Free Finding Me: Book 1: All I've Ever Wanted (A New Adult Romance Series) by Unknown Page A

smoothly. They had agreed not to sell the old place; it was a family heirloom meant for them to share collectively in their adulthoods as a space to spend Christmases, Birthdays, and Graduations, much the way their family had used it, a place for celebration and togetherness, a place to be kept in the family.
        Maggie had driven three hours down the coast that day, looking forward to seeing her brother, and the progress on the house. She had thought that it would be good for him to have a project to do, aside from his job. It would be something to keep him out of trouble while he got his life together. Yet, as Maggie drove the block in her little red sedan, she could even see from the street that something had gone completely awry. The front door was swinging open, and empty beer cans were scattered across the porch. She pulled into the driveway and dove out of her car, barely turning it off before she closed the door. She crept through the open doorway and looked around; empty food containers, full ashtrays, empty cups and bottles with cigarette butts floating in them were scattered across the house like a minefield on her parents’ fixtures.
     
       Maggie’s hands shook as she reached for her cellphone in her large, brown leather side bag.  She rumbled around her purse, searching endlessly for it in the abyss of papers and pens for her phone. She finally clenched onto the device and brought it to her face, her hands trembling with anger as she looked at the destruction that laid around her. She punched in the numbers on the flat screen as if she was going to be able to psychically hurt her brother with her key stroke. Brining the phone to her ear she was just greeted with his voicemail.
     
       “Hey! This is Andrew, you know the deal.”
       “Andy,” Maggie spoke into the speaker, her voice shaking, “You need to call me back NOW, I’m not saying it was you, I love you and I know you’re doing well, maybe we had a break in. Either way you have to call me back as soon as you get this. I mean it Andy, no messing around.”
     
       She hung up the phone and threw it back in her bag. She took a deep breath and rubbed her eyes, Maggie had always been a punctual and self-resilient girl, even as a child, however this one incident, the sight of seeing her childhood home becoming some kind of party haven, and not what her father had wanted, weakened her almost to her knees.
     
       Maggie pulled back the tears and took deep breaths. She walked over to the pantry and drew out a box of plastic garbage bags and began filling them with the rubbish that was left behind. There were coaster stains left on the driftwood table her father and her had built in her late teens when they went on an excursion to the coast one weekend. The house seemed to breath with memory itself, every particle of it becoming alive with memory as she cleaned up the destruction around it. In the distance, she could hear the ebb and flow of the waves of the ocean that could be seen just beyond the back patio.
     
        Her father had built the place itself in his thirties before her and her brother came along. The piece of California, beach-front, property had been a wedding gift to her mother from some strange wealthy aunt who seemed to come out of the woodwork at the most unexpected times. Her parents had been ecstatic with the gift, and had spent their honeymoon not in some tropical dream-land, but rather walking on the beach that Maggie would grow up knowing as her back yard. She remembered her father, and how he was always up to something with the house, making constant repair and upgrades, adding new fixtures where he could find there. It was by no means a palace, especially for California’s standards, but it was her palace. To see the place in such a state of disarray, knowing that someone had done this to a place she loved almost as much as she had loved any other human in her life, made Maggie almost want to collapse in upon