“And then they died tragically of typhoid and lead-based paint?” he guessed.

Maggie gave him a playful shove and danced up the steps onto the porch. “No. They lived happily ever after for forty-plus years, giving generously to the town. Raising a family. Throwing spectacular parties.”

“And then they died.”

“And then they died—romantically—a few months apart. The house was passed down through the generations—some with better taste than others. When the family money ran out after a few generations, the house was donated to the town in the 1980s.”

“What did the town ever do to them?” Dean quipped. He gave the porch railing a shake and shot her a smug look when two of the spindles fell to the ground.

“I can fix that,” she said with confidence.

“The town turned it into the Campbell House Museum and ran it for just over a decade. Which is why the place comes chock-full of family artifacts.”

“Don’t even ask me to run the cash box at the yard sale, Magpie. I’m busy that day.”

“Come on. It was cute when you haggled with the church bingo lady in Aberdeen. The viewers loved it.”

She cupped her hands to one of the dingy front windows and peered inside. Wallpaper. Gloriously hideous pheasants in blue and gold climbed the walls of the study like an invasive ivy. Her fingers itched to touch it. It was so aggressively eye searing it might actually work. There were a few pieces of art, including what looked like a portrait hanging above a blackened fireplace. She gave the glass a swipe with her wet sleeve but only succeeded in smearing the layers of grime.

“Speaking of, when are you announcing this new ‘guaranteed to bankrupt you and lose all of your followers’ project?” Dean asked, clomping down the steps.

In Maggie’s opinion, the man spent entirely too much time thinking about numbers. Budgets, YouTube subscribers—all 900,000+ of them—and advertising dollars. But that was why they worked so well together. Dean obsessed over numbers on the page while she turned disasters into dream homes.

She followed him around the side of the house to the uneven stone terrace. The whole thing needed to be relaid. “We’ve still got three episodes banked on the beach bungalow. But I’ll start teasing this place on Instagram.”

He tripped, stumbled, and then kicked at the offending stone that had caught his shoe.

“Wait until tomorrow when the place is ours and there’s insurance before you fall and break your face,” she advised.

“What the hell is that?” he demanded, gesturing toward a concrete monument.

Maggie grinned. “A fountain.”