A Time for Us - By Amy Knupp Page 0,16
how gracious his sister acted.
He felt as though he’d been through hell, but more importantly, he’d made it “back.” After spending more than a year grieving Noelle and wondering when he would be able to return to some semblance of normalcy, he’d made a lot of progress and started moving toward getting his life on track. He’d made an effort to be more social, to go out with the guys from the station when they invited him, to stop hiding out in his private quarters at the station all the time. He’d even been set up on a couple of dates, although he had no intention whatsoever of getting further involved with either of the women he’d gone out with. Or any woman, for that matter. It’d be years before he could even think about that—if ever. But the dates had been a major step for him.
And yet, with all the positive action he’d taken in an attempt to settle into his life without Noelle, he’d ignored one of the biggest aspects.
His first obligation was to get his parents’ projects done as he’d promised, but then...maybe it was high time to face the memories he’d been avoiding and get to work on his own home.
CHAPTER SIX
RACHEL CONSIDERED HERSELF a lot of things—and not all of them were good things—but a coward was not on the list of traits she’d ever claimed willingly.
Early Sunday afternoon, after her mom had fluttered off to a dolphin cruise with her sudden group of friends, Rachel stood outside the door. The closed door to her childhood bedroom. Noelle’s bedroom. She grasped the knob but then dropped her unsteady hand as if she’d been burned.
Damn her brother for pointing out her preference for avoidance. Though he hadn’t mentioned her untouched bedroom out loud, this intricately grained, six-panel plank of oak had become like a living, breathing enemy for Rachel. One she could mostly ignore as long as no one accused her of being scared of it.
She wasn’t going to be scared of it anymore. It was just a room, a hundred and fifty square feet of stuff. Things. Items that she’d assigned too much importance to. The room only had as much significance as she gave it. Noelle was not in that room.
With a frustrated grunt at herself, she straightened and stepped back up to the door. She inhaled deeply and held the air inside her lungs.
Just a slab of wood leading to a room.
She twisted the knob and pushed the door open with so much force it bounced off the wall and back at her. She smacked the door back to the wall, funneling all her freaked-out anticipation into it.
As she took in the room and its contents, she felt as if she had all the air knocked out of her.
Nothing had been touched.
The twin bed to the left—Noelle’s—had the hot-pink-and-purple polka-dotted sheets strewn about and the pillow cattywampus, as if Noelle had just crawled out of it twenty minutes ago. The heel of one beaded flip-flop stuck out from under her bed, and her countless makeup containers littered the dainty vanity table along the wall that Noelle had long ago outgrown but had continued to use.
Rachel’s half of the room was neat, as always, her bed made and a reading lamp and digital alarm clock the only items on top of her nightstand. Everything in the two-toned room—on both sides—had a thick layer of dust covering it.
It was amazing how their two lives and their sisterhood were so accurately summed up and displayed in this one room. The room was an L shape, and three walls, those on Noelle’s side, were painted electric green, but the color was barely visible with all the wall hangings—a couple of movie posters starring one of Noelle’s celebrity crushes, a wildly colorful print of a Brazil street during Carnival, a two-years-out-of-date beefcake calendar of male dancers given to Noelle by her friend Trina and a bulletin board full of candids of Noelle and her friends from over the years.
Rachel’s three walls were a light, mellow, coral color interrupted only by a single item on two of them—a print of one of Monet’s lily-pad scenes done in muted colors and a photo Rachel herself had taken of the glasslike bay at dawn. A window took up much of the third wall. She and Noelle had separated the space with an invisible diagonal line down the center, from one corner to the other. The door was on one of Noelle’s