LITMIR.BIZ

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her life. But Marcy had skirted the truth, and Emma didn’t want to be part of those nearly true stories again. It didn’t mean she couldn’t act like any other Halloween-festival volunteer. A normal person who lived in Bliss, Tennessee.

      Until Owen finished the work on Nan’s house.

      Marcy showed her again before she went on to her more important errands. Emma had a few false starts, but she concentrated on her work and ignored any sign of curiosity from her former friends and neighbors.

      She slipped an orange balloon over the nozzle on the tank. As she activated the pump, the balloon expanded, and a cat swelled to arching life on its side. The trick was getting the thing off and tying a ribbon around it. She had a pile of balloons to finish before Owen was ready to leave for his paying job. At her house.

      Peter Franklin, toddler son of another volunteer, kept leaving the petting zoo set up on the courthouse lawn, to help Emma collect runaway balloons that popped off the nozzle before she could tie them. Emma wrestled the cat balloon into submission and started a black one decorated with a happy, non-threatening ghost.

      She whipped it off the nozzle, held it to her stomach and roped it with a long length of ribbon.

      “That ghost isn’t scary,” Peter said. “We aren’t babies, you know.”

      “You have a baby sister,” Emma said. “Your mom told me so the last time she asked you to stay inside the petting zoo.”

      He ignored her less than subtle reminder. While she wouldn’t let the little runaway escape, the last thing she needed was Peter’s mom accusing her of putting a kindergartner to work.

      “My little sister has a ghost of her own. Mom pretends it’s an imaginary friend, but Becca and I talk to Sebastian all the time.” He scratched his nose. “Becca tells me what Sebastian says.”

      “That’s pretty creepy. How many other Sebastians do you know?”

      “Just Becca’s. He’s pretty bossy. Like you.” Peter offered her a purple ribbon as a shadow crossed her arm.

      Emma turned and froze, but Peter held up his arms to Noah.

      “Hey, kiddo.” Without so much as a glance at Emma, Noah scooped Peter up and deposited him inside the fence where a goat immediately took a gentle nibble of his hair. “Your mom says you love the goats and llamas.”

      “Llamas spit.” Peter stopped and gathered some saliva in his mouth. “Like this,” he said with an impressive display. Emma barely kept herself from leaping out of the line of fire, but Noah stuck like glue to the tall, leaf-strewn grass, and Peter stuck out his chest. “My dad taught me.”

      “Your dad?” Emma looked around for the missing father. So many new people had come to Bliss in the past few years.

      “Ted Franklin. He’s deployed,” Noah said, “for the second time. He went first the week after Peter was born.”

      “He isn’t home much,” Peter said, looking strong, sounding wistful.

      “I say we have a spitting contest right here and now,” Emma said. “So you’ll be in practice when he gets home again.”

      Peter’s tiny fist shot into the air as he yelled “Yes!”

      Noah stared at Emma as if he’d never seen her before, but he offered Peter a fist bump. Emma considered him brave for touching the little guy’s hand if the boy practiced his spitting skills at all.

CHAPTER FOUR

      “YOU HAVE HIDDEN skills,” Noah said as Emma watched Peter run off with his mom.

      Emma had changed. He tried to imagine the young woman he’d known and deeply loved being carefree enough to throw herself into a spitting contest. He offered her a wet paper napkin he’d obtained from a wary volunteer, who’d avoided touching his hand.

      “Oh, I could have won.” Emma wiped her face thoroughly, her smile a soft, sweet invitation to come closer. “I just wanted Peter to have good news for his dad when he comes home.”

      Noah longed to ask how she’d learned such surprising playfulness, but the conversation and the afternoon had already revived feelings he didn’t want to feel. He’d never been enough for her. She’d never realized he was carrying his entire family on his back. She didn’t know he still awoke in the night, ducking his father’s fists.

      Or that sometimes those fists were his in nightmares. When he was frustrated with the council. Or worried about Owen’s drinking, their younger sister, Celia, balancing between the next great party and the scholarship she couldn’t afford to lose, and finally, Chad, who confused the temper that eked out of him in his high school halls for the aggression on the field that made him a much-scouted football player.

      Noah hadn’t been able to hide everything that happened at his house before, but he’d tried to protect Emma. He’d dreaded her pity more than anyone else’s. He still didn’t want to see that look in her lovely green eyes.

      He focused, crawling out of his troubling thoughts. “You were in no danger of winning.”

      She searched his face. “Noah, are you all right?” She touched his arm. Her hand was familiar, small but strong, her touch, less clinging, more comforting.

      He nodded, not daring to speak for fear he’d expose how much she still affected him. She’d wanted him her way or no way at all. He had to keep reminding himself of that.

      But no way had worked well enough for the past four years.

      “We can be like this,” she said. “Instead of angry with each other or wary, we can be real friends.”

      He stared at her hand. “So we don’t have to discuss anything else.”

      “Like feelings,” she said with a wry laugh, and she turned back to her post at the helium tank, dismissing him.

      * * *

      SHE SHOULD HAVE known Noah was only pretending for Peter.

      When they’d been engaged, she could have been his support, his helpmate. She would have listened to all the situations he kept bottled up, if only he’d shared them.

      But he’d been closed off, unable to share happiness or pain. She’d lingered at the edges of his love, until those little tastes of happiness had left her starved.

      “Hey,” Owen said behind her. “I saw Noah. Was he harassing you?”

      “Never,” she said. “Can you drop me off at home? I think it’s too late for any more work on the house tonight.”

      “Yeah, sure.”

      As soon as she was back inside her house, she locked the door behind her. She leaned her head against the thick, solid oak.

      She was safe. Here, where Nan’s love still lingered, warming the corners and the open spaces, safety waited for her to call upon it. She dropped her things on the tufted bench and scurried to the kitchen to plug in the tea thing and start dinner.

      She had Nan’s tomato soup in the freezer. All these years, and Emma still didn’t know how to divide the components to cook for one. Nan’s recipes were built to feed a family.

      She set the dining-room table for one and chose a bottle of wine from the creepy basement where Nan had installed shelves along one stone wall.

      It was like sitting down to eat with her grandmother. Except when she poured one glass, she had no one to toast; no one to tell she was glad to be home, but was afraid coming home had been a mistake. Owen could have done the work and reported his progress to her father.

      A knock at the door startled her out of her thoughts. Clutching her napkin, she went to answer it. She was so in tune with every memory of Noah and each new thing she’d learned about him, she recognized his navy-suited arm in the window

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