speaking, and you know it.
Yeah, she did. She’d never be able to abandon something in need, but darn it, staying up to feed someone else’s demanding—and let’s face it, butt-ugly—baby hadn’t exactly been on any of her lists, master or otherwise.
As they made their way around the side of the house, Scarlett noticed what looked like a green Skittle every few steps, slightly melted and blending into the patchy grass. She stopped, looking behind her and ahead to see that they traveled in a straight line to form a trail that led toward the old shed near the tree line. The shed she hadn’t yet been brave enough to look inside. Who knew what manner of mess it contained?
“Haddie”—she turned to her daughter who’d stopped beside her—“did you do that?” Scarlett nodded down to the widely spaced line of green Skittles.
Haddie paused but then nodded slowly, her expression blank. “Yes, Mommy,” she said. “I was trying to . . . catch something.”
“What? Like a bunny? With candy?”
Haddie swallowed and Scarlett got that internal buzz she felt when Haddie was having trouble communicating something or leaving information out. “Yes, Mommy.” She looked behind them and then ahead. “I left a trail of all the colors.”
Scarlett frowned in confusion. Something had eaten most of the candy. It couldn’t have been a bunny, could it? More likely a scavenger such as a raccoon. Those things would eat anything. A small nervous laugh emerged. “Well, whatever it was that ate your trail, decided it didn’t like the green ones.” Odd. Scarlett took a step forward, heading for the front of the house and their car as Haddie walked beside her. “I guess I can’t blame it.” She smiled down at her daughter. “Everyone knows the green ones aren’t any good.”
Haddie’s expression remained mostly blank, though her eyes were alight with interest. Or . . . wonder. A curiosity that stayed burning in her gaze even as they got in the car and pulled away from Lilith House. A curiosity that Scarlett could see had stolen her away, at least temporarily as she pondered things available only to her own mystifying mind. “It doesn’t like green,” Scarlett thought she heard Haddie murmur under her breath.
Scarlett pulled her eyes away from where she’d watched Haddie for a moment in the rearview mirror, focusing on the windy, single-lane road that weaved through the forest toward town. The drive to Farrow took about thirty minutes, but to Scarlett, who was from Los Angeles where it could literally take two hours to go twenty miles, the drive was nothing. If anything, it was relaxing, a chance to think, to get lost in the quiet of her own head as the road disappeared beneath her tires. Haddie, similarly, seemed happy to quietly stare at the woods outside her window, caught up in her secret thoughts.
As she drove, Scarlett’s mind turned to Camden West and the moment she’d thought he was going to kiss her two nights before. At the memory, a kaleidoscope of unwanted butterflies stirred to life in her stomach. Speaking of curiosity. It seemed she and her daughter were alike in that they both were in possession of far too much of it.
She was slightly embarrassed that she’d been so forthcoming with him, but then again, he’d made her feel like he was deeply interested in her, like he was almost . . . hanging on her every word, and it’d felt good. He’d made her feel interesting, and God, it’d been a long time since she’d thought of herself as such.
Is anything forever, Scarlett? His words reverberated through her mind. She wondered what sort of life he’d lived to make him ask such a cynical question.
She followed the directions the girl named Amelia Schmidt had given her when they’d spoken on the phone. The girl had been peppy and engaging and Scarlett had liked her immediately. She’d seemed enthusiastic about the idea of looking after Haddie, so she’d set up a meeting for the three of them that morning.
The house where Amelia lived with her parents was in a quaint residential neighborhood in Farrow. Scarlett admired the vining pink bougainvillea that grew up the columns of the front porch. Other than the lush, bright blooms, the house was small and somewhat plain, though it was obviously well-maintained, the paint fresh, the porch swept clean.
Haddie held the bird in his “nest” in one hand, and gripped Scarlett’s with the other as she rapped twice on the door. A