Tess sighed and shut off her car. She had managed to make a three-and-a-half-hour trip last more than six hours with all her detours, but she had only delayed the inevitable. She got her small suitcase out of the trunk and walked up the cracked cement path leading to the front door. She wasn’t sure if she should knock or just walk inside, but her sister opened the door before she made a choice, and Tess had the eerie feeling of coming face-to-face with herself. She and Kelly had often been mistaken as twins, and the similarities between them had only grown more pronounced as they had gotten older. Kelly’s dark hair was longer than Tess’s and tied in a ponytail, but it was the same dark sable and framed the same bright blue eyes. Her belly was slightly rounded from her pregnancy, but otherwise she was as slim and angular as Tess. They were even wearing similar cable-knit sweaters, for God’s sake. Tess fought the childish urge to strip down to the tank top she was wearing underneath.

  “Dad won’t take his pain pills. Where have you been? We expected you hours ago.”

  So much for a warm welcome home. Tess hadn’t expected a banquet in her honor, but she hadn’t thought she’d be met with the same hostility from Kelly that she felt inside herself.

  “Hey, Kelly, great to see you, too,” Tess said, hesitating on the porch before she stepped inside the house. Nearly every surface was covered with something crocheted, and Tess wondered if her mother was putting all her old gardening energy into the less strenuous needlework.

  “Hello, Tess. Glad you could finally make it.”

  The disapproving-older-sister expression on Kelly’s face was probably almost identical to the rebellious-younger-sister look Tess gave as her response. They both got a lot of mileage out of the two-year age difference between them.

  “Tess? Is that you?” Tess’s mom, Edith, came out of the kitchen. She was using a walker, but once she saw Tess, she set it aside and came over to her with a halting step. Tess met her halfway across the room and stooped down to hug her. Her body felt smaller, frailer than Tess remembered, but her arms gripped Tess tightly enough to make a wave of guilt flow through her because she had been away so long. She shook off the feeling. She would be going away again, as soon as her parents were able to handle her father’s injury without her help.

  She looked over her mom’s shoulder and saw Kelly’s son Justin hovering in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. He wouldn’t meet her eyes, and his hands flapped almost imperceptibly against his thighs. She untangled herself from her mom’s grip and knelt down, reaching into her backpack for the plastic dinosaur she had brought.

  “Hi, Justin,” she said. “Remember Aunt Tess? I brought you something.”

  He came toward her with hesitating steps and reached for the toy. He turned it over a few times in his hands, still not looking directly at her, and then launched himself at her neck. The hug was brief, but tight, and Tess dropped one hand to the floor behind her to keep from falling over. The physical movement seemed to loosen something inside Justin, and he started to speak rapidly.

  “It’s a Tyrannosaurus rex, from the Cretaceous period. They sometimes weighed more than ten tons and ate…”

  Tess sat back on her heels and listened in amazement as Justin rattled off an impressive array of facts about dinosaurs for such a young boy. When she had last seen him, he still hadn’t started to speak, and Tess knew from infrequent phone conversations with her mom that he had been slower to develop than other children his age. He was apparently trying to catch up by fitting as many words into each breath as he could, and she loved it.

  Kelly must have heard enough of those words by now to have lost some of her excitement about them because she came over and put her hands on her son’s shoulders. “Okay, Justin, enough for now. You can tell Tess all about dinosaurs over lunch, but right now she needs to take care of Grandpa.”

  This last bit was directed at Tess with a sharp nod toward the ground floor spare bedroom. She sighed and got to her feet.

  “At least take your bag to your room first,” Edith said. “Get settled in.”

  “Dad should have taken his pain pill two hours ago, Mom. Tess needs to take care of him right now.”

  “But she just got here, and…”

  Tess shook her head and left the two of them bickering in the living room. She tapped on the open door of the bedroom where her dad was staying because the trip upstairs was probably too much for him right now. She didn’t get a response, so she stepped inside. Her dad was propped on the bed in an upright position, staring at the television screen where robots, elves, and humans seemed locked in some sort of sci-fi or fantasy battle. Her dad had a game controller in his hands, but Tess couldn’t tell which of the characters he was.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  He glanced at her, and then refocused on the television with a grunt. “Tess,” he said in his usual brief way of acknowledging her presence.

  She walked over to his bedside table and looked through the array of pill bottles before finding the right one. She tipped one pill into her palm and held it toward him. “You need to take this.”

  He disengaged one hand from the controller and waved dismissively at her. “I don’t hurt. Besides, I don’t want to risk getting addicted to those damned things.”

  Tess stood silently for a few moments, watching her father play his game and noticing the occasional wince when he got too aggressive with the controls and probably felt the movement in his back. She had been dreading seeing him again, and it was almost comforting to have him focused on the game instead of her and her life choices. She was tempted to let him suffer for being so stubborn, but she couldn’t.

  “Look, Dad, you need these pills to help your body relax and heal. If you keep fighting through pain, you’ll be in bed longer, and then I’ll be here longer. Neither of us wants that, do we?”

