Josh waited patiently with every other ranch hand as Lil assigned tasks in the early-morning fog.
Although he’d never held a regular job before—his parents had tried to give him jobs on the ranch, one after the other, but none had ever stuck—it wasn’t strange to have to be somewhere when someone else said. Prison had been an effective crash course in that.
No, the strange part was the freedom. He had to be at work, and he had to call his probation officer, and he had to be at his AA meetings… but the rest of his time was fluid. He didn’t like the way he had to scramble to fill that time up before it slipped through his fingers.
But he’d gotten his library card, so he had stuff to read. Watching movies or TV or messing around on the Internet didn’t really appeal. He wanted something solid to grasp in those fluid, free hours. Books were good.
And Leonora worked at the library, which was another point in its favor.
“Josh.”
At the sound of his name, he swung his attention toward Lil. “Yeah?”
“I’ll need you to drive out to the meadow and check the windmill and fences there. Also, I’ll need you to stop by Tía Franny’s and give some paperwork to Hank to sign.” She snapped her fingers at herself. “Ah, crap, you can’t drive.”
Not being able to drive was like a horrible affliction that everyone seemed to forget he had. Only it wasn’t so bad.
Okay, it actually sucked, having to bum a ride from everyone. But better that than telling his family he’d been offered the chance to drive and turned it down. That would freak out Luke, and Luke was already worried enough about him.
“I can just ride up there,” he offered. “It’s not that far.”
“I guess so.” Lil hid a yawn behind her hand. She’d been up most of the night with the baby—he’d heard the crying even in his apartment over the garage.
“Just give me what I’ll need for Hank.” He’d gotten the bonnet back to the church in time, he was showing up to work every day—he’d deliver those papers too, and slowly, slowly his reputation as the family fuckup would have to melt away.
Once Lil had given him the papers and he’d gotten the parts he’d need to repair the windmill, he saddled up Rusty and set off. The fog had started to burn off by then, warmth creeping into the air as it did.
The horse swayed beneath Josh, the rhythm as familiar as a song from childhood. Josh had to admit Rusty was the perfect companion for him these days. Bombproof, quiet, and just generally unimpressed by everything. Rusty only wanted to do his job and get his can of sweet feed at the end of the day. It was a good life philosophy.
Do his work, earn his feed and board, and stay out of trouble. That was his motto now.
Oh yeah? But you went and talked to Leonora, even though Luke and Benedict told you not to.
His inner voice had once been the devil on his shoulder. Sure you can pound two more shots. Aren’t you a man? Sure you can drive. You hardly had anything.
Now his inner voice was his devil’s advocate. A better job for it, but it was annoying in a new way.
Okay, so yeah, he had talked to her. And by doing so, risked his job and his place to stay. He had no doubt Benedict would make good on his threat to kick Josh off the ranch. And if Luke found out and told Jackson…
Trouble. Every path led to more and more trouble.
But all of her was worth the trouble. Always had been.
He’d known her since forever—their families were some of the oldest in Cabrillo. But it had been sophomore year of high school when he’d taken a second look at the youngest Harper. She’d snuck in late to fifth-period trig—half an hour late, as if just to prove she could—and all without Mrs. Phelan noticing. Josh had thought, I like her style.
He still did although she was better at hiding her spark now, at least at work.
Work. That was another strange thing—Leonora had never been too interested in starting a career. They’d done three years of college together in San Diego, but they’d spent more time partying than in class. He wondered if she’d finished while he was gone.
He wondered about a lot of things she might have done while he was gone.
Tía Franny’s house came into sight then. They called it Tía Franny’s, but Tío Felipe had also once lived there—and they’d first moved into the house over a hundred years ago. But Tía Franny was the kind of person whose presence lingered. They’d still be calling the house Tía Franny’s a hundred years from now.
As he rode up, he listened hard for any sign of life. He knew Hank had a dog, but the dog was supposed to be as odd and reclusive as Hank himself.
Hank had always been a loner even before he’d joined the service. Josh hadn’t seen him since he’d come back, but according to Lil, Hank was a downright hermit now. And while he’d been injured, it wasn’t PTSD. Hank wouldn’t say exactly what it was, but he insisted it wasn’t that.
Nothing came out to greet Josh, not even a barking dog. Maybe Hank wasn’t home. Although there was a truck out front. According to Lil, Hank never left.
Josh tied Rusty to the front-porch rail and walked up the steps. Hank was supposed to be taking care of the old house, which was basically a warehouse for all the family mementos. He was doing a good job, judging by the exterior. The wood of the porch was in good shape, the house had been recently painted, and the hardware on the door gleamed.
“Hank?” Josh called through the door. Nothing. Not even the dog.
He knocked, which should have sent the dog into a frenzy. Still nothing.
