Page 18 of Halloween Town

Poppy held up her hand. “No, really, it’s fine.” She pulled a face. “I’m glad, because I don’t want to have to face the missed calls and messages.”

“Fair. I’ve fielded at least five calls from your sisters, a few from your brothers, and one from your father.”

Poppy rested her forehead on her knee. It took a crisis to make her father interfere in family affairs—that was her mom’s area of expertise and responsibility—and her mother either had to be too angry to talk or in a catatonic state for her father to make the effort to reach out.

“Ugh,” she muttered. Then hesitated before she asked, “What happened yesterday after I left? Did any of them say?”

“Isobel gave me a blow-by-blow account,” Wren replied. “Apparently, they got the hotel manager to open the door to the bathroom, but didn’t find you in it. Someone saw you heading to the bus station, but by the time they got there, you’d gone. It took them a while to figure out where you were heading, but by that time, it was too late to get you back to the wedding. They decided to focus on the guests instead.”

“Of course they did, they were more worried about the reaction and the scandal than me,” Poppy said. Little about her family surprised her. “Did Izzy say how Benji was?”

Wren shrugged. “He was pretty sanguine about the whole thing, apparently. A bit pissed that he’d paid for a honeymoon you wouldn’t go on, and that the booze he paid for wasn’t returnable.”

Poppy released a strangled laugh. “Sounds like Benji.”

Wren half turned to face her and scooted back, her arms folded. “What happened, Pops? I’ve been asking you for months whether you really wanted to marry Benji, and you, sometimes vociferously, told me you did. Yesterday, at the last minute, you changed your mind and bolted. I mean, I wanted you to bail, but I didn’t expect it to happen right before the actual wedding.”

Poppy shook her head and glanced at the still-green grass trailing down to the lake, the small beach, the two kayaks tied to the concrete pole, and the flat rock they’d spent hours on. Achingly familiar. Marrying Benji? Playing hopscotch on the moon made more sense.

But she didn’t want to talk about the ghosts in the mirror, or the reason why she ran, so she changed the subject. “Thom doesn’t want me here.”

Wren didn’t blink. “You’re a runaway bride and were supposed to marry his estranged brother. You last spoke thirteen years ago. You’re strangers. Why would he be thrilled?”

Huh. Poppy crossed her arms and pouted.

“Why are you hedging, McMaster? What aren’t you telling me?” Wren leaned forward and flicked her forehead. “Out with it.”

“Ouch.” Cornered, Poppy wrapped her arms around her bent knees and noticed the huge chip in the polish of her big toe. She sighed. “Remember how I used to see things as a kid?”

Wren frowned. “What things?”

“Like the things Hadley sees.”

Hadley, Hayes’s teenage daughter, often claimed to see ghosts. Hayes and Wren wrote it off as imagination. Poppy didn’t. Maybe it was because she’d had her own … unexplainable encounters. She firmly believed—Shakespeare had said something along these lines—that there were far more things in the world than humans could see or understand.

“Where are you going with this, Poppy?” Wren’s voice was sharp with suspicion. “If you’re going to tell me ghosts made you run, I am going to lose my shit right here, right now.”

Nailed it. Poppy just held her gaze as disbelief, resignation, and a dash of has she finally lost it? all appeared on Wren’s face. “That didn’t happen, right?” she shouted, cheeks and chest flushed.

“They appeared in the bathroom mirror. Told me I was making a mistake and I had to leave. Then and there. Why are you upset? You never wanted me to marry Benji.”

“I wanted you to get there at least a few weeks or months before your goddamn wedding. And I’m pissed you listened to some so-called ghosts instead of me!”

Wren buried her face in her hands and drummed her feet on the rickety stairs. Poppy winced, half-wishing the stairs would collapse.

At that exact moment, Thom appeared in the doorway, dust in his hair, a face mask dangling from his neck, ragged jeans, and a sleeveless tank showing off his ripped arms and she promptly forgot how to breathe. At thirty-three, he was somehow getting better with age.

“Why are you yelling?” he asked Wren, clearly confused.

“My best friend bailed on her wedding because ghosts told her to run!” Wren threw out her hands.

Thom looked from her to Poppy, shook his head, raised his hands, then let them drop. Another skeptic. “Yell away,” he said, and strode back inside.

And yell Wren did—for at least the next fifteen minutes.

It only took Mr. Rodgers, the town’s most respected and oldest attorney, five minutes to confirm that Thom was indeed the new owner of the Solstice Deep. Which Poppy already knew, of course.

But he did fill in some details… Thom had bought the inn while her grandpa was still alive, on the condition that the old man could stay in his beloved house for the rest of his life. On his death, instead of inheriting the old inn, Poppy’s dad was gifted a healthy chunk of change from the sale of the house that held every one of her happiest memories. She loved Solstice Deep with every piece of her heart, but love didn’t equal ownership.