  He looked at the pill as if nearly swayed by her argument, but then shook his head. “Just leave it on the table. I’ll take it when I need it. Whoa! Did you see that? I just took out two cyborgs at once.”

  Tess closed her eyes and mentally transported herself back to her bedroom in Olympia. She was safe and warm, with a woman’s leg draped over her thigh and delicate fingertips trailing over her stomach. Kelly’s damned phone call never came, and Tess, roused from sleep, looked over and saw…Brittany. Not Lydia. Where had she come from? She heard Brittany’s laugh as she answered. The parking lot. Seattle. The sea?

  Tess opened her eyes, shaken by the daydream. She snatched the controller out of her dad’s hands.

  “Hey! I was about to level up. Give it back.”

  “Take your pill, and then you can play your game,” Tess said. She had to get the hell out of this place before she went mad, and she would do whatever it took to get her dad well.

  He grumbled but took the pill and drank from the glass of water she handed him next. He muttered under his breath about being treated like a child while she straightened the items on his table, making as much noise as she could in the process.

  “Well, if you insist on acting like one, it’s how you’ll be treated,” she said. She hesitated with a plastic pink water carafe—probably brought from the hospital—in her hand, and then set it gently and deliberately on the bedside table. Their angry words were echoes from the past, but their roles had reversed. Weird. Her dad still stared at the television, but his hands weren’t moving on the controls. She wondered if he’d noticed the same thing. Tess cleared her throat.

  “Do you need anything else?” she asked in a somewhat softer tone.

  “Ginger ale would be good. If we have any.”

  “Fine.”

  “Thanks.”

  Snippy, but not angry. A real breakthrough moment. Tess took a deep breath and left the room. She picked up her bag from the living room floor.

  “We saved some lunch for you,” Edith said, coming out of the kitchen. Justin stood next to her, leaning against her legs. “Are you hungry?”

  Tess wasn’t, but she nodded anyway. Easier to eat something than to get into a long discussion about it.

  “I’ll be right there. Don’t let T-Rex eat my lunch before I get back, okay, Justin?”

  He giggled and ran back into the kitchen, where he would probably take a dinosaur-sized bite of her sandwich.

  She grinned and carried her suitcase to her old room on the third floor. Everything looked exactly the same as it had when she was in high school, complete with taped-up posters and a dusty collection of shells on the windowsill. She figured the utter absence of change had less to do with her parents keeping a shrine to her and more to do with their lack of imagination. To them, her room was simply her room and they probably couldn’t conceive of it being used for anything else.

  Tess tried to stretch out her moment of solitude, but it only took her a few seconds to toss her clothes into an empty dresser drawer. She changed out of her warm sweater and into a long-sleeved T-shirt before going back to get her dad some ginger ale and eat a lunch she didn’t want.

  Chapter Six

  Tess backed out of her parents’ driveway and paused at the four-way stop for a few minutes, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, even though there were no other cars on the road. She should be relieved to get out of the house—time off for reasonably good behavior—but somehow going to the grocery store was even worse than sitting at home with her family. At first, she had jumped at the chance to get away and had leapt into her car the moment her dad or Justin mentioned an item that wasn’t in the pantry. After three days, though, the relief of being out of the house had been eclipsed by the turmoil of emotions she felt walking through the damned grocery aisles, and she would rather have stayed in her old room. But the precedent had been set, and now her family assumed she’d eagerly fly out of the house whenever a sudden yearning for a particular food or drink was expressed.

  She sat at the intersection and contemplated her options. She could flee back to Olympia. Take a long detour to a store in Port Townsend and not get back until well after dark. Drive off the bluff and into the ocean…

  Okay, the last option was a bit drastic. Tess turned left, aiming toward the center of Forks instead of toward a chilly plunge into the sea. She wasn’t sure why the prospect of a shopping trip had become so daunting in such a short period of time, but it had. Something about the mundanity of the errand made her feel trapped in this town and this lifestyle more than anything else had. Taking care of her father was strange and unlike anything she had experienced in her childhood. Going to the store, however, was a normal, familiar task. She had met several of her classmates from high school on previous trips. They had been friendly, but oddly unsurprised to see her again after so many years. They acted as if they had been together in homeroom or biology class just the day before, and their acceptance of her reappearance as something unremarkable made her feel the same sense of suffocation and yearning to be far, far away she had felt as a teenager.

  Being here and thrust into the unwanted role of caretaker was one thing. Settling into the routine of daily life in Forks was something else entirely, and she hated it. She felt trapped, and the grocery store had become her prison yard where she was sent for daily exercise.

  She drove slowly, caught between feeling sorry for herself and realizing how ridiculous her self-pity actually was. She was an adult, with a job and life waiting for her in Olympia, and she needed to stop reverting to a stage of adolescent claustrophobia.

  Or, she thought as she pulled suddenly off the road and cringed at the grating sound of her hubcap brushing the cement curb, she needed to find a way to distract herself from it.

