As her eyes slip to the red lines still etched into the skin of my forearm, bright spots of pink appear on her cheeks. “Logan, right?”
Now I wish I could remember her name. Sarah? Sammy? It’s been a couple of weeks, and I only thought about her…every time I saw the cuts on my arm. But in my head, I’ve been calling her Spitfire. Not a name I think she’ll take kindly to. “I’d be insulted if you didn’t remember, considering you sicced Beef Wellington on me,” I say instead of possibly getting her name wrong. Not that the alternative was any better.
Her stance softens the slightest bit, though her thumb slides closer to the green ‘call’ button on her phone. Does she know her screen is on? I haven’t done anything wrong, but I have no plans to test the respectability of my citizenship if the cops decide to focus on the Australian part of me instead of the “born in the US of A” part. Plus, there are too many doorbell cameras on this street for me to argue that I wasn’t sitting in front of this house for over an hour as I psyched myself up to knock on the door.
It’s a headache waiting to happen, one I really don’t need.
“Okay,” Spitfire says, jutting out a hip. “I did notsicmy cat on you. You came barrelling into the room with your big muscly body and scared the living daylights out of him, so he responded accordingly.”
I clench my jaw, taking a breath before I speak. I need to stay calm. “You threatened to murder my friend.”
“No!” She points at me indignantly, a vivid reminder of her fiery personality. “I threatened to murder mycat.”
“How do you reckon I’d know that?”
“By taking a minute to use your head instead of your impressive muscles to assess the situation.”
“For someone a few millimeters away from calling the coppers on me, you’re praising my muscles an awful lot.” And I don’t know what to do with that.
Her eyes jump to the phone in her hand, opening wide before she deletes the three numbers and lowers her hand. “You have muscles,” she says with false nonchalance as her face turns a bright scarlet. She shakes her hair out of her face and lifts her chin. “I was simply stating a fact.”
“How about yousimplyanswer my question. What are you doing here?” I nod at the house behind her.
Spitfire looks back, then meets my gaze again. “What’s it to you? And no, I don’t live here.”
I exhale with a modicum of relief. That’s one complication I can toss out, though it doesn’t make this situation any less stressful. The last thing I want is to spend more time on this walkway than I need to. “Do you know the woman who lives here?”
Her eyebrows pull together, one lifting slightly higher than the other. “Doyou?”
“Answer the question, mate.”
“I will if you ask nicely,mate.”
Grinding my teeth, I take a few deep breaths and remind myself that I have time. A few months, anyway. I don’t have to do this today. “Forget it.” Turning on my heel, I head back to my car.
“Why were you watching the Shafers’ house?”
My steps pause. I look back. So I do have the right address… Okay, so I was never questioning my research, but a part of me liked the uncertainty. The excuse to stay in my car and pretend I wasn’t a few dozen meters from the whole reason I left Australia.
“I was…” I curse under my breath. There’s no good way to explain. I should just walk away and hope I don’t run into this woman a third time because she’s starting to feel a bit like a curse. Then again, if she knows Lola… Swallowing, I fold my arms again. “I was curious.”
Spitfire wrinkles her nose like I’ve said something disgusting. “Are you some kind of perv?”
I groan. “No, of course not.”
“There’s no ‘of course’ in this situation, buster. There are kids in that house, so you’d better explain yourself before I call the cops on you.” She fumbles with her screen lock for a few seconds, then pulls up the phone app and shows me the keypad with the numbers typed in again. Except, I’m pretty sure she opened her calculator.
I’d laugh at how ridiculous all of this is if my mind didn’t get stuck on ‘kids.’ As in more than one. That…hurts more than I thought it would. Obviously I knew there was a possibility that my birth mom would have more kids after me, and I saw the boys walk in not too long ago. But I was busy trying to figure out what I would say once I worked up the courage to go up to the door and didn’t connect the dots until now. They were teenagers.Olderteenagers. Maybe only a decade behind me in age, which isn’t all that much time in the grand scheme of things.
I havebrothers.
Why did she want them but not me?
“What’s wrong with you?” the spitfire in front of me demands. “You’d better start convincing me that you’re not a creep before I get you registered on all sorts of lists.”
I blink as my gaze shifts from the house back to her. She’s frowning again, but there’s less protective fury and more concern on her wrinkled forehead. “I’m pretty sure Lola’s my mum,” I say before I can think better of admitting the truth.I’ve always been a firm believer in honesty, but this might have been a good time to lie.
Her eyebrows jump high. “What? What do you meanpretty sure?”
