Page 62 of The Sweetest Obsession

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It doesn’t takeme long to unpack for what feels like the twentieth time.

It also feels a little pointless when everything is so transitory right now.

Or maybe I just have a feeling Grant will be shipping me right back home tomorrow after one of the out-of-towners comes rushing in to apologize because their grandpa broke out of his cabin and wound up lost, running around town spooking people.

Grant will feel silly for overreacting. I’ll feel sillier for going along with it, but we’ll forget within a week, after my bruises heal.

By the time I’m back downstairs, I find Nell hunched over the coffee table. She’s kneeling on the floor and scribbling diligently at a workbook from school while some colorful cartoon bubbles across the TV with overly bright colors and loud noises and a lot of weird, um, stretching.

I stop and lean over to watch her for a moment.

“Whatcha working on?” I ask.

“Book report,” she chirps without stopping her aggressive scribbling. “It’s about howThe Velveteen Rabbitis really a book of philosophy. Like how Skin Horse says you can find your real self if you suffer enough for love.”

Yikes.

That’s pretty freaking deep for an almost ten-year-old.

I arch both brows. “Now where did you learn about philosophy? Last I checked, that’s usually a subject for college.”

“Miss Lilah!” she answers brightly, her eyes going starry. “She’s the best teacher ever. She says when life gets tough, that’s when you find out what you’re really made of. A lot of ancient people thought so too and wrote long books about it. Don’t much like Aristotle, though. Aristotlesucks.”

I burst out laughing at her enthusiasm.

Honestly, it was all Greek to me—pun intended—in the Great Thinkers extracurricular I took, too.

“You have an interesting teacher,” I tease wryly, tweaking one of her curls. Then I glance up as I catch a muscular shoulder passing by through the kitchen door.

“Be right back. I’ll let you focus.”

I follow that glimpse a minute later and the sudden heavenly smell of cooking meat into the kitchen.

Sure enough, Grant changed out of his uniform, slipping into a pair of battered jeans and a plain grey Redhaven PD t-shirt that strains across his chest.

I think I’m in awe.

Seeing him like this, casual and barefoot and sohuge,breaks something inside me.

This powerful ache of homesickness that doesn’t make sense when I’m already here with good people.

But it’s not a place I’m missing.

It’s a time when things were simpler.

Before we were missing so many pieces of ourselves.

“Need a hand?” I ask.

Grant glances up from flipping homemade hamburgers on the stove.

“Sure,” he says. “Fries are just about ready to come out of the oven, if you wanna season ’em.”

“On it.” I scrounge up a pair of oven mitts as he steps aside so I can retrieve a tray crowded with thick wedge steak fries coated with some aromatic oil. “Spice rack?”

“Cabinet overhead.”

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