The main one being that I didn’t feel any kind of terror going through me as I took in his face. My knees didn’t shake. Bile didn’t rise up in my throat.
If anything, this coolness flooded over my skin and through my veins as I took him in.
When my eyes flicked to the woman sitting beside him, I wasn’t sure what to think when I barely recognized her too. Her face was blank and dotted with sores. She was thinner than she had been before. A lot thinner. But if he looked twenty years older, she looked thirty years older. The years hadn’t been kind to her. Not that they ever had.
On the other side of her was a man I had grown up with but barely knew.
My cousin.
Of course they were here. All of them—minus my older brother and my uncle, who was still in jail—but that wasn’t shocking at all. These were the people who were at the top of my list for those human beings I didn’t want to have anything to do with.
I didn’t let myself think as I pivoted where I was standing and went to Rip just as a man in a suit walked down the center aisle. I was looking at Rip as his attention went from the people in the pews that I didn’t want to look at for another second to me, then back to them. They finally went back to me just as I stopped a foot away, his jaw doing that tensing thing again.
Okay.
I nodded, and he blinked slowly enough to agree with me. We moved together down the aisle along the wall. My heart beat, beat, beat just faster than normal as we passed one aisle after another until I stopped at one only a couple of rows before the exit. Sliding all the way in, I took a seat as the man in the suit stopped behind a pulpit set up just to the right of my grandmother’s casket. Ripley took a seat directly beside me, the material of the jacket he’d put on as we walked toward the building brushing against my bare elbow. I had rolled up the sleeves of the black button-down shirt I had tucked into my skirt.
The body contact did nothing for me.
I could see the backs of their heads in the second row, but I made myself focus on the man who started talking about my grandmother in vague, vague words that I wouldn’t remember and that I had a feeling he had to have used generically for others all the time. My face went warm and stayed warm as I sat there, listening but only barely. This hum started buzzing around in my ears, but I did my best to ignore it and the way my heart seemed like it wanted to beat its way out of my chest.
Rip’s arm moved, brushing against my elbow even more.
But I kept my gaze straight forward.
In less time than I ever would have expected, the man stopped talking and explained the instructions for the motorcade that would head to the cemetery where Grandmother Genie would be buried.
And still, my ears buzzed.
I didn’t mean to get up so fast, but I did, and luckily so did Rip. We were the first people out and the first ones walking toward the lot. The tension in Rip’s body was something I could have easily tasted. I felt it everywhere, even if I didn’t understand it and wasn’t in the mindset to as we walked out.
I knew something was wrong the second we got into his truck and he slammed the door shut, my name slithering out of his mouth, ending on a hard vowel. “Luna?”
I was looking out the window at the side mirror. My cousin was out of the door, his head swinging around the parking lot. Probably looking for me. “Yes?”
His breathing had gotten loud, but it was steady; I had no problem hearing it. “Is your last name really Allen?”
Shit.
This throbbing sensation instantly pierced right through my right eye socket and had me rubbing my lips together. My fingertips even went numb before I winced—on the inside and the outside.
That was just about the last thing I would have ever,ever, expected him to ask.
Somehow,somehow, I managed to get the truth out, because there was no way I could lie. This wasn’t the kind of thing I could try and hide when there were a handful of people who knew the truth. “Legally, yes.” The pain from my head got stronger before I admitted slowly, “But it hasn’t always been.”
Had he recognized my grandmother’s last name? The one I’d had for the first eighteen years of my life?
This was exactly why I had changed it. This was what I’d been trying to avoid. Only a handful of people—including Mr. Cooper—knew that I hadn’t always been an Allen. No one else at the shop, not even the other guys who had worked there nearly as long as I had, knew about it. They had no reason to know that my siblings had a different one. I was the only one so far who hated it enough to not want to keep it. Lily had mentioned before that she wanted to change it too, but she was still too young.
Rip had closed his eyes at some point. His forehead became lined as he frowned. I could see that great, big chest inhale and exhale, and his voice was incredibly calm as he breathed out. “Okay.”
Okay?
Did he… know?
Had he read the paper and recognized the name and seen what my family looked like and pieced it all together?
It hadn’t been a huge bust. Dad had only gone to jail for three years. His brother was a different story. But while I’d been growing up, everyone knew the Miller last name hadn’t been the greatest. Maybe they hadn’t known specifically about the meth, but they had known there was something, and no one ever did anything.