“It’s Josh. I’ve got some papers for you. I’ll just leave them on the porch.” He tucked the envelope under the mat, which had recently been vacuumed. “I hope you’re still alive,” he called through the door.
As he walked down the steps, there was a rattle and the door opened.
“Josh?”
Hank had opened the door the barest crack and was peeking through it, a single dark eye blinking. “Is that you?”
“Yep.” Hank must not have heard him announce himself. Or maybe Hank didn’t believe his eyes. “Didn’t you know I was coming home?”
“I did. I just didn’t think they’d send you out here. I didn’t hear a car.”
Josh jerked a thumb at Rusty. “Took the horse. Lil asked me to drop off those papers and check the fence in the meadow.”
“Hey, Rusty.” The door cracked open another half inch, and Hank waved through the gap.
“You guys are old friends then?”
The door swung all the way open, Hank’s rawboned frame canting out. “Come in for a bit.”
That caught Josh short. He hadn’t even expected Hank to come out, so inviting him inside was… He shrugged. “Sure.”
After his reception at the wedding and christening—his cousin Fee continued to give him looks angry enough to melt steel—Josh would take whatever family friendliness he could.
The house smelled of pine wax and freshly chopped wood along with a faint—just the faintest—hint of mustiness. Just enough to let a person know that this house was old and ought to be treated with care.
From wall to ceiling, the place was stacked with boxes, all carrying family papers and artifacts and who knew what. Tío Felipe had been a sort of memory keeper for the family—letters, papers, and other mementos went to him to be preserved. And he’d told the family stories. Somewhere in here were tapes of him reciting them all. Or maybe they’d been transferred to CDs and hard drives. That was probably one of Hank’s tasks here.
“The place looks good,” Josh offered.
“It’s not too much work to keep it up.”
“This is more than kept up.”
Hank shrugged. “I got coffee, some tea, and I milked the goat this morning.”
Josh followed him into the kitchen. “Coffee’s fine. You’re still using the desert cooler, huh?”
The wire-frame cabinet of the desert cooler was set in the wall and open to the outside. Cloths were draped over the wire, and a pan of water sat in the bottom, the condensation keeping the food on the shelves cool. It was an old way to keep things cold without ice.
“It still works,” Hank said, “and adding water to it is cheaper than running the fridge full bore. Not everything needs to be that cold.”
Hank had always had a survivalist bent—if civilization ever ended, Josh was hightailing it to Hank’s side. The dude probably already had a plan.
“How are you doing?” Josh asked.
The curve of Hank’s mouth was humorless. “About the same as you are, I expect.”
“The Army was that bad, huh?” Josh accepted the mug from Hank with a nod of thanks and took a sip. Damn. That was some strong coffee.
“It wasn’t the Army. It was coming back. Everyone fawning over me like I was some kind of hero.” Hank spun his mug in circles, frowning at it. “I didn’t even lose any limbs.”
“What did you lose?”
“My spleen. Part of my liver.” Hank shrugged. “Must not have been too important since I’m still here. What’d you lose?”
They were sharing war stories then. Although, despite Hank’s insistence otherwise, his sacrifice was noble. Josh’s was decidedly not.
“My whole life.” Josh shrugged. “Not that it was much of a loss.”
Except for Leonora.
“Yeah. I hear you on that. After all those docs poking at me in Germany… I was looking forward to being left alone when I got back. And then everyone was on me.” Hank rushed his hands toward the table as if pouncing on something.
“I’m getting the opposite. Everyone’s acting like I’ve got the plague.”
Josh had never talked like this before with Hank. He hadn’t thought Hank was weird, not like the other cousins had, but Hank certainly never had been friendly. And Josh had been too caught up in his own bullshit to try to get to know his cousin.
But now they were both outcasts. Hank by choice. And Josh… Well, getting into that car had been his choice in the end.
“There was a vote before you got here.” Hank didn’t try to dance around that, which Josh respected the hell out of.
“I heard.”
It seemed the entire family had gotten together to vote on whether Josh ought to be allowed to work for the ranch. Fee—she of the steel-melting stares—had argued hardest against it. But she wasn’t the only unhappy one. Judging by the number of cold looks Josh got around the ranch and resort, there was quite the silent majority on the issue.
“You don’t have to tell me how you voted,” Josh said. In fact, he’d rather not know.
“I voted yes.” Hank’s gaze was steady and open. “I figured if I could get paid to sit in this house, you could get paid to be a cowboy.”
Josh swallowed hard and then looked around to hide his reaction to that unexpected loyalty. He’d been such an idiot to overlook Hank before.
“You do more than just sit in the house,” Josh said once the wave of emotion had passed. “I heard you’re cataloging all the”—he gestured at the boxes—“stuff.”
Hank leaned back in his chair. “I’ve been pecking away at it. Figured I’d do something useful.”
