Page 71 of At the Edge of Surrender

She’d had a couple of glasses of wine and had misstepped.

And that was it.

She was gone.

“It was always our thing…climbing onto our roof from our window in the middle of the night so we could talk when we were growing up. And even though we were adults and lived in the same town, once in a while we would still do it. She’d crawl out onto her roof, I’d climb out to mine, and we’d reminisce. She’d called me that night and we’d talked for two hours.”

And then she’d slipped, and my sister had been stolen from me.

Sympathy dimmed Kane’s bright eyes. “Fuck. I’m sorry, Emery. That’s awful.”

“Absolutely awful.” The words were hoarse. Close to a cry. “Her neighbor found her the next morning, thankfully before Maci woke up.”

He inhaled a shaky breath, and he rubbed one of those big, tatted hands over his face, blinking hard when he dropped it, voice dipping even farther.

“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize her name.” He hesitated before he muttered the question, “You have a picture of her?”

God, this was brutal.

My nod was bumbling, and I grabbed my phone from the table and swiped into my gallery, heart fisting in a wrench of pain as I searched to find a good one of Emmalee.

I settled on one of my favorites, a slow smile twitching at the edge of my mouth as I looked at it.

It was a picture from last Christmas Eve. I was hosting the family at my house, and she and Maci had spent the night. It was late, and she was in my kitchen, walking my direction and shaking a can of whipped cream, sticking her tongue out at me as I held up the camera.

We both had been laughing.

A flicker of those defenses flared as I passed him the phone, but it was different than it had been earlier.

As if I’d been soothed in some way by this interaction.

“We’re twins, but not identical,” I told him.

Kane accepted my phone and looked down at it.

My attention was probably too focused on his expression.

On the way he searched it before he flinched. The way that for one beat, his golden flesh turned ashen.

“Do you recognize her?” I couldn’t help but demand it, my voice cracking with the plea. Unable to stomach the idea of her being forgotten.

I watched him stall and work up the single gruff word that rose from his thick throat. “Yeah.”

“And?” Anger surged out with it.

I couldn’t help it.

His head dropped low as if he didn’t want me to see whatever was written on his face.

“And I didn’t really know her. She was vacationing here in Moonlit Ridge one winter. Skiing with a group of friends. They came into Kane’s a couple of times. We hooked up once, and that was the last I ever saw of her.”

His jaw ground as he said it.

Disquiet tied a knot in my stomach. A feeling that something was off. That there was something he wasn’t telling me.

“That’s it?” I pressed, almost frantic.

He lifted his face back to mine. “Yeah. That’s it.”

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