Then again, Evelyn Myers had always been a heavy sleeper.
Chapter Eight
Raina Myers was a nice, fair woman. She wasn’t unkind or abusive, didn’t cuss or yell. Paid full price, donated to charity, and always drove the speed limit. Her grades had been good, her friends happy, and even though her parents had died young, she had been old enough to cherish them. Most everyone who knew Raina even believed that the love she’d shared with her parents would transfer to her future children after she had married.
So it took longer than it would have otherwise for most to admit—in hushed waves of gossip—that those people were wrong. Raina might have been a nice, fair woman, but when it came to being a mother, she’d decided she didn’t have time for it.
That’s why the smallest Myers was still outside long after the sun had gone down the first time she met Darius Williams.
The then-seven-year-old had been trying to run away and had been horrible at it. Something that the six-year-old Eve had had to point out.
“You’ll hurt your leg if you do it that way.”
Her voice had been small but easy to hear in the side yard between their houses. She had a bat in one hand while the other should have held a softball had she not lost it. She had decided to play golf with the two and had realized quickly that the porch lights and streetlamp in the distance weren’t doing the best to illuminate her makeshift golf course.
It had been quite the shock to see the neighbor’s window slide open and a boy around her age start trying to climb out.
He, on the other hand, seemed to be much more shocked. Once her voice broke through the quiet of the night air, his backward climb out of the window turned into more of a downward spiral. It wasn’t that far of a drop, but the angle was all wrong, and Eve knew all too well that it was the angles that got you most of the time. She’d once jumped from the back of a pickup truck with ease but had misstepped on the porch stairs and landed wrong enough to twist her ankle.
She’d cried for a long time after that.
Now she knew to watch for angles.
The boy was going to hurt himself if he fell the way he was going, so Eve dropped her bat and closed the space between them just in time to become a pillow.
She tried to stop his fall but instead met him as he fell backward. They hit the grass with a little more than a thud. Eve had her arms wrapped around from his back to his chest and kept her hold a few moments after everything had stilled.
He wasn’t heavy enough to knock the breath out of her, but the book bag that he had thrown out of the window before his scurry down looked like it would have done the trick had he been wearing it.
Eve glanced at it as the boy rolled off her to the side and sprang up to his feet. His eyes were wide and dark as they were finally about to take her in.
“You—you’re the girl—” he pointed to her house “—you’re the neighbor.”
Eve laughed and stood, dusting off her jeans.
She pointed to the window opposite the one he had just fallen from.
“Eve Myers. That’s my room.” She gave him a questioning look. “Who are you? I haven’t seen you before.”
The couple who had moved into the house next door had done so while Eve had been at school. Or maybe when she was out atthe park. Maybe it had been when she was trying to sneak onto the Becker farmland that wasn’t too far from where they were now.
Either way, she hadn’t known the new owners had any kids.
Suddenly, she found herself extremely excited at the prospect.
The boy was shy in his nod.
He rubbed at his arm.
“I start school next week. My name’s Darius.”
The rising excitement was too much for the small Eve. She dropped her bat and jumped up and down in place.
“Finally, I can have someone to play with,” she exclaimed. “I get so bored here by myself! What are you doing now? Do you want to play golf?”
She scooped the bat back up and held it out like a queen presenting a knight with his sword.
“I’ll let you go first,” she added. “We just have to find the ball. I was hitting it in the front yard, but it rolled to the street, and I think I hit it a little too hard to get it back, and itsoundedlike it might have hit that gutter…”
