My head whips around at the last comment and I catch Carly sitting there at a table with her younger sister, Mae, where they have their usual early Saturday breakfast before Carly drives back into the city. She winks at me.
My lips pull up in a grateful smile, and I shoulder open the door and step outside.
September hits hard today, bringing an abnormal chill compared to how it was even yesterday. The weather hasn’t scared off the regulars wandering Falcon Haven’s narrow sidewalk in search of breakfast, exercise in the nearby public park, or catching up with acquaintances on the wooden benches carefully placed near the decorative tree wells lining the sidewalk.
Falcon Haven is the type of town that looks good on the Fourth of July, Halloween, or Christmas—with banners hanging from the streetlights for each season, of course. At the moment, green leaves fight for survival against their inevitable submission to fall.
The nip in the air adds a pleasant cold to my cheeks as I slip into my car with the laughter of children collecting on the park’s playground and tired parents holding the Merc’s coffee cups, leaning on strollers to watch their kids.
I fall back into my seat, straightening my arms against the wheel. It would be the perfect start to Saturday if it weren’t for yesterday.
Stone’s back.
And I’m about to drive straight to him.
Feeling a lot like those errant green leaves, I turn on the engine and drive down the hill of Falcon Haven’s main strip and into the larger plots of land with perfectly landscaped houses.
Stone moved her into the richer, northern part of town soon after scoring his first big paycheck in LA. I shouldn’t have been being attention, but I can never seem to stop looking for information about him. Besides, the town kept tabs on Stone Williams, too. Even during my most desperate times when I tried not to give in to Google, my neighbors were perfectly happy to do it for me.
Seen as a good thing, I guess. It helped make me impervious to the mention of his name—the real or the fake one. It was certainly necessary, since the one way I could truly escape Stone Williams was impossible—by leaving Falcon Haven.
I thought I had my feelings for him, if not completely gone, then under control. Then he had to show his face in this town again.
Mrs. Stalinski’s driveway comes into view all too soon and I creep into it as if my car’s on the fritz. I lean over the wheel, my chin practically bumping against the leather as I search the darkened windows for his presence, my thoughts about as slow as I’m driving my Civic.
As if it wasn’t enough to arrive unannounced on a literal doorstep I was sitting on, he had to get that look on him, that static, heart-rendering, shook expression where I could practically breathe in his pain as he learned the truth about his mother before he righted his features again.
Stone wasn’t pretending. Before yesterday evening, I was certain Stone was avoiding his mother because he didn’t want to deal with her diagnosis and the fate that would follow, too consumed with his job and his new life in the city to look back. I figured his selfish ways had bled into his future, including dealing with his mother’s shortened one, which is why he never came around when Mrs. Stalinski first got the news.
I hate being wrong. But I give myself full permission to keep hating him.
When my bumper’s about an inch away from the garage door, I accept defeat and turn the engine off.
The wind bites my cheeks during my trudge to Mrs. Stalinski’s front door. I squint up at the sky. Gray, dreary, and threatening to storm.
My keys jangle as I dig them out of my pocket, but I pause with the key inches from the lock.
Normally, I’d walk right in and begin setting up while Mrs. Stalinski sleeps. Doling out her medications, pouring her juice, tidying the kitchen if she came down late at night for a nocturnal snack, as many cancer patients do since that’s about the time the nausea from their meds wears off. That sort of thing.
Mrs. Stalinski encouraged I enter without ringing the doorbell so I don’t disturb her, but now…
There’s another occupant.
I take a sip of my coffee, contemplating the closed door and whether I should knock. It would be the polite thing to do. The nice thing.
Poor, sweet, Noa-Lynn…
Screw it.Mrs. Stalinski would tell me to come on in, regardless of who’s staying with her.
Even if that person were her hot, calculated, heartbreaker son…
Taking a deep breath, I unlock and swing the door open.
That’s the extent of my rebelliousness.
“Hello?” I ask in a quiet voice.
The foyer lights are off, no different from any other time. It isn’t even seven yet. The house is silent, no footsteps or muffled voices.
