The lines at his forehead and along his mouth got even deeper, and I couldn’t miss the way he shook his head slowly, thinking who knows what. The skin at his cheeks changed color and got… pink? Why?

“I changed it eight years ago,” I explained to him, glancing out the window to look through the side mirror again. More people exited the building, but none of them looked familiar.

I wondered if my dad had already gotten to whatever car he was now rolling around in, without me noticing.

“Mr. Cooper and Lydia drove me to the courthouse two days after my eighteenth birthday so I could start the process. They paid for the filing fees. The judge eventually granted my petition, and… I changed it,” I explained, still looking through the side mirror, the pain behind my eyeball still sharp. “No one but my sisters, the Coopers, and now you, know I changed it.”

The breath Rip let out was low and long, and the leather creaked as he shifted around.

I was a coward and didn’t want to look at him. “Did you see it on the news?”

He didn’t respond. The leather just creaked more, and the next sigh he let out was even louder than the last one. The deepest one I had probably ever heard from him.

Out of the side mirror, I watched a hearse pull around to the front of the building and a police officer appearing out of nowhere on a motorcycle.

It was time to go.

To go and see my dad, whose smallest offense had been selling drugs. The man who I would have forgiven for doing that, if he’d just been a decent person. If he’d just been… different.

“If you don’t want to go to the burial, I understand,” I found myself telling Rip as I fought the urge to scrub my face with the palm of my hand.

There was another sigh—not as deep but still off—and then he said, “We can go.” The words had barely come out of his mouth when he started the truck and then put it into drive.

I could feel the wheels in his head turning. Could sense his tension. I didn’t like it.

Did he think…

“I’m not… like them,” I told him, just in case he was thinking that I was. I was reliable. I had never actually lied to him before. I hadn’t stolen a single thing in years, and even then the stealing I had done was subjective. At least I thought so. “I’ve never done a single drug in my life. I rarely drink. I would never do anything to hurt anyone at the shop or anywhere else, even if they deserved it.”

His scoff almost made me jump. His fingers flexed on the steering wheel for what might have been the hundredth time since he’d picked me up. “That’s not what I’m thinking.”

I held my breath and kept on looking at him and his facial features, but they didn’t give a single thing away. “It’s not?”

Rip scoffed again, shaking his head while his attention was on the other side of the windshield. “You’re a good girl. Everybody knows that.” He paused and a muscle in his cheek twitched.

“Nobody’s fucking perfect, Luna, but I know a good girl—a good person—when I see one.” His breath was more of a sigh. “And you are. I’m not about to start a fucking tally with you about the shit we’ve done in the past. I know you’re not like… them in there.”

My nose tingled, and I didn’t… I didn’t want to talk about those things I’d done. “I haven’t seen them since I left when I was seventeen,” I rushed out. “I told you, I’m not… it’s complicated. We don’t… like each other.”

A line had somehow formed while we’d been talking, following the hearse that had just driven off. Rip squeezed the truck in between a Chevy Impala and a small Toyota pickup. I looked behind me to make sure that it wasn’t anyone I knew in the truck.

I wouldn’t put it past the cowards I called my family members to do something stupid like accidentally run a light or look down. That’s who and what I was related to.

Crap. What the hell had I been thinking? I had no business being here.

Yes, you do, Luna. You have every right. You think they were close to Grandma Genie? You think they’d be here if there wasn’t some other motive? They never do anything unless they can get something out of it.

People don’t change. Well. Most don’t.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I told him. “I guess I’d hoped that they wouldn’t come.”

He didn’t say anything. He just drove, and as the silence stretched, all I could do was stay where I was and, after a moment, look out the window. The ache behind my eyeball got worse as we drove on.

We pulled into the cemetery and parked after a moment. I held my breath as we got out of the truck and walked in the direction of where two heart-shaped sprays of flowers were located. Rip walked beside me the whole time, the tension still just pouring directly off him. It said something about how much I distrusted the people I was related to that I kept glancing over my shoulder to make sure none of them were following us.

I was pretty sure if I looked up the Miller family history, the word “backstabbing” had to have been stemmed from an ancestor somewhere down the line.

Luckily, I didn’t see any of them, at least not directly behind us. As we stopped at the gravesite, a hole that seemed too small for a casket, I kept my head aimed down, but I didn’t close my eyes.

Rip’s arm brushed my elbow as he settled in so close beside me I could feel the heat of his body. It wasn’t unwelcome. The size of him, the knowledge that he more than likely wouldn’t let anyone physically hurt me, even if he was unhappy about all of this—including finding out I was related to a felon—made me feel better. It was too warm for my long-sleeved shirt, and I could only imagine how hot he had to be in his jacket and dress shirt, but he didn’t complain or act in any way like it bothered him.

I had a feeling it was him there that kept me from walking off as I watched the three people I hadn’t seen in years approach slowly.

My sisters’ mom didn’t look at me.

But my cousin was staring. Beside him, the man who was half responsible for my existence acted like I was invisible.

I stood there and watched them both.

I wished that later on I could have looked back on that moment and been the bigger person. That I could and would have looked away from them while the chaplain or whatever he was said some more generic words about a woman he had more than likely never met. I wished I could have let myself focus on Grandma Genie and the few memories I had of her.

But I didn’t do anything like that.

As the man went on, I stood there and took turns staring at my cousin and the man that my birth certificate said was my father.

My cousin basically snarled.

My dad looked right through me with those green eyes I saw every time I looked in the mirror.

Rip’s arm brushed mine a few times, but I was too caught up in my own moment to worry about how bored he must be. Or how disappointed he might be in me for being related to these people. There were a million other things that he might have been thinking, and none of them were good.

It was only when the chaplain stopped speaking and the thirty other people around us approached the casket with mementos that I snapped out of it and took a step forward to drop the small picture of my sisters and me that I’d put in my purse the day before in the hole.

I was ready to leave, and it had nothing to do with the people on the other side of the casket.

I just wanted to go back home to the place that made me feel safe, to the people who made me feel loved, to the life that made me happy—that I swore from now on would only make me happier.

Turning to face Rip, who it seemed had his entire attention focused on me, I met his eyes and nodded.

He nodded back, his gaze flicking behind me for a beat, and we headed back toward his truck, avoiding old headstones and flowers.

Fortunately, I hadn’t been able to relax or let my guard down, because I heard the hurried steps coming and was partially expecting the hand that wrapped around my wrist, the hold tight and hurtful and mean, a second before it yanked at me.

Or tried to.

Because I didn’t let that happen. I’d spent years with Lenny at the gym so I’d know how to defend myself. That was how we’d met. She had taught a self-defense course I’d taken. Then kept on teaching me things after it ended. So I didn’t hold back when I threw my elbow as hard as I could backward, and in a move that would have made her proud, I kicked my right leg out, feeling it connect with a left leg. The second the person behind me stumbled forward, I grabbed their right arm and extended it across my body into a straight armbar position—a submission move that hyperextended their elbow—his elbow, if you wanted to be specific, because I knew who it was.