Because making sure that the house stayed intact wasn’t useful. “Find anything interesting?”
“There’s at least two boxes’ worth of letters between Sebastian and Isabel Spencer. You know them? Bea and Fee’s great-great-grandparents.”
“Huh. How’d those letters get here? They lived in San Francisco if I remember.”
“Somebody must have passed them on to Tío Felipe at some point, I guess. I haven’t even started on those, there are so many. But you’ll like this, being a Merrill.”
Hank rose and came back with a small cardboard box. “Open it.”
Josh did, slowly. Inside were dozens of white linen handkerchiefs, embroidered with the initials WJM in every color imaginable.
“Your Grandma Cat made those for your Grandpa Jace. And he saved them all. They’re in good condition—he must have hardly used them.”
Josh lifted one. It was pristine, the linen white as snow and the embroidered threads gleaming like sapphires. You didn’t see things made this fine, not anymore. “This is awesome. Has anyone else seen these? Lil would love them.”
Hank shook his head. “I haven’t seen anyone in”—he mentally calculated—“a week? I’m not sure.”
Wow. Lil hadn’t been joking about the hermit stuff. Josh tucked the handkerchiefs away and closed the box. “I ought to be going.” Hank was probably reaching the limit of his sociability.
“Thanks for stopping by.”
Josh rose and set his hat back on his head. “Don’t worry—I won’t make a habit of it.”
Hank laughed. “You can stop in when you’re passing by. Just don’t stay too long.”
That was… Josh swallowed hard. He knew what that meant, that Hank was willing to offer that. Never would he have guessed that the most reclusive member of the family would offer him a friendly hand.
Josh was more grateful than he could say for it. And he meant to be worthy of it.
Leonora settled into her usual spot at the family dinner table, right next to her sister and across from Jackson. Daddy was at the head of the table, and Mama was at the foot, same as always. Many things changed, but Sunday dinner in the Harper household wasn’t one of them.
There was a pork roast, greens, mashed potatoes, and soda biscuits set out on the table—their usual Sunday fare. They’d changed out of their church clothes before supper. When they were kids, they’d stayed in their formal wear until the end of the day. Probably because Grandma and Grandpa Harper had been here then, and they’d done things that way in their day.
Her grandparents had been a fixture at this table until just a few years ago when they’d gone on to God within a few months of each other. So Leonora supposed things did change at Sunday dinner after all.
They bowed their heads, Papa said grace, and then they dug in. Jackson passed the bowl of mashed potatoes to Leonora, asking as he did, “I saw Josh in town the other day. Close to the library. He wasn’t bothering you, was he?”
The steel in Jackson’s tone made her shiver.
No, Josh hadn’t been bothering her—although he had kind of ambushed her in the stacks. And then she’d met him in an abandoned restaurant. But none of that fell under the definition of bothering her.
She wet her lips, trying to keep her expression steady. To keep from giving the whole thing away.
It wasn’t like Jackson had even asked if she’d wanted to see Josh again. Couldn’t she decide for herself if she wanted to see him? Her brain wasn’t so broken that she couldn’t be trusted to do that.
“He wasn’t,” she said to her brother.
No, he’s done everything I asked him to. Which you’d beat the shit out of him for if I told you about it.
Lying to her family used to give her a thrill. She’d taken perverse enjoyment in getting one over on them, getting out from under their thumbs. She was doing all that here, in her secret arrangements with Josh, but this time the thrill was mixed with equal parts sourness. Not only because she was lying, but because she had to lie in order to gain this little bit of freedom.
“Well, you tell me if he does,” Jackson said. “Luke and I are keeping an eye on him.”
The sourness crept up her throat. That made her even more worried—had Jackson set spies on them? He was her brother, for God’s sake. She wasn’t a criminal.
She tried to clear the acidic sensation from her throat. “I’ll let you know.”
If she didn’t elaborate on what exactly she would let him know, it wasn’t exactly lying.
“Did you have any headaches this week?” her mother asked.
Jasmine sent her a worried look as if Leonora might’ve hidden that from her.
Leonora scooped some mashed potatoes onto her plate, avoiding both their gazes. “No.”
She didn’t go on, because frankly she didn’t want to. She knew they meant well, all of them, but they didn’t have to have everything in her life explained to them. She could have some things that were just her own.
“Are you sure?”
She bit back her instinctive response to that. Prone to flying off the handle—they’d told her that in therapy, that with her head injury she was more likely to have moments of irrational irritation, that she’d find herself getting angry for no reason. She didn’t think she had no reason for being upset here—hadn’t she clearly said that no, she hadn’t had a headache?—but still, that warning held her back.
Was her anger justified or was it only a product of her malfunctioning brain? It was exhausting, always examining her emotions to see which she could count as real and which weren’t. And since they were all produced by her brain, wasn’t all of it unreal on some level?
She sighed. This was all too metaphysical. She’d chase her own tail following that line of thought. Sometimes she was totally okay with all this brain stuff and what might be real and what wasn’t—and sometimes she felt like she was falling down an endless rabbit hole.
“Well, are you?” her mother demanded.
Leonora blinked at her. Hadn’t she answered? No, she hadn’t, because she’d been too busy musing on the nature of emotions. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m sure. No headaches.”
A headache would have had her bedbound for several days, so yeah, she would have remembered that. And Jasmine would have noticed and tattled on her, and her mother would have dropped everything to care for her and… and… and…
She shook herself. Stop it.
“I’m taking care of her,” Jasmine said rather sulkily to their mother.
Leonora sighed inwardly. There was the other thing—the turf war over who would take care of her. When she’d moved in with Jasmine, she’d hoped to escape at least some of the family’s oversight while also reassuring her parents she wasn’t totally alone.
But instead, her parents’ suffocating concern was simply taken over by Jasmine and Jackson. Her parents had eased up, but her siblings took up the slack.
Only now she had a secret, thanks to Josh: something that was all her own. Something she wasn’t supposed to do. For the first time in five years, she had something that was hers alone.
Her heartbeat was loud in her ears, and her skin was tingly and chilled all at once. But her voice was steady as anything as she said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you all—I want to organize a farmers’ market at the library. Something to bring people in on the weekends, move some of the books in the Friends of the Library sale. It would mean staying late a few nights a week for a while, but it would look good for library school.”
“I’m so glad you can go to library school online,” her mother said without even looking at Leonora.
And who said Leonora was going to stay right here and go to the online school? Maybe she wanted to go to UCLA’s library science program and attend in person. Not that anyone asked her what she had planned. As soon as her mother had found out about San Jose’s online program, she’d instantly assumed that was what Leonora was going to do.
“Anyway,” Leonora went on because there was no point bringing all that up, “I’m going to need to stay late occasionally while I’m working on it. Sasha said she could drive me home.”
There. Nothing to object to there. She was working on something that would improve her future, and if Sasha was driving her home, there was nothing for them to pick apart.
Except that most of it was a lie.
“I could come pick you up,” Jackson offered.
Leonora waited a few beats, trying not to appear as if she were rejecting him out of hand, which would arouse his suspicions. “Really, you guys don’t have to drive me everywhere. Sasha is more than happy to help out.”
She actually wasn’t certain about that; it would take some maneuvering to get Sasha to agree to drive her to a meeting with Josh. But Sasha wasn’t the difficult part here, so Leonora pulled her focus back to navigating this.
“If it’ll help you get into library school, that’d be great,” Jasmine said.
“Well, if Sasha is willing and it would help with school,” her mother said, “then I suppose it’s all right with us.”
Wow. Thanks so much for your permission. But Leonora knew better than to say any of that. She didn’t even let a hint of it slip into her expression. Instead, she picked up her plate. “Is anyone else finished?” she chirped. “I can start clearing up.”
Which pretty effectively ended the conversation.
Once the table was cleared, the dishes put into the dishwasher, the pots and pans scrubbed, and the counters wiped down, everyone went into the living room to crowd around the big screen in order to watch the Sunday games.
But on her way to the couch, Leonora made a detour to her purse. Now that she had her parents’ approval, it was time to set the next piece into motion. She pulled her cell phone out from the pocket and called up her text messages. Her hands were steady even as her pulse hammered in her ears—she still had her old skills then.
A sly little smile took hold of her mouth as she punched in a message to Josh. That familiar thrill raced across her skin, thrummed through her veins, and made the roots of her hair feel electrified.
She was messaging him right under her family’s noses. It was wrong, and she knew it was wrong, and that knowledge was what made the action delicious. The sour sensation from earlier was gone—there was only the triumph of the forbidden now.
Meet me at five on Thursday at the old Tastee-Freez.
The Tastee-Freez was on the very edge of town and had been closed for… geez, ten years now. It was easy enough to get to but isolated enough that they would essentially be undisturbed. A perfect place to meet someone she shouldn’t be seen with.
“What are you doing over there?” her mother called. “The game’s already started.”
“Nothing,” Leonora called back, frantically hitting Send. The lie to her mother made her want to giggle like a teenager. She was getting away with something again, which she hadn’t done since before the accident. She’d forgotten how much fun it could be.
Once she’d tossed her phone back into her purse, she dashed over to the couch on her tiptoes, unable to suppress her sneaky smile as she did.
She held on to that smile all throughout the afternoon’s games. But no one bothered to notice it, because of course Leonora had reformed. She couldn’t be thinking fondly of her early rebellions.
Or of the man who’d been her accomplice.