Good for You: A Novel (16)

Knowing that more mess awaited her, Aly steadied herself as she climbed the stairs to the second floor, where all three bedrooms were located. And still she gasped in horror as she entered the first of the two smaller guest bedrooms. Wyatt had left his two suitcases wide open beside the bed, which didn’t even have sheets on it, and the entire floor was covered with blankets and clothes. There were empty chip bags on the bedside table and a dirty plate that had begun to resemble a science experiment. It smelled almost as bad as the kitchen had.

Filthy, she thought, closing the door behind her. How had Luke possibly been friends with this hurricane of a human being?

The two guest rooms were side by side, connected by a jack and jill bathroom. Aly’d just started for the second bedroom when she suddenly had an urge to get it over with. Before she could talk herself out of it, she crossed the hall and flung open the door to Luke’s bedroom.

She braced herself for more of Wyatt’s destruction. But aside from a gray wool rug, the floor was completely bare. The books and photos on the shelves remained neatly arranged, and the duvet on Luke’s large four-poster bed was unwrinkled. The room still even smelled like him.

In fact, judging from the dust on the dresser, the room hadn’t been touched since . . .

Before.

Though it was the largest of the three bedrooms and the only one that had its own bathroom, Aly’d known that there was no possible way she’d ever sleep in there. How could she, when it was still so very Luke?

And it appeared that Wyatt felt the same way.

Something in Aly shifted then. For the first time since she’d arrived—since last September, really—it sank in that Wyatt had lost Luke, too. She didn’t really know much about how men’s friendships worked. Seth’s inner circle had been together since elementary school, but they were impermeable and clammed up whenever she walked in the room. As for Harry, he and Aly were entirely too attached; though they both had a decent number of acquaintances, neither had ever made other close friends. And Luke—well, though he’d always been popular and well liked, Wyatt was the only person he’d remained close to year after year after year. Yet she’d been kind of thinking that it was . . . different somehow, for him, than if he’d been a woman who’d lost her best friend.

Maybe she was wrong about that.

Her empathy for Wyatt evaporated the minute she stepped into the second guest room. Though free of empty containers and moldy plates, it was nonetheless filled with moving boxes and bags, and random pieces of what she assumed were Wyatt’s clothing. “Really?” she muttered, kicking an errant pair of boxers out of her way.

The sole silver lining of all the clutter was that it gave Aly something to do—which was better than ruminating about how her brother should still be alive and how she’d come perilously close to imploding her carefully crafted career. After rolling her suitcase into the closet, which was blessedly empty, she picked up a box to haul to Wyatt’s room. It was heavy—what was in it, anyway? But she was determined to tidy up quickly, so she could move on to more important things. Like salvaging her career.

An hour later, the room was clean, and Aly was tired to the bone. Still, her mind was abuzz. Because with every surface she scrubbed and box she hauled, she’d become more and more convinced that Wyatt was wrong. There was no possible way Luke left the house to both of them. After all, Wyatt didn’t need the money. Nor had Luke made a promise to take care of him. (That would’ve been weird, she decided, not to mention unnecessary.) He probably told Wyatt he could crash there whenever he needed to, and Wyatt had gotten the details mixed up.

Yes, this was all just a big misunderstanding.

Aly retrieved the folder with Luke’s will out of her suitcase, but when she pulled out the thick stack of stapled pages, the words might as well have been hieroglyphics. So she opened the contacts on her phone, hit Roger’s number, and left a message with his assistant.

Less than two minutes later, her phone lit up.

“Aly? It’s Roger,” he said.

“I know,” she told him. “Caller ID.”

“Oh. Right. I’m guessing you reached out about Luke.”

“I did,” she said. This was the first time since before her episode at the salad place that she sounded like herself, which was to say calm and in control. “I’m at Luke’s house.”

“Good.”

“And Wyatt Goldstein is here. At the beach house.”

Roger cleared his throat. “Yes.”

The only reason Roger didn’t sound surprised was because Wyatt had spoken with him recently, Aly told herself. Not a big deal. “He’s under the impression that the place is half his.”

“Aly, do you have the paperwork I sent you?”

“I do. But I’m . . . having some trouble focusing right now,” she admitted. “I was hoping you could just tell me what I need to know. I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner—I had a lot going on at work.”

“It’s okay. I can’t say I’m used to having my calls not taken for nearly nine months, but grief is complicated,” said Roger.

Aly knew he was trying to reassure her, but she’d really have preferred if he’d told her she was behaving like most people did under these circumstances. The last thing she needed was someone pouring more gasoline on the fire of her fears about her addled brain.