Sadie's turn

Hi, This is Sadie Morrissey. Anne says I should introduce myself and let you get to know the real me before you believe all that nonsense Spence is spouting.

Let me just say, there are a few things about me that Spencer Tyack doesn't know. In fact there's at least one thing about Spence himself he doesn't know.

Or he didn't -- until yesterday.

Now he's ticked. Like it's my fault! Like I wouldn't change it if I could. Like he's Mr Perfect. I don't think so!

Anyway, about me. The first thing you should know is that I don't normally write with purple ink. But Anne said that, if we wanted to make it clear who was who, I should get a distinct ink and a distinct font. So I have. (The purple is me trying to sound like a heroine. I think I'm heroine-challenged. Anne thinks Spence is hero-challenged. She says we make a pair).

So . . . I've known Spence forever. I did not, however, imprint on him like a duck. I might have followed him and Danny, my brother, around for a few years -- well, okay, a lot of years -- but that's because they always did cooler stuff than the girls I knew. I'd have rather climbed a tree than played Barbies. I'd rather have played baseball than hopscotch.
And they let me. Because it was handy, I think, to have someone to blame things on.

Like, believe me, I wasn't the one who broke Mrs Sullivan's front window when we were playing baseball in the street! And I didn't eat all the trick-or-treat candy in Spence's grandma's mixing bowl before the trick-or-treaters got there, no matter what anyone says. (I think she figured that out when I was the only one who didn't throw up.).

And regardless of what he's been saying, I didn't follow Mr Hot-Shot Tyack around forever, either. I worked for him when I was in high school and he was just getting started buying old houses and renovating them. But when I graduated, I left. And I went to college in California -- at UCLA, for heaven's sake. Hardly next door to Montana. And Spence was nowhere to be seen.

Yes, all right. I admit it. I went home during the summer. But someone needed to straighten out his files. For nine months he either fired the people he hired to do it, or he left everything in a heap for me. "Sadie can do it," he always said.

And I always did.

Maybe I shouldn't have. Maybe when I went away to college, I should have left for good. And maybe I would have if Spence hadn't come to my graduation. If he hadn't grinned his million megawatt grin, teased me, tempted me, told me he couldn't live without me.

He couldn't live without me? His business couldn't live without me, he meant!

I should have known.

No. I did know. But I was stupid. I thought absence had made his heart grow fonder. I thought he'd realized I'd finally grown up. But the truth is, maybe I hadn't totally grown up. If my heart still beat faster every time he came into the room -- even when it was just to thrust a folder of papers at me or ask me to do a title search -- how grown up could I have been?

Not very.

Not grown up and not smart, despite the summa cum laude college degree. I guess you could say I was too stupid to live. Certainly I was stupid enough to get myself into the most awful mess I've ever been in my whole entire life. And now I've got to get out of it. Or something.

I wish I knew what. Even Anne doesn't know. I asked her and she just shrugged and said, "That's up to you and Spence."

Well, no hope there. That's all I can say. She might as well quit now or move on to someone else. But she says no. She says she's worked with a lot of pain-in-the-neck guys before. She says some of them take two or three or four books to turn into heroes. Anne says Spence might need to go to Remedial Hero School.

I wonder if she's kidding. If she's not, I should find out if there's one for heroines. I've never been a heroine before. I've never exactly thought of myself that way. "Like a princess?" I asked her.

"No, like you," she said. "Like the very best you that you can be."

She said that I can do everything else. That I am beautiful and wise and kind and generous (and that I would have to be to put up with Spence all these years without tying his ears in a knot). So she says I can become a heroine if I try. She also said she'd get me some steel-toed boots, just in case I need them.

I might.

But truly, if Anne thinks she's going to get a happily ever after out of Spence and me, I think the Remedial School had better be co-ed. And we'd both better sign up.