LITMIR.BIZ

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the bush, do you?”

      Quinn shrugged. “What’s the point?”

      “Good question.” Grace jerked her thumb toward the pile of garbage. “If you want answers, though, you have to help me out.”

      Quinn trudged beside her without a word, even though she picked up only the small, fallen carton and a half-empty garbage bag. Still, half-hearted help was better than no help.

      “So?” Quinn said as they walked back to the curb.

      “I left my husband,” Grace told her. “Because…well, because. So I’m starting over. Toby’s one of my best friends in the world, and he said I could stay with him while I get back on my feet.”

      “Did you quit your job, too?” Asked as if the idea of a housewife was a concept one only read about in books.

      “Well, no.” Grace hefted her three bags and a broken lamp onto the pile for the trash men.

      “You didn’t have a job?” Asked as if Grace had recklessly broken a sacred vow.

      “Of course I did,” she snapped, and caught herself by clearing her throat. “I mean, I did have a job a few months ago, but it didn’t work out. So now I’m going to start my own business, right here in Wrightsville.” As if the plans were all made and she actually knew what she was talking about.

      “Doing what?” Quinn’s eyes were as dark as her hair, and far too deep for a girl who looked barely more than fifteen.

      “Gardening,” Grace blurted out, the lie coming far too easily. She resisted the impulse to fold her arms over her chest defensively. The kid was like a cat. She’d be able to tell right away if Grace showed even a frisson of fear.

      “There are a lot of gardeners in Wrightsville already,” Quinn said thoughtfully.

      “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

      “I’m just saying.” The girl shrugged again, and after two more trips up and down the driveway, they were done with the garbage haul. “Toby lets me help out in the shop sometimes,” the girl said idly as Grace gathered her bag off the hood of the car and searched for the keys. “Like, if he has to run out for a while and there’s no one to watch the shop. Like today.”

      Ah. Well, she could use some company. “You want to come in for a while?”

      Quinn scuffed the toe of her boot along the cement and shrugged again. “I guess.”

      Grace bit back a smile and ran up the front porch steps to unlock the door. Quinn followed, all disinterest and boredom again, but once they were inside, she helped Grace turn on the lights and flipped the sign on the door to the OPEN side. She trailed a finger along the chair rail as she slowly ambled behind Grace.

      “Lived next door long?” Grace asked to break the silence. Toby needed a radio in here.

      “Since I was about five, I guess,” Quinn told her as she followed Grace into the kitchen. “It’s a boring street.”

      “It didn’t used to be when I was your age,” Grace said, and took two bottles of Diet Pepsi out of the fridge. “But that was mostly due to Toby and me, rather than the neighborhood.”

      “Toby’s gay, you know,” Quinn said archly. She’d opened her soda and was examining the inside of the cap.

      “Yeah, he pretty much figured that out when we were fourteen.” Grace sat down opposite her and opened her own drink. “Do you have a problem with that?”

      “Of course not!” The girl looked insulted, and for the first time there was actually color in her pale cheeks. It was hard to tell if the blush was due to embarrassment or outrage, though. “I just didn’t want you to get your heart broken.”

      Definitely embarrassment, Grace thought with a pang of sympathy. Seemed as though someone had nursed a little crush on Toby before she realized that girls of any kind weren’t his type. Grace had done the same thing herself, back when Toby still had his hair, and his lanky, gawky charm inspired her to kiss him down by the canal one humid summer night.

      Of course, that was a long time, and a lot of kisses, ago.

      Not that any of the boys and men she’d kissed had ever truly broken her heart, she thought, staring at the bottle of soda in her hand. Even leaving Robert hadn’t done that. Maybe because she’d never truly given it to him in the first place.

      She raised her eyes to Quinn’s darkly serious ones. “My heart’s pretty sturdy,” she said softly. And wondered if she would ever have a chance to test that theory again.

      Chapter 5

      On Tuesday morning, Nick was slouched behind the wheel of the patrol car, making his usual circuit through town. Up River Road, a left onto Bridge, another left on Broad, straight through the village and past the quiet green square with its bandstand and handful of benches. Left on Schoolhouse Road and then again on Canal Street, past the bakery and the Café and the cramped, dusty little bookstore Walter Greenmarsh had run since Nick was a kid.

      So far, the most exciting thing he’d seen was a fat gold tabby cat taking a swipe at a blue jay, and Joy Goldberg, who was supposed to be doing the Atkins diet, walking out of the bakery with a cinnamon-sugar cake donut in her mouth. It was a warm, bright blue morning, and unless Nick wanted to set up a speed trap over on Bryant Farm Road, there was nothing much to do.

      As usual. Which was just the way he liked it. It meant he didn’t have to feel bad about leaving Wrightsville behind.

      He pulled into the lot behind the Methodist church near the square and radioed in to Miriam.

      “Nothing going on here, Nick.” He could hear her chewing gum, which she’d taken up when she quit smoking. “Are you surprised?”

      “Shocked,” he said with a smile. He signed off and pulled out, watching as Mr. Terrill pushed his walker across the street, his dachshund Frank waddling along beside him. He’d never asked if the dog’s name was short for frankfurter. He didn’t actually want to know.

      Without thinking, he turned the car toward Tulip and drove down the wide, quiet street only half aware that he was heading to his mother’s house. It was Tuesday; without anything more pressing to do, he could at least put the trash out for her, even if it was a little early in the day.

      But when he pulled up to the house, he had to park beneath the elm that would shade the whole front yard in midsummer. Another car sat in his mother’s driveway, a clean, compact little Toyota about half the size of the Ford his mother had driven since just a few years after his father took off.

      He started across the neatly trimmed yard, cocking his head when he heard voices, his mother’s and…Mason Lamb’s. Which was when he nearly tripped over his own feet.

      Mason Lamb was up on a stepladder on his mother’s front porch, replacing a lightbulb in the ceiling fixture, while Nick’s mother leaned against the screen door with a cup of coffee in her hands.

      She had a ribbon in her hair. A pink ribbon. Which matched her sweater. And she was wearing earrings. Earrings. At home, on a Tuesday morning in March.

      Not only that, but she was laughing at something Mason had said. Dressed in his usual uniform of wrinkled khakis and a white Oxford under a loose gray cardigan, he twisted to reach for something, and Georgia handed him the old glass cover for the light fixture.

      Smiling all the while. The woman was practically batting her eyelashes.

      She looked up then and smiled at him across the lawn. “Nick. What are you doing here, honey?”

      “Well…” What was he supposed to say? That he was bored and figured taking out her trash would be more interesting than cruising around Wrightsville for the sixth time that morning, even though that was his job? His mother never asked him why he stopped over, or at least she never had before.

      Of course,

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