Once More, At Midnight. Wendy Warren

mean when I crashed my car into Old Man Hertzog’s grocery?” Gus leaned indolently against the doorframe. He crossed his arms, as relaxed as if they chatted about old times every night around midnight. “Not the crime to which I refer,” he said, a corner of his mouth hooking into a half smile. “I’m talking about the crime that happened a couple years earlier than that. The crime of falling for the sheriff’s niece.”

      “It’s almost midnight,” she protested, mindful of Sara and Bree asleep—she hoped—upstairs. “You shouldn’t be here.”

      “I was never supposed to be here. Didn’t bother you before.”

      “Seems like stating the obvious to say we’ve both changed since then.” She tugged at the hem of her tank top, ineffectively trying to make it stretch past the short tap pants she slept in during the summer. “What do you want?”

      In lieu of answering, he poked his head over hers and looked around the kitchen. “Invite me in, Lilah. Do you know I’ve never seen the inside of this house before?”

      “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

      “Why? Afraid I won’t like the decor?”

      “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to come in this late,” she clarified tightly. “My sister…”

      The gray eyes she used to get lost in so easily narrowed and turned cold. “Never liked me,” he finished for her. The relaxed smile around his lips tensed—not much, but enough for her to notice. “I have my own shower at home now, and my clothes are almost always clean. I don’t think I’ll offend anyone.”

      “That’s not what I mean, and you know it!” Her face felt hot, but the bare wood of Sara’s kitchen floor sent a chill through her bones.

      There was no point in contending that she’d never been offended by him, not by his clothes or his family or by any of the other things that had shamed him in his youth. There was no point, because it wasn’t true.

      The first time she’d seen Gus, she’d been curious and a little scared. At the age of ten, she’d moved with her sisters from Seattle, Washington, to Kalamoose, North Dakota. The girls’ parents had died in a plane crash on their way home from a second honeymoon. Up to that time, the Owens sisters had lived a sheltered, gentle life. Raised by parents who had loved each other and adored their children, Lilah and her sisters had had no reason to expect anything but the joy to which they were accustomed. Lilah wasn’t sure about Nettie or Sara, but the accident that took her parents’ lives had changed something in her, something deep and crucial.

      She wasn’t sure she could articulate the change even now, as an adult; she certainly hadn’t been able to do it as a child. All she knew was that her parents had left full of happiness, that they’d expected the best from life and had suffered the worst; they’d been torn from their kids, and at some point before they’d died there must have been a moment, a cruel and heartaching moment, when together they’d known, they’d never see their girls again.