Page 90 of The Cul-de-Sac War

Bree answering Chip’s note in the window. Dinner with Chip. Chip beside her on the porch beneath a clear sky, as she shared things about her life she hadn’t even told her oldest and dearest of friends. Gravel tapping her window while she stood in her room, overwhelmed with the news. Anna in the hospital. Anna getting transferred. The New York girl. Chip sitting in the audience, holding up the absurd sign about family dinner—

Wait.

Backtrack.

There.

Just after the play.

When she made it to the dressing room, she had swooped to her phone with the deftness of a vulture alighting on its dead. As she clicked open Craigslist, her fingers never paused or faltered. She had published a post.

The fate of her job, the news about Anna, the bizarre evening beside Chip had eclipsed her memory of the little, insignificant post.

The post she had assumed would amount to nothing but a few annoying phone calls—at best, a random visitor.

Bree spied out the window.

Tried to swallow but felt her throat too dry to do so.

She had done an excellent job—too excellent—getting revenge.

Her eyes bounced from the cars to the trucks covering the cul-de-sac.

One impatient driver honked at a truck trying to parallel park in too small a space.

In front of Mrs. Lewis’s, a family stood at the open back door of an old Camry, tugging on the rope of an unwilling goat in the back seat.

“Oh no.” Bree reached for a sweatshirt hanging on the door of her closet and yanked it over her head. She tripped over a stack of whittling tools on her way down the stairs as she checked the time.

6:59 a.m.

“Shoot. Shoot. Shoot. Shoot. Shoot. Shoot.”

Her advertisement said to come at seven.

She yanked the door open and ran out barefoot. The gravel dug into flesh as she jogged toward an old red pickup. She grabbed the driver’s side mirror as the door shut. Lifted a finger to the man in Carhartt overalls in need of a good wash.

“Sir, I think there’s been some mistake.” Her head jerked up to Chip’s second-story window as if expecting his glowering face to tower over them. But there was nothing. Nothing besides the lingering note saying SLEEP WELL in the window.

She glanced back to the farmer. “If you could move out of my driveway, and quickly, please—”

With a bit more prodding the farmer gave up and got back in his vehicle. The engine turned and he backed up, but just as Evie was hopping into her car, another car smelling of dozens of freshly baked strawberry swirl, chocolate chip, and asiago bagels swerved in like a shopper taking the last Macy’s parking spot on Black Friday.

“Ma’am,” Bree said, knocking on the person’s window. The woman had apparently decided to pretend this wouldn’t be a problem. “Ma’am, you need to move. My housemate needs to leave.”

The woman—looking everywhere but at Bree—started digging in her purse. She pulled out her phone and put it to her ear.

“Ma’am,” Bree said, knocking again at the window.

The woman nodded and started talking.

Bree exhaled impatiently. “I saw your phone. You. Aren’t. Talking. To anyone.”

A hum of commotion grew behind her, and Bree whipped her head around to see the crowd forming into a pushy sort of line to his front door.

A woman on his porch peeked through his living room window.

Panic rising, Bree heard a door slam and swiveled her head to see that the bagel woman had slipped out the passenger door and was now running toward his yard with her basket of bagels.