  She let the car idle while she looked in her rearview mirror at the reason for her abrupt stop. A cream-colored Lexus, looking out of place on Forks’ nearly empty main street. One of the cars that had been in the La Push lot when she had first arrived and gone to see the ocean. Of course, there was a chance it didn’t belong to Brittany, but Tess shrugged off the possibility. Brittany had seemed out of her element in La Push, but she’d look right at home inside the elegant car. Tess stepped onto the cracked sidewalk and wandered along the street, peering into the stores and trying to look like she was casually window-shopping instead of Brittany-stalking.

  Tess finally spotted her in a clothing shop. Her breath caught, and her thoughts started tumbling over themselves like her words had when she and Brittany had first met. What was her endgame here? Brittany was in some sort of relationship, and Tess was determined to avoid anything resembling a commitment. But Tess was feeling trapped in the quicksand of normalcy here in her hometown, while Brittany looked about as un-Forks as she could be, even dressed in a plain gray sweatshirt and jeans, with a small mountain of flannel draped over her arm. She had a quiet elegance about her that made her look as if she should be wearing a little black dress and sipping a latte in front of a Tiffany store rather than rummaging through racks of cotton and denim.

  Tess shook off the vision of removing the imaginary silky black dress from Brittany’s body and stepped resolutely through the door of the shop. She just wanted a short break from her regression into her past. What was the harm in saying hello?

  Brittany yelped and spun around when Tess tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Hey. I didn’t mean to startle you,” Tess said, bending down to pick up the bundle of heavy flannel shirts that Brittany had dropped. Her hands brushed against Brittany’s when she handed her the clothes, and Tess took a step back. Maybe there was the potential for harm in saying hello. She was confused by the strength of her reaction to being this close to Brittany, and the sensible side of her wanted to get the hell away. The rest of her wanted to see what would happen if she got even closer, like a child who wouldn’t stop playing with a light socket.

  “Hello, Tess. I’m not usually this jumpy. I don’t really know anyone around here, so I’ve kind of gotten lost in my own world.” Brittany laughed and reached up to tuck her hair back in place as if it wasn’t neatly braided and under control. Tess wanted to release it from its plait to give Brittany something to fidget with. And to give herself a chance to touch her.

  She cleared her throat and gestured around at the clothes racks. The movement seemed a little frenzied, but she needed to occupy her hands in some way. “I just came in to buy a few things and saw you, so I thought I’d say hello.”

  “Really. You’re buying clothes here.”

  Tess followed Brittany’s gaze and looked down at what she was wearing. She was casually dressed, but her dark jeans had a designer label and her sweater was cashmere. Nothing overly fancy, but she didn’t look like she tended to go for the casual beachcomber look that was prevalent in Forks.

  Brittany shook her head with a rueful sounding sigh. “You’re dressed like someone who’s been to a city with a population larger than three hundred. And someone who lives in a house with insulation in the walls.”

  Tess laughed, eager to move the conversation away from the question of why she was really in the store. “What are your walls made of?”

  “The plywood equivalent of twenty-pound bond paper.”

  “Oh. Then you might want to get one of these.” Tess picked up a hunter-orange flannel hat, complete with earflaps and a sherpa fleece lining, and set it on top of Brittany’s armful of shirts.

  Brittany balanced her load of clothes in one hand and used the other to pluck the hat from the pile and put it on her head. She tugged on the strings to tighten the flaps. “Mm. Warm. I don’t care how much you laugh at me, but I’m buying it.”

  Tess was too busy thinking of all the ways she could keep Brittany warm on these cold autumn nights to do much laughing. She was feeling a definite rise in her own body temperature and she looked around for something else to distract herself from dwelling on her attraction to Brittany since the funny hat idea had backfired so alarmingly.

  “Come on, Britt,” she said, leading her to the back of the store. “We’ll have you looking like a local in no time. The hat helps, but it’s just a start.”

  “You don’t look like a local,” Brittany said, pulling off the hat and smoothing her hair down as she followed Tess. “Why should I listen to your fashion advice? Aside from the brilliant hat suggestion, of course.”

  Tess sorted through a rack of dresses. “I’m a Forks expert. I spent my entire life studying what the locals wear and how they act so I could do the exact opposite once I escaped this town.”

  Britt sighed and dropped into a nearby chair, her flannel shirts clutched in her lap. “I escaped to this place, and you seem eager to escape from it again.”

  Tess paused in her search and glanced over at Brittany. Her expression was softening from laughter to sadness, and Tess struggled to find the right response that would make Britt cheerful again. They might have come to the Peninsula with separate agendas and drastically different viewpoints about being here, but they could certainly work together to improve their situations. For a short time, they could add some much-needed fun and laughter to each other’s lives. Some companionship. A lot of heat. But what she saw as a positive—their fleeting connection as fellow transients—was likely a negative for Britt. And would be further proof to her that Tess was the casual-fling type, just like Brittany had identified her at their first meeting.