She Hid Them in Her Lighthouse Cove Cabin, They Asked Her to Stay novel · Chapter 2 of 40

Chapter 2: House Rules

Mara writes four rules on a tour flyer, Chan covers her windows, Hyunjin hits his head on the loft beam, and the bar photo goes online with a map pin.

I texted Odette back: Nothing. Go to sleep.

It was the first lie I'd told her in eleven years of friendship, and it took one thumb.

Chan stood on my porch with rain running off his hood and checked the lock on my front door before I could open it.

"Is there a back way out of this house?" he asked.

"There's a back door and a window over the tub," I said. "Neither opens onto anything but cliff."

"Good."

"Not good. I'd like to keep my cliff private."

He didn't smile. Hyunjin did, a little, from behind him.

I unlocked the door, and the cabin did what it does when you come home cold.

The woodstove had burned down to orange, and the room smelled like cedar and old paper.

My tabby came off the armchair and complained at all of us.

"Boots," I said.

Hyunjin lined his up at the mat, toes to the wall.

Chan kept his on and walked the whole cabin in a slow circle.

He looked in the bathroom, in the bedroom, in the back room with the daybed.

He looked up the ladder to the loft, where the ceiling slopes to a beam.

"Who sleeps up there?" he asked.

"Nobody. It's storage. And a mattress."

"I'll take it," Hyunjin said.

He went up the ladder two rungs at a time.

He stood up too fast at the top and hit his forehead on the beam with a loud, hollow knock.

There was a long silence.

"I'm fine," Hyunjin said from the dark.

"It's a very old beam," I said. "It's seen worse heads than yours."

"That's not comforting," Chan said.

"It's not meant to be. Ice is in the freezer."

Hyunjin came back down with one hand pressed to his forehead and laughed, properly this time, so that his whole face changed.

I looked away.

I have a rule about men who are that pretty, and the rule is that I look at the woodstove.

Chan took the daybed.

Before he lay down, he took every towel I owned out of the linen closet and hung them over the windows with clothespins.

I watched him do it from the kitchen doorway with a mug of tea in my hand.

"You're hanging my good towels over my own windows."

"It's one night," Chan said.

"It's my house."

"It's a precaution."

"I didn't ask you for precautions. I asked you to take your boots off."

He turned, and the light from the stove showed me his face for the first time.

He was younger than I'd thought, and more tired.

There was a bruise coming up along his jaw that had nothing to do with anything I had done.

"I'm sorry," he said. "It's a habit. I'll take them down."

"Leave them tonight," I said. "Take them down in the morning, wash them and fold them."

"Understood."

I went to bed with my door open a hand's width and my tabby on my feet, and I didn't sleep.

Two grown men were breathing in my house.

It had been nine years since that happened.

At five, I gave up and made coffee.

By six they were both awake and sitting at my kitchen table with their hoods down.

Neither of them looked like he had slept either.

"We'll go now," Chan said. "I'll leave money for the trouble."

"No."

"Ms. Larkin."

"Mara," I said. "Nobody who slept on my daybed calls me Ms. anything."

"Mara," he said. "We've put you in enough danger."

"You've put me in a kitchen with a bad coffee maker. I'll decide about danger."

I took a flyer off the stack on my counter.

It said LIGHTHOUSE TOURS, SAT AND SUN, $8, KIDS FREE, with a drawing I'd cut myself in linoleum.

I turned it over and found a pen.

"Nobody leaves at six," I said. "The fog is down to the road.

"And there's a man in town with a fifty thousand dollar card in his pocket, looking for exactly the two of you."

"How do you know that?" Chan said.

"My best friend told me. I lied to her. That's a first."

His face stayed very still.

"So here's what's going to happen," I said.

I wrote on the back of the flyer in block capitals.

ONE. You pay rent, and you cook. I do not cook for men who can afford those shoes.

TWO. No lies under my roof. Not to me, and not about me.

THREE. You are guests. I am not a hiding place, and nobody ever tells me to stay out of sight in my own town.

FOUR. Nobody sleeps in my bed.

I turned it around and slid it across the table.

Hyunjin read it first, then Chan.

"Four is not necessary," Hyunjin said. He had gone pink at the ears.

"Four is the one I'd write twice," I said.

Chan read it a second time, slowly, with his thumb on rule three.

"We can't promise three," he said. "If someone sees you with us, they'll look at you."

"They already looked at me. I'm the one who turned the lights out."

He looked up at me.

Something moved behind his face that I couldn't name, and then it was gone.

"Two weeks," he said at last. "That's all we need.

"Our people will have a proper security plan by then, and a police report. Then we'll leave."

"Your people. Is that Manager Min of the thirty-one missed calls?"

Hyunjin's head came up.

"You saw that?" Chan said.

"I saw a phone. I'm not a spy, I just can't help my eyes."

"I don't want to talk to him," Hyunjin said quietly.

"Then don't," I said. "Not under my roof."

Chan took out the second phone, a cheap black one, and set it flat on the table.

He tapped the screen awake and turned it toward me.

It was a photo of the back wall of the Rusty Buoy, with the net of plastic buoys.

Hyunjin's face was in the middle of it, just after the hood slid.

The little red light of her phone was still in the corner of the frame.

The post had four thousand likes.

Under the picture, in tiny type, was the line the app adds automatically.

Rusty Buoy, Lighthouse Cove.

Chan said, in a very flat voice, "They know the town."

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