The thought was interrupted by another smack of the mudroom door. She hoped it was Andrew leaving. Instead, she spotted Evvie through the kitchen window, heading toward the garden with a basket over her arm. Apparently, Lizzy wasn’t the only one who needed a little alone time.

As if on cue, Rhanna wandered into the kitchen, trailing her fingers along the counter like a bored child in search of distraction. “Andrew’s gone out to the garden with . . . Evvie, is it?”

“Yes,” Lizzy answered tersely. “Her name is Evvie.”

Rhanna was up on her toes now, craning her neck for a better view of the garden. “Now there’s a sight for sore eyes. Andrew, I mean. Not Evvie. He was still at UNH when I left, but he turned out real nice.”

Lizzy stopped chopping and turned to stare.

“What?” Rhanna pouted, all innocence. “I’m old, not dead.”

Lizzy opened her mouth, then closed it again, and resumed her chopping.

“So what’s the deal with her?” Rhanna asked, filching a bit of green pepper from the cutting board and popping it into her mouth. “Why’s she living here?”

“The deal,” Lizzy said dryly, “is that she was Althea’s friend. She was with her till the end.” She paused, looking up at Rhanna. “She’s like us.”

Rhanna’s brows lifted. “By like us, you mean . . .”

“Yes,” Lizzy answered pointedly. “I mean like us.”

“Wow.” The corners of Rhanna’s mouth turned down thoughtfully. “There’s something you don’t hear every day.” She reached for the glass of chardonnay on the counter, but Lizzy checked her, sliding the glass just out of reach. Rhanna sighed. “Is this how it’s going to be? You treating me like I’m some unwanted guest who just turned up on your doorstep?”

“Isn’t that what you are?”

“This is my home, Lizzy. I grew up here—just like you.”

Lizzy stared down at her glass, twirling the stem between her fingers. “You grew up nothing like me.”

“Lizzy . . .” Rhanna’s eyes were soft, pleading.

Lizzy sidestepped her. “Let’s not do this, okay?”

But Rhanna seemed determined to have her say. “What I did, when you were a baby, giving you to Althea—I know it seems horrible. But I also know I was right. I wasn’t . . . equipped. I was selfish and thoughtless, and so screwed-up. That’s why I did it, Lizzy. Not because I didn’t care—because I did. I was afraid . . .” She closed her eyes, her slender shoulders sagging. “I was afraid I’d hurt you.”

“Right,” Lizzy shot back before swallowing the last of her wine. “You certainly wouldn’t have wanted that.”

They were still glowering at each other when Andrew reappeared. Lizzy turned, eyeing him frostily. “You’re still here.”

“Evvie asked me to bring you this.” He handed her a trug of freshly picked lettuce. “She said she’d be in shortly to do the salad. Oh, and I’m supposed to tell you to set a fourth place for supper. She asked me to stay.”

Lizzy eyed the basket, then Andrew, wondering how she’d managed to lose complete control of the situation. “Terrific.”

“I carried your mother’s things up. I didn’