Page 15 of Wild Love
“Are you hungry? Are there specific snacks you like? I didn’t know what to get, so I figured I’d wait and see what your favorites are. But the house is stocked. I want you to… make yourself at home.”
She nods, finally glancing back my way.
“I can get you a boiled egg.”
Now it’s her turn to scrunch her nose up. “A boiled egg?” I never thought I could feel so judged by a child. But here I am. Justifying the nutritional merits of boiled eggs. “It’s a great snack. High in protein. Helps you sleep well.”
Cora looks full-on disgusted.
“There’s also cereal.”
I get a quirked brow for that one. “What kind?”
“Oatmeal?”
Her lips pull back in a teasing expression as she shakes her head.
“Lucky Charms?” I try again. I bought them against my better judgement. The sugar content is terrible, but they seemed like something a child would like based on what I’ve seen with West and his kids.
For that suggestion I get double finger guns, an almost smile, and a “Now we’re talking.”
We head downstairs, and I watch Cora eat her cereal at the kitchen island while I’m hit with the full impact of what I’ve agreed to do. Nerves creep in. Doubt creeps in. And later, when she says goodnight and shuts her door, I decide to go online and find some black sheets so I don’t totally blow this entire thing.
CHAPTER SIX
FORD
“What are you doing here?”
Rosie flips her head around from where she sits at the end of the dock, clearly startled by my arrival. “Enjoying the view.”
I wanted peace and quiet to clear my head tonight. I know that with Rosie here I’ll get neither. I look beyond her at the darkened lake. Without the scattered glow from the solar lights dotting the pillars, it would be pitch black out over the water. But I know the view well, given that this dock sits near the property line between my and West’s houses. Even though there’s nothing visible on the horizon right now, I can envision it almost perfectly.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
I stay standing, not sure how to act around her.Still. Even though I’m now a perfectly successful and independent thirty-two-year-old. “I came to sit on my dock and escapethe new realities of my life in the dark, by the water, where it’s quiet. Except you’re here, and it’s never quiet where you are unless you’re plotting someone’s death.”
She snorts, but it’s half-hearted. Then she turns back to the still body of water again. “First, this isn’t your dock. It’s my family’s. I would know, because I’ve been coming here for years. Second, I don’t plot people’s deaths.”
I stride toward her and opt not to tell her that, according to the land survey, this dock does, in fact, fall on my property. “Fair, you’re more of a crime-of-passion type. But I’ve spent years thinking you planned Travis Lynch’s death out in detail on the pages of that diary.”
She laughs, but it’s not light and airy like I remember. There’s a heaviness to Rosie now that doesn’t match my memories of her. She may be three years younger, but she always kept up with us through her teen years. West never excluded her, and she was always the “it” girl in Rose Hill— popular to the point of being beloved—if that’s a thing.
As someone who was more of a loner, she always seemed that way to me anyway. I only got the summer experience of Rose Hill as a kid though. Now and then, we’d come for Christmas, or the odd weekend getaway, but my family’s life was in the city. My mom’s practice, my dad’s band. He’d go on tour, and Willa and I would go to school. But the summer was sacred. My parents built it that way on purpose. We spent those two months based here in Rose Hill and it was the best escape.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I started spending more time here just because I wanted to. It wasn’t until thecity became too fucking much that I decide to move here permanently.
“Yeah. I’m fairly sure I wrote an entire paragraph weighing whether it would be more humiliating for him if I cut off his penis or his testicles.”
“Dark. What did you settle on?” I crouch down, placing a hand on the wooden boards to take a seat. Several feet separate us, but our legs dangle over the edge as we sit side by side, taking in the view of lights from homes dotting the other side of the lake.
“I forget.”
“That’s a shame. I saw him at the grocery store the other day.”
“Yeah?” She doesn’t look my way, but I can tell by the change in her voice that she’s entertained. “What does it say about me that I hope he’s aged poorly?”
“It says you can take the girl out of the small town, but you can’t take the small town out of the girl.”
