Fact: you are twice as likely to be killed by a vending machine than a shark.
“Who’s missing a phone?” Audrey Miller held up an older-model iPhone with a cracked glitter case in one hand while she fished around in her handbag for her car keys. “And someone left the faucet dripping in the bathroom. Oliver, I think that was you.”
The first day of school for her younger siblings was always chaos. There were costume changes to be assessed, bags to be packed, and nerves to be calmed in an extra level of insanity that Audrey was thankful only happened once a year. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her youngest sister, Deanna, skid across the tiles in her socks, blond ponytail flying as she made a grab for her backpack. It had a hole in the bottom that Audrey had been meaning to sew up for weeks now.
Mental note: don’t give her anything valuable to carry until the backpack is patched.
Not that there was much chance of that happening. Firstly, Deanna was about as responsible as a Labrador puppy left alone with a tasty pair of stilettos. Secondly, the Miller family didn’t own much of value.
“That’s mine.” Middle sister Georgie sailed past and grabbed her phone out of Audrey’s hand. “Can I borrow your battery pack? I forgot to charge mine.”
“I reminded you last night.” Audrey looked up, her car keys still nowhere to be found. Georgie stood there, an expectant expression on her face. At seventeen, she was in a phase where she wanted to date and go to parties and generally act like an adult but without taking responsibility for any of it.
Audrey had never been given that option—not even when she was a teenager.
Rolling her eyes, she gestured for Georgie to go ahead and grab the battery pack from her bag. She had bigger concerns than her phone dying. Namely, if she couldn’t locate her car keys, then her siblings would be late for school and Audrey would be late for work. And she might live among chaos at home, but nobody outside would ever see that. Being late was totally unacceptable.
“Oliver! I said turn that damn faucet off.” She marched up the narrow hallway of their cramped house, knocking on her younger brother’s door as she went past. She should never have gotten him those noise-cancelling headphones for his birthday. Not only had they maxed her credit card out, but now he was even more lost in his own world than before.
As Audrey reached the bedroom she shared with her sisters, she spotted her keys poking out from underneath a silk scarf on the middle of Georgie’s bed—aka the bottom of the bunk she shared with Deanna. What on earth were they doing there?
“We leave in two minutes!” she called out as she headed back down the hallway. “No exceptions. If your ass isn’t in that car before I start the engine, you’ll be walking.”
Oliver emerged from his bedroom, ducking to avoid knocking his head on the doorframe. He might be the exact age as his twin sister, Georgie, but that’s where the similarities ended. Georgie was the shortest of all of them, and Oliver was six foot two and still growing like a weed.
“RIP my food budget,” she muttered. The kid already ate like a horse, and it was only getting worse.
Snatching up her bag, she took a final glance around the room. The kitchen was a bit of a mess from the morning’s cereal bowls, but otherwise it wasn’t too much of a disaster zone. Well, so long as you ignored the overflowing recycling bin and the pile of laundry she’d dumped onto the couch while Deanna demanded she find her missing lucky socks.
“Miller family, roll out!” She held the door open as the kids trooped past her, the twins’ heads bowed toward their cell phones as they tapped furiously with their thumbs. “Oliver, Georgie, Deanna… Where’s Jane?”
Georgie snorted and lifted her head for the briefest second. “She left for college a year ago.”
Oh yeah. Audrey shook her head as she locked the front door. She was so hardwired to count to four when checking on her siblings that she’d momentarily forgotten Jane had already flown out of the nest. Flown all the way to Duke, in fact, and was living her best life far away from Kissing Creek, a town with a stupid name and an even stupider reputation for celebrating all things romantic.