lav’s living her best six-year-old life.
Despite all of that, I’m on edge. There’s too much I need to do to help take care of this place and prep for a wedding, and I worry about how I don’t even realize I’m fucking up my daughter and I can’t shake the feeling that something bad is about to happen.
Also probably a trauma response after all the shit life’s thrown my way since before Lav was born.
But the cat can’t keep eating this way.
And Lav needs to redirect her energy into something that’s not sneaking around, but not in a way that’ll crush her spirit or make her feel like she’s bad.
Having someone help with that in the thirty to forty-five minutes that I get to myself each day might help with that.
Especially since Cricket’s hardly intimidating herself.
Annoying, yes.
Intimidating, no.
And Lav loves her, and since Cricket’s been playing with her in the mornings, Lav’s been fighting bedtime less for being more tired too.
Regardless of what I want or don’t want, my daughter would be thrilled.
“We can try—” I start, but I’m cut off by a loud, reverberating crack of wood that’s followed by Cricket shrieking as she falls sideways into the wall.
The doorframe broke.
The fucking doorframe broke.
I toss aside the trellis post and dash to her side, coughing as a plume of rotted drywall dust swirls around us.
“I didn’t do it,” she rasps before coughing in my face.
I yank her out of the doorway and into the main fermentation room.
There’s a long creak, then a sharp crack, and the top board of the doorframe crashes down right where she was standing too.
“Are you for real?” she gasps at the doorway.
The frame’s collapsed sideways into the wall, where I can quickly see evidence of water damage on all of the rotting support beams.
There’s a roof leak.
Has to be.
Shit, shit, shit.
“Oh my god,” she shrieks.
It’s all the warning I get before she’s climbing me. “Mice!Mice!”
One mouse runs out from a hole low in the wall and across my boot.
Three more scatter toward the fermentation tanks behind us.
A large mouse that’s clearly eating as well as Fluffy these days lumbers slower than the rest, and it goes back into the storage room instead of out.
Dean always hired the lowest bidder.
Pip says it all the time when things break.
