I turned and raced up the stairs to the second floor, my heart pounding in my skull. At the top of the steps I heard a noise and paused, clinging to the wallpapered corner. But this time, it wasn’t laughter. It was something else entirely.
Taking a breath, I tiptoed across the hall and stood outside the closed door of my father’s bedroom. He let out a sob so pained I felt it inside my heart. My father was in there, alone, crying. Yet another thing I hadn’t heard him do since the day we’d buried my mom.
I stood there, my hand on the door, and listened. Listened until the fear faded away. Until I started to realize how irrational I’d been. How I must have imagined it all. How I’d let a natural weather phenomenon freak me out to the point of panic. None of that was real. This was real. My father’s pain. His finally breaking down.
This was real. And as much as it hurt, standing there in the hallway, listening in on his grief, it gave me hope.
After breakfast the next morning, I decided to walk into town and see if I could find a newspaper. There wasn’t a single TV in the house, and I needed to know what was going on with the hunt for Steven Nell. Maybe the cops had found him. Maybe everything was fine and we could go home.
Just as I put my hand on the knob of the front door, I saw something move in one of the windows across the way.
“What’re you doing?”
My hand flew up to cover my heart. “Darcy! You scared me!”
“Well, why are you standing there frozen?” she asked, looking me up and down from the bottom step like she couldn’t believe she was related to someone so weird. She reached back to tie her hair into a high ponytail with a sparkly black and gold band. “You looked catatonic for a second. Did you have another flash?”
“No.” I couldn’t believe she knew what catatonic meant. “I was just about to go for a walk—check out the town.” I yanked the door open and paused. “Want to come?”
She narrowed her eyes. I was sure she was thinking the same thing I was thinking. The two of us hanging out together twice in less than twenty-four hours? Looked like hell had finally frozen over.
“Sure,” she said finally, grabbing her purse from the table by the door and almost knocking over the family photo in the process.
“Should we tell Dad we’re going out?” I asked.
“He went for a run, like, an hour ago,” she said as she slipped on her dark sunglasses.
“Really?” I asked, following her out the door and across the porch. “Again?”
“What? Like that’s so bizarre?” she asked. She opened the gate and strode through, not bothering to hold it for me.
“Dad hasn’t gone out for a run in about five years,” I told her. Leave it to Darcy not to notice. “Now he’s gone twice since we’ve been here.”
She lifted a shoulder, walking backward up the sunlit sidewalk. “Well, good for him. Maybe it’ll chill him out.”
Then she turned, flinging her hair, and walked ahead of me. As we reached the corner, I glanced back at the gray house, half expecting to see Tristan’s face in one of the windows, but it was still. The place looked deserted. Even so, I quickened my steps, trying to make it look like I just wanted to catch up with Darcy, not like I was scared. A middle-aged man on a bike rode by with a surfboard tucked under his arm, and he rang his bell as he passed. On the other side of the street, a guy in his early twenties was watering his small lawn. I took a deep breath of the uniquely scented air and tried to relax.
“What is that smell?” I mused. “Is it honeysuckle? Lavender? I can’t place it.”
Darcy inhaled. “I don’t know, but it’s nice.” She trailed her hand along the top of a neatly clipped rosebush growing along the sidewalk. “It’s kind of…”
“Soothing,” I supplied.
She tilted her head, considering. “Yeah. Like aromatherapy.”
We walked a couple of blocks, past colorful Colonial homes with flower gardens and porch swings and peach trees, each one more stunning than the last. It was all very pretty, but almost too perfect. Like someone had come in and told everyone to get their houses ready for the postcard photographer.
“So you never asked me how it went with Joaquin last night,” Darcy said.
“How did it go with Joaquin last night?” I asked.
“Amazing!” she answered, bending slightly at the knee. “He’s a lifeguard. How hot is that? And he works at this bar down by the bay, so we have that in common.”
“That’s cool,” I said.
“He is so beautiful, and he totally ate up the whole story about us being from Manhattan. He was fascinated,” Darcy said, clasping her hands under her chin and then swinging her arms wide. “Thank god they made us from someplace cool and not, like, Kansas City or something. I can’t wait to see him again.”
Well, at least she’d gotten our cover story out there. Maybe now everyone would know and I wouldn’t have to answer questions about our supposed past.