LITMIR.BIZ

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downtown neighbors... Jake’s right. It’s not just about me. They’re going through the same thing I am.”

      Chelle waved her hand expansively. “Mi kitchen es su kitchen, I told you that. Jakey, go get some money out of my purse and run to the grocery and get her whatever she needs, okay? She’ll make a list.”

      Jake barely concealed a roll of his eyes. “Sure, sure. I’ll grab her a superhero cape while I’m at it. I think they’ve got ’em on aisle three. Hey, sis, just text me the list, okay? I’m outta here.”

      He sauntered out of the kitchen, presumably toward wherever Chelle kept her purse.

      The timer beeped on the oven. It galvanized Kari. She called after Jake, “Wait! The muffins! You said you were hungry?”

      His reply wafted back toward the kitchen. “I’ll grab a honey-bun or something.” The front door banged shut.

      Rude. Just plain rude and inconsiderate. Ma would have skinned any of her children who turned down home-cooked food as it was coming out of the oven.

       Not everybody was raised by Ma. You can’t judge people by Monroe standards. Isn’t that what you’re always telling Daniel and Andrew?

      Rob drew his thoughts back from his brothers and pinned his attention on Kari. It wasn’t hard to do—not with her pulling a delicious-smelling pan of muffins out of the oven.

      These were huge, puffy confections, studded with steaming volcanoes of blueberries. His fingers itched to snatch one up.

      Kari must have read his mind. “You’ll have one, won’t you, Rob?”

      “Uh, sure. If you have enough.”

      “Don’t worry. I’m cooking more for the downtown folks.” She smiled—a sweet curve of her lips that warmed her face in a way he hadn’t seen on her before. “Can I get you some coffee?”

      “I guess I’ll take you up on that muffin. I don’t know, though, about the wisdom of me having more coffee. I’ve had something like six cups already since four, and I’m wired as a coat hanger. Maybe I’d better just have some water.”

      “Milk,” Kari said instead, firmly, confidently. “Milk would go better with the muffins, and you look like the sort of fellow who would enjoy a glass of milk.”

      “Yeah. That sounds perfect.” He pulled out a chair beside Chelle and watched as Kari deftly turned the muffins out in a wide shallow bowl. They came out perfectly, like something that would be in the pages of a cookbook or a magazine. His mouth watered as Kari set the bowl down on the table between him and Chelle. With quick efficient movements, Kari grabbed a stack of small plates from the cupboard.

      “Let me get that milk,” she added as she set the plates down beside him with a clatter.

      Kari was back in a flash, pouring two glasses of milk. As she handed him the milk, Rob saw that her face was still suffused with that warm expression. This was a different Kari from this morning, a confident, poised Kari who seemed to feel comfortable in her own skin, doing what came naturally to her.

      Feeding others. Taking care of others. Rob had seen that same level of comfort and confidence in his mom and his sisters and even his brothers as they’d done the same thing.

      The Monroes were like that, too—squirmy when the microscope was turned on them. He understood how a person could be uncomfortable with attention focused on herself, and then completely at ease when she could focus on the needs of others.

      “Oh, Kari, you outdid yourself on these,” Chelle told her after an enthusiastic bite from her muffin.

      Kari smiled, ducked her head. “Thanks, Mom,” she murmured as she tested one for herself.

      Rob liked that. No “aw, shucks, it was nothing,” no “These? These are horrible!”

      Now he tried one of the muffins. It was like biting into a piece of paradise: warm and comforting and with a burst of summer as a blueberry exploded into his mouth. The balance of sweetness and earthiness mingled perfectly, along with just the right cross of crunch and chew.

      “Wow.” He managed to swallow the bite of muffin and not instantly stuff the rest of it in his mouth. Self-control. That was the ticket.

      “You like it?” Kari glanced at him shyly.

      “It’s head and shoulders above my attempts. But then, I do use one of those boxed mixes,” Rob admitted. He took a bigger bite of the muffin, trying to decide if it would be bad to eat two or three or the whole bowlful.

      Kari shuddered. “Ugh. Really—I know I’m talking myself out of a job here—but muffins are just as easy to make from scratch as a box. And so much better.”

      “You’ll have to teach me sometime.”

      Chelle scarfed the rest of the muffin and said with a wink to Rob, “Oh, you can’t trust Kari. I follow her same recipe, and mine never turn out like this. She leaves something out when she writes it down.”

      “I don’t,” Kari protested with a laugh. “You saw me, Mom. You saw me cook them in front of you. Just follow the recipe and don’t overmix. That’s the only secret.”

      At the word secret, some of Kari’s confidence seemed to wilt. It was as if she had been instantly reminded of the morning’s events. She put down the half-eaten muffin and stared across the table at Rob.

      “So you had some questions,” she said.

      Rob let the sweetness from the muffin linger in his mouth for a second longer before he washed it away with a swig of milk—and like the muffin, it was perfect: not too cold, not too warm, no ice to mess it up, an exactly appropriate amount of bubbly froth ringed around its surface.

      He dragged his thoughts back from the task of filling his belly...and from his appreciation of the woman who’d provided the food to do that. “Yes. Oh, and you’ll need to give a formal statement sometime today. You left this morning before I could finish.”

      “Ha. That’s a polite way of putting it. I tucked my tail between my legs and ran,” Kari said. She toyed with a muffin, shredding it between fingers that were long and slender but still managed to look as though they could manhandle a bowlful of bread dough.

      “Well...yeah. Mind telling me why that was?”

      “It was—just too much. That bakery is my dream, the goal I’ve worked toward since I was fifteen. To see it all up in smoke and know that somebody intentionally did it...” Kari trailed off.

      “But you did the same thing, didn’t you?” Rob scrutinized her face for any reaction his provocative question gained him. “You burned down someone’s dream, right?”

      He’d not been able to pull up the case, so he was flying blind here. He had run Kari’s name through the system, and it came up clean except for the sealed record she’d had as a juvie. Not anything else—not so much as a parking ticket in the years since she was fourteen.

      That was odd. Usually juvie for a kid that age was a first stop on a long path to the revolving door of prison. Either Kari had been scared straight or she’d not belonged there to begin with...

       Now, that doesn’t make any sense. She’s a self-confessed arsonist. Of course she belonged there.

      The reaction that Rob had hoped to provoke didn’t disappoint. He could have slapped her and got the same expression for his trouble: first the slack-jawed expression that followed any low blow, then the in-drawn breath, the narrowed eyes and compressed lips.

      “I never—” she snarled.

      Her mother quickly wrapped her fingers around Kari’s in a tight squeeze. It seemed to deflate Kari. Pain pushed away the anger around Kari’s eyes. She closed them, then dropped her head.

      “It’s okay, Mom. I’m...” She freed her hand from her mother’s,

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