Page 10 of Sneak Attack

For me to have walked over. For her to be in town.

All of it.

Eden and I were always a bad idea. I needed to remember that now more than ever.

I spun on my heels, shoved out of the front door and jogged down Marley’s steep incline.

My mom was on their front porch, wearing her standard yellow and white checked apron over a soft pink short-sleeve dress. Dresses. She always wore them unless she was cleaning, and it shouldn’t have surprised me for one second she would have heard the peeling of tires into her driveway. She probably smelled the burnt rubber over whatever she was most likely cooking and came out to wait for me.

“Feel better?”

I stomped up the stairs and kissed her cheek. “Not in the least.”

“Yeah, you should have known hustling over there like your ass was on fire wasn’t gonna get you anywhere. How is she?”

“Marley was sleeping.”

“I wasn’t asking about Marley.” Mom pushed off the railing and opened the door to inside. The fresh scent of recently baked banana bread wafted out of her house, the smell of it lured me in before I realized I was following her.

And yeah…I knew that too.

“Told her she shouldn’t be here, and this was all a bad idea.”

“I don’t know. From what I hear, Eden could use a decent friend in her life.”

“What have you heard?”

The Barclays moved to town three weeks before our senior year. Her dad was hired to teach in the business department at Nashville College. It was an interim position and he’d spent Eden’s entire senior year of high school keeping feelers open for new jobs, hoping to move to Florida once Eden and I went to Tennessee. He’d done exactly that before moving to Missouri for another position teaching economics a few years back. It was Eden who had vanished into thin air. No social media. No trace of her for as much as I’d searched for two years.

My question proved I’d never stopped thinking of her, hunting for her, even if I wasn’t doing deep internet search dives online anymore.

“Nothing really. All I heard when I was at Frank’s this morning was her showdown with Selma. It’s all town is talking about, what with Selma approaching her on the street and all.”

“What?”

Selmaapproachedher? Mom had to be wrong. Eden had only said she’d seen them and since she wasn’t sporting black eyes or broken limbs when I saw her, I didn’t think they’d actually spoken. Although physical violence wasn’t Selma’s typical arsenal. That came from her words, and I’d seen the power of those firsthand.

“She didn’t tell you?” Mom glanced at me, questions in her eyes.

To say my parents loved everyone would bemostlytrue. My parents loved everyone but Irv and Theresa Holden, and any of their offspring—Selma being the first. Some small-town, old rivalry had grown between the families since before I was ever born, back before my dad taught in the same high school he attended. The Buchanan-Holden feud was long known by everyone.

And everyone thought once Selma and I had Jasper, that feud would be over.

How wrong they were.

“Get to the point, Ma. I’ve had a long day.”

“Yes, with showing up at Marley’s to yell at Eden after she’d already been yelled at by Selma, and handing your precious boy over to that—”

“Nope. Don’t finish that.” I didn’t care much for Selma, but shewasthe mother of my son. Feud or no feud, crap talking his mom was out of the question and Ma knew it.

“Sorry.” She lifted a hand in apology. “I know. That wasn’t going to be nice, and I know she loves him and is a great mom. Uncalled for. Just seems Eden sweeps back into town and you two are both acting like kids all over again and it’s been less than a day. Time for old wounds to mend is all I’m sayin’.”

“That mean you and Irv and Theresa and Dad gonna sit down over sweet tea and cookies and get to it?”

Mom rolled her eyes. “When the smoky mountains tumble is when that’ll happen.”

“Same.”

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