A Time for Us - By Amy Knupp Page 0,97

room look like a new place entirely. The walls were now a dusky purple color, also thanks to her brother, who was proving to be a rock of support in so many ways. The only thing remaining of Noelle’s was the bookcase and a handful of her belongings that Rachel hadn’t yet decided what to do with.

Still mired in the drowsiness of an uncharacteristically deep sleep, the sensations from her dream lingered. She kept her eyes closed and rolled to her side, curling into the feeling she’d had an actual conversation with Noelle. It had been on an inconsequential topic—she couldn’t even put her finger on what it’d been about—but Rachel longed to continue it.

Her eyes popped open and she sat up on the edge of her bed, driven suddenly by that need to connect with her twin. Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she went to the half bookshelf on the other side of the room and plucked out the item that drew her out of bed, that had been beckoning her for days. She hadn’t been ready to tackle it until now.

Noelle’s diary.

When she had the journal in her hands, there was a second’s twinge of guilt left over from when they were teenagers. Noelle would scream if she knew Rachel was reading her most private thoughts.

Rachel shook it off. Noelle would never scream again. The woman who had had the thoughts contained in this thin, bright blue and green volume no longer had any thoughts at all. It was merely a link to the past. The connection to her sister she was yearning for.

Skipping over the warning specifically to her on the inside cover, Rachel opened the book as she padded back to her bed and slipped under the covers.

At first, she flipped open to a random page and practically inhaled the words in the familiar scrawl, her chest expanding with love and her heart breaking with loss at the same time. After a couple of entries, Rachel thumbed back to the beginning to read every single page, intent on spending the day with her beloved, beautiful sister.

Noelle had kept a journal since they were in grade school. Rachel remembered the Christmas they’d both received coordinating, girlie diaries, hers pastel blue with dragonflies on it and Noelle’s apple-green with flowers. Rachel had used hers to play “school” with her plush animals, but Noelle had begun a lifelong semiregular habit. She’d not been the type to write every day; sometimes weeks passed between entries. She’d said she wrote when she had something to say, otherwise, what was the point? Rambling about nothing on paper was a waste of time to Noelle.

One thing Noelle did faithfully was note the date every single time she wrote—month, day and year. This particular volume began several years ago when Rachel was starting med school. There was the Christmas that Rachel almost hadn’t made it home due to a snowstorm back in Iowa. She was touched by Noelle’s worry that Rachel would end up all alone for the holiday and Christmas wouldn’t be the same, and also her hope that she’d get to watch Rachel open the velvet-soft lavender-and-white-striped winter scarf Noelle had knitted for her. Rachel had ended up getting into the Brownsville airport after midnight on Christmas Eve, but she’d made it. And she adored the scarf to this day, having worn it every single winter-weather day when she’d lived in the north. The scarf had become like a toddler’s security blanket to her, keeping her close to her twin even when she was so far away physically.

There was the long-distance argument they’d had over what to get their mom for Christmas four years ago, the time Noelle and Sawyer had visited Rachel at med school and the periodic mentions of some of Noelle’s men over the years, though only the few she’d dated for more than a couple of months made the journal. A fight with their mother over whether a twenty-six-year-old woman should have a curfew even if she was living at home. Her sister’s outrage made Rachel smile sadly because she remembered listening to Noelle rant about the same topic on the phone at the time.

And then she got to Cale. The date of the first entry that mentioned him was two months after they’d met. Rachel froze, her pulse pounding in her throat.

She couldn’t handle this. Not now.

Sliding the book under her pillow, she threw the blankets back and rushed out of the room to take a