Violet was there, setting up the breakfast buffet.
She hadn’t heard me come in, and I watched for a moment, almost like I had the day before in the garage. I was still stunned to have her back in the house. Stunned that she looked so grown-up. My body―no longer tired―had the same damn reaction to her as it’d had yesterday. Longing and desire filled me.
Violet turned, and her eyes landed on me. She smiled before she caught herself. It was the same thing she’d done for five years now…since the car crash. Since the combination of our mistakes had almost cost our siblings their marriage because Jersey blamed Truck as much as me for Violet being in the car on the cliff.
Before the crash, Violet had smiled at me without reserve.
How many times had I wished I could have that back while simultaneously hating myself for having the wish at all?
“Morning,” she said.
I nodded and turned away from her to the coffee urn, collecting my thoughts, putting my body back in check.
“I still can’t get over you being here,” I said.
When I turned back around, I caught her staring at me, eyes strolling down my body dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, deck shoes on my feet. She flushed, and my lips quirked. I couldn’t help the once-familiar tease that slipped out of my lips. “Like what you see?”
Her eyes flashed, annoyed by my smile, and she flipped her braid backward before giving me the same old retort. “You wish.”
This had always been us. I taunted. She retreated. She taunted. I retreated.
She returned to fixing the buffet, and I leaned up against the counter, watching.
“What happened to your dad?” I asked.
“Drank himself to death,” she said, a hint of bitterness laying under her nonchalance. “Big surprise.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it.
She shrugged. “You, of anyone, should know how little it actually means to me.”
I’d found her crumpling a newspaper one morning a few weeks after Truck and I had temporarily moved into the B&B. She’d thrown it with such viciousness across the room that it had spiked my curiosity, wondering what on Earth could have caused the sparkling sprite to have turned deadly. The article had been about the anniversary of Ana Perez’s death and her father’s role in it.
“He killed someone?” I asked quietly, and she nodded.
“It’s why I don’t have a spleen. I was in the car when it happened,” she told me.
“Shit,” I responded for lack of better words. Hearing about her own accident so soon after the one I’d been involved with on the water in Clover Lake was painful, ripping at wounds I was trying to heal. A brutal reminder that, while I might not have been behind the wheel of Carlos’s boat when he’d crashed, I’d been the reason he was at the helm at all. I’d dared him to race at night, even though we’d both been drinking. It had been stupid. Careless. I could try and deny it all I wanted, but I knew the truth, just like my father did. I was responsible for Carlos almost dying and losing his arm.
In that moment, I realized I was more like her father than I cared to be, and instead of making me repentant, it made me angry. Somehow, she read my emotions. All of them.
“Want to talk about it?” she asked. And surprisingly, I did. I told her some of it. About Dad only using me as prop for his elections so he could appear to be the model “family man” when, in truth, he barely gave me the time of day. How I’d gone back and forth between his house, where I’d been seen but not heard, to Mom’s house, where I’d been heard but not stopped. And I ended with telling her that he’d kicked me out of his town for tarnishing his shiny image.
“Prove him wrong,” she said.
“What?” I frowned at her.
She shrugged casually. “It’s what I intend to do. Take every single one of the comments anyone in this town has made about Jersey and me, take the words Dad used to whisper about us being a mistake, and make them all eat crow.”
“Eat crow,” I laughed, and she shoved my shoulder with hers.
The awareness of our bodies and how close they were filled me. I ached with every particle in my being to prove to her she was bright and beautiful and quite the opposite of a mistake. Which