“Threeweeks,” I repeated, stunned. Stung. Yes, I had sworn never to return to Bunyan. But Meg always kept me in touch. “Has she been to see a doctor?”
“Dr. Bangs.” Who had been our family doctor since before I was born. “He wants her to get an MRI.”
Wait.What?“Is she going to be all right?”
“She says she’s fine.”
“Right. And if she chopped off her arm, she’d tell you she had a hangnail,” I said. This past summer, when she’d gashed her shin almost to the bone on portable paddock fencing, she’d bandaged it up herself and gone back to herding goats.
“Don’t worry,” my sister said in her warm, reassuring Meg way. “I’m here.”
I felt a wave of love along with the teensiest surge of guilt. She was the best sister. The model daughter.“Never a minute’s trouble,”Aunt Phee liked to say. Usually with a glance at me.Not like that one,her look implied.
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.
“You want to come home?”
“Ha-ha,” I said.
Bunyan, North Carolina, could have been the setting for a Lifetime channel movie or a romance novel. Stuck in the middle of miles of farmland, past hand-lettered signs offering pine straw delivery and tarot readings, the small town clung to the bank of the Cape Fear River like a patch of daylilies, sturdy and bright. The lampposts all had flags, the front porches all had rockers and deep eaves. There was a bandstand on the river walk and a farmers’ market on Saturdays. The main street boasted a library, a bank, a struggling art gallery, and three churches. A jumble of storefronts sold postcards and ice cream and secondhand clothes, bait and paint and appliances. It was the kind ofplace you wanted to raise a family in or move to in retirement. A good place to come from.
But not where I was going.
“I’ll see you at Christmas,” I promised. “Only six weeks away.”
“We’ll miss you at Thanksgiving.”
“I’ll miss you, too,” I said.
But not enough to jeopardize my job, I thought as we ended the call. Not enough to disrupt my life.
They would all have to get along without me, Meg and John, Daisy and DJ, Momma and Daddy. Beth. Amy. Even Aunt Phee and old Mr. Laurence.
And Trey.
My heart tripped. My decision to stay away had nothing to do with Trey.
I scowled into my wineglass. Nothing at all.
Iwas fifteen the summer Trey Laurence came to live with his grandfather.
“The boy next door,”Amy called him, which I thought was ridiculous since he lived a mile away up the road.
Our big orange barn cat, Weasley, had gone missing the day before. Beth was making herself sick, worrying he had encountered a coyote. More likely a truck, I thought, but I’d promised her to keep an eye out when I went for my run.
So when I saw the orange shadow slink through the gap in the hedge by the Laurence place, I was relieved. Well, relieved and annoyed, because now I was going to have to break pace, and it was going to be really hard to get my body moving again. Also, I had no idea how I was going to get the cat home. But I pushed through the bushes anyway, scratching my arms, whistling the way Beth did when she was calling the cats to feed them.
Naturally, Weasley ignored me, streaking toward the antebellum-style house.
I jogged up a long gravel drive through an avenue of trees like a dirt-scratch farmer come to beg a favor at the Big House, growing hotter and sweatier and more exasperated by the minute.Damn cat.If I hadn’t promised Bethie... I whistled again, following the flick of the cat’s tail as it rounded a corner of the porch.
And there, sitting on the back steps, was a boy scratching our cat under the chin.
I stopped, eyeing him warily. He was about my age, with dark curly hair and faintly golden skin.
He looked up at me and smiled. “It’s not a dog, you know. It won’t come when you whistle.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “It’s my cat.”
