He gives a single nod and walks off.

Ellen turns back to me and looks over my face. “Nice beard,” she says. “Pixie?”

I rub a hand down the smooth side of my jaw. “Yeah.”

She lets out an exasperated sigh. “Levi—”

“I’ll check out the fire alarms after I finish shaving,” I say, quickly cutting her off. Because I don’t have the time, or the balls, to undergo the conversation she wants to have with me. “Later.” I don’t give her a chance to respond as I turn and head for the stairs.

Back in the bathroom, I stare at my reflection in the mirror and shake my head. Pixie timed it perfectly, I’ll give her that. My facial hair is literally half-gone. I look like a before and after razor ad.

I think back to the irritated expression on her face and a small smile tugs at my lips. She was so frustrated, waiting outside the bathroom door with her flushed cheeks and full lips and indignant green eyes…

Why does she have to be so goddamn pretty?

I turn on the razor and run the blades down my jaw, thinking back to the first time I saw those indignant eyes cut into mine. My smile fades.

Pixie was six. I was seven. And my Transformers were missing.

I remember running around the house, completely panicked that I had lost my favorite toys, until I came upon Pixie sitting cross-legged in the front room with my very manly robots set up alongside her very dumb dolls.

I immediately called in the authorities—“Mom! Pixie took my Transformers!”—and wasted no time rescuing my toys from the clutches of the pink vomit that was Barbie.

“Hey!” She tried to pry them from my hands. “Those are the protectors. They kill all the bad guys. My dolls need them!”

“Your dolls are stupid. Stop taking my things. Mom! Mom!”

Haunted eyes stare back at me in the mirror as I slowly finish shaving.

I wish I would have known back then how significant Pixie was going to be.

I wish I would have known a lot of things.

3 Pixie

I enter the kitchen and grab my apron off the wall. It’s bright yellow with dozens of red cherries all over it and trimmed with ruffles. It’s the happiest apron in the world and my name is written in permanent marker on the front. Gah.

“Good morning!” Mable looks up from a bowl of egg yolks with a smile. Her thick, gray hair is pulled back in a bun, and her chubby cheeks are rosy like always. She reminds me of a sassy Mrs. Claus—minus the furry red dress and spectacles.

“Morning.” I tie the yellow-and-cherry madness around my waist before moving to the industrial-sized sink in the corner to wash my hands.

I’ve known Mable, and pretty much every other inn employee, my entire life. Nearly everyone Ellen hires is from our hometown—a tiny dot on the map named Copper Springs. It’s a typical small town, with struggling business owners, troublemaking teenagers, and churchgoing folks who pray for both. And it’s a place I’d be fine never visiting again.

“How did you sleep, dear?” Mable asks, whipping the yolks with a fervor I do not share. The kitchen and I are not friends; we are simply allies in a time of war. The only position Ellen had available this summer was “prep cook,” and as much as I hate cooking, I hate being broke more.

But I don’t suck at cooking. Years of making food for myself and my mother, a woman who thought feeding me was a grueling chore, taught me how to put a meal together without disastrous results. At least now I’m getting paid to slave away in a kitchen.

“Aside from the blasting noise of Levi’s TV?” I say. “Fine.”

She eyes my half-wet ponytail. “Cold shower this morning?”

Everyone who works at the inn knows how Levi and I fight. Not just because sometimes we slam doors and yell but because everyone who works at the inn knows about us.

For the first few days after I moved in, this really bothered me. Because I knew the real reason the employees whispered, and the real reason made my chest hurt. But I don’t give a damn anymore. If Levi and I provide some sort of tragic entertainment for them, so be it.

I look down at the list of menu items for the morning. “Yes. The spawn of Satan strikes again.”

Mable laughs like she always does when I talk about Levi, her round cheeks glowing. Even though she’s like sixty, I’m pretty sure she has a cougar crush on him. And if I didn’t love Mable so much, it would totally gross me out.

“That Levi is something else,” she coos.

“Something selfish, maybe.”

She pours the yolks into a pan. “Something delicious.”

Gross.

But true.

“What’s delicious?” Haley, the curvy thirty-five-year-old who runs the front desk, enters the kitchen through the back door and peers into a bowl of chocolate chips before popping a few in her mouth. Haley gossips almost as much as Mable. She also has a minor addiction to chocolate.

I watch her shovel more of the chips into her mouth.

Okay, major.

“Levi,” Mable answers, wagging her eyebrows.

“Mmm. He is scrumptious.” Haley tucks her shoulder-length black hair behind her ear and gives me a dirty smile. “I’d lick him from head to toe and back to head again.”

Good God. It’s like I work at Hotel Horny Women.

“Levi is not scrumptious,” I say, trying to think about omelet ingredients instead of how Levi’s stomach muscles rippled when he leaned into the hallway this morning. “He’s annoying.”

“He doesn’t annoy me. Does he annoy you, Mable?” Haley says.

“Not one bit.” Mable smiles.

Haley reaches for more chocolate chips and I smack her hand away. “That’s because you two didn’t grow up with him and practically live at his house your entire childhood.”

An uncomfortable silence falls over the room.

“No,” Mable says after a few moments, her voice carefully quiet. “We didn’t.”

Haley clears her throat and forces a smile at Mable. “Got any of last night’s cake left?”

Leave it to Haley to break up the tension with dessert.

I busy myself getting things ready for breakfast as Mable and Haley start gossiping about the guests.

Most guests who visit Willow Inn are retired folks who come to the country for fresh air and a quiet retreat. And some of them stay for weeks or months at a time, and make it an annual occasion.

So several of the guests staying here this summer have visited before and, since Willow Inn is a small establishment with semiregular clientele, they sometimes get to know one another, and things around here can get rather friendly.

Mable’s voice is dripping with drama. “… and then Marsha Greenberg told Betsy Peterson that she was no longer welcome at their bridge table because of the incident with Mr. Clemons.” She looks up from the cutting board, scandal on her face, onions in her hands. “Can you believe that? Especially after what happened with Vivian Whethers last month…” She jabbers on, Haley bobbing her head emphatically as she forks chocolate cake into her mouth.

You’d think senior citizens relaxing at a quaint inn in the middle-of-nowhere Arizona would be low-key and rather boring, but they’re just as bad as college kids. They flirt and drink and sleep with one another, and it’s just nasty. Entertaining. But nasty.

Haley gasps at Mable’s ongoing story, which I’ve failed to follow because I’m busy over here actually working.

“No, she did not.” Her mouth drops open in disbelief.

“Oh, honey, you know she did,” Mable says, and makes a disapproving mm-huh noise. “I told you that woman was trouble.”