Page 5 of Second Chance for the Grump

“I’m sorry about your grandma.” Shit, that sounded insincere, but things between us were stilted. Weird. She’d had a rough two years with the deaths of so many people.

What did I expect coming back after so long? Did I think we’d fall right back into the same patterns? Pretend no time had passed? I wasn’t normally so stupid, especially when it came to women. But something about Maisey twisted me up inside.

“What in the fuck?” she said, leaning forward to stare out the windshield of her car.

I tensed, going on high alert until I spotted it. “Shit.”

Right in the middle of a cul-de-sac in the small neighborhood we’d turned into sat a white-sided ranch home. It was modest, but the front yard had plants on every available inch of the front lawn, indicating someone took care of it. You wouldn’t give the place a second glance, except right then it looked like it’s been caught in an ambush.

Of the chicken kind.

The white siding had streaks of dried egg yolk in bright shades of yellow. The yolks had hardened against the white backdrop, and their trails glistened as the sun’s late afternoon rays hit them. Pieces of shells stuck to sections, drying in uneven patches. The front windows were splattered, chunks of shell fusing to the glass as we sat in the now-stopped car and stared.

Maisey swore as she opened her car door and got out. “I hate that motherfucker.”

“So, I take it you didn’t leave it this way?” I asked as I met her at the hood and held her back from marching her way to the front door. She wasn’t going into the home until I’d cleared it.

“Look at my front door!” she demanded, waving her hand at it.

I held on to her shoulders and cringed. The white door had taken the worst of the attack. Eggs pooled along the threshold with cracked shells sitting in the goo.

Somehow the scene hadn’t drawn a crowd, but that wouldn’t last as people made their way home from work.

“Stay here,” I said, giving her shoulders a squeeze. “Let me go inside and make sure it’s safe.”

Maisey’s eyes widened. “You don’t think he’s in there. Do you?”

“Who would do this to you?” I needed to get the full story of what was happening in Maisey’s world and why she brought me here if we were already at vandalism. “Who is Charlie, Maisey?”

Her eyes flashed, and my heart clenched in anticipation of the answer.

She swallowed hard. “Promise you won’t be mad if I tell you?”

I turned back toward her. “That you hid my child from me for two years? Yeah, probably.”

Her shoulders tugged away from me as she jumped forward and threw her hands in the air. “What? No!”

3

MAISEY

My heart beat out of my chest as my brain worked through what Rowan had just said. He thought we had a child together? A hidden, secret child?

“What?” I asked again. “A son?”

He tilted his head to the side. “He’s not our child?”

I shook my head, unable to form words. What had I done to make him think I had a child with him and then hid him for two years? I wasn’t a monster. “No.”

“Stay by the car,” he said, pointing at it as if I’d forgotten where it was. Honestly, with the stress shooting through my system at that moment, it might not have been that far off. “I’m going to search the inside and make sure everything is safe. Don’t leave.”

He waited until I nodded before turning toward my house and marching up to it.

“Wait, you need the keys!” I called out to him.

Rowan half turned around, holding up my keys between his fingers and shaking them. “Already thought of that.”

I glanced downward, looking for them as if he’d come up with his own set, but the ones I had in my hands just a moment before were gone. “How did he do that?” I asked no one in particular since Rowan had already made his way inside.