He gave her a nonchalant tilt of his head. “Everyone’s got to eat. Including you. I suggest you get to it.”
He went back to pacing and Willow went back to picking at the crackers and chips. Everything tasted like sawdust in her mouth. She knew she needed to put something in her stomach before she fainted from hunger and thirst, but all she could think about was Laurel and the fact that her twin was lost forever.
Grief had her in a stranglehold, but she refused to give in to it while Razor was in the room with her. God knew, he’d likely seen and heard enough already. She hated looking weak to anyone, and always had from the time she was a little girl. That went double when it came to him. Right now, she needed to be strong. For herself, and for Laurel. Her sister was counting on her, even now that she was gone.
Willow thought about the book Laurel had left for her to find.
Why had it been so important to her sister? What was Laurel trying to tell her?
Willow noticed the book lying on the edge of the chest of drawers across the room. She got up and brought it back to the bed, flipping through the pages while she chewed another dry cracker. Seeing the childish handwriting on the margins next to the birds she and Laurel once studied to pass the time was almost like traveling back in time.
All the little notes, the smiley faces and tally marks she and her sister had recorded whenever they’d spied their favorite birds on the orphanage grounds made Willow long for her twin even more. She could almost hear the echo of Laurel’s little girl voice in her ear, excited and happy after what had been such a tragic beginning to their lives.
Was this all that Laurel meant for the book to be? Some small comfort to Willow after her twin was gone?
There had to be more.
How she wished she could ask her. How she wished she would have demanded Laurel tell her everything that had been troubling her and had her so afraid when she’d first arrived in Colorado.
Now, all Willow could do was turn the pages of the worn old book in regret.
And pain. Emotion gathered in her breast, making her vision swim and her breath shallow in her lungs. Against all her effort to contain it, a tear splashed down onto the page. Willow wiped it away, frowning to see one of Laurel’s scribbled notations blur under the wetness.
The ink on that one wasn’t as aged as most of the other margin notes and annotations. No, it was relatively fresh by comparison, and written with a different pen. The black smudge on the page drew Willow’s eye to the Latin bird name that had been underlined.
Toxostoma rufum.A common Brown Thrasher.
Willow flipped through more pages, curious to see if Laurel had made any other recent annotations. She found another similarly underlined entry on a different page.
Nucifraga columbiana.Clark’s Nutcracker.
Like the first, there were no margin notes, nothing to indicate why Laurel might have been recently interested in the entry. There wasn’t anything remarkable about either bird, so why had Laurel noted them?
Willow began to flip the pages more urgently, unsure what she was looking for or why. Admittedly, she was desperate for any connection to her twin, no matter how thin or random. And these two underlined bird names certainly seemed random at best.
So did the third notation she found.
Spinus tristis.American Goldfinch.
Willow couldn’t think of any reason for her sister to have an interest in those particular birds, never mind why Laurel would go to such lengths to leave the book with Willow. Or was she grasping at straws here? Maybe the book had continued to be a hobby to Laurel and it truly was just intended to be a memento for Willow after Laurel was gone.
As confused as she was, she couldn’t convince herself that her twin wasn’t trying to tell her something important.
Keep this close,Laurel had said of the key to the storage unit.You’ll know what to do once you get there.
No, I don’t know,Willow thought, miserable with her inability to understand her sister’s message and the gnawing sense of loss that pulled her into its grasp all over again.I have no idea what you need me to do, Laurel.
Unless . . .
Willow searched the pages for more entries, a hunch niggling at the back of her mind. She found another. Then another. Was Laurel trying to communicate some kind of message through these more recent annotations?
“Find anything useful?” Razor’s low growl drew Willow’s head up with a start.
“No.” Swiping hastily at the wetness that lingered on her cheeks, she closed the book and glanced his way. “Just a bunch of scribbles that don’t seem to make any sense to me yet.”
He was already scowling, but he let out a hissed curse when he saw her tear-streaked face. His golden eyes seared her from beneath the slashes of his brows. It took him a moment before he spoke. “You going to be all right?”
“Yeah.” She sniffled, setting the book aside and trying to pretend she had a strength she didn’t quite feel. “I’m fine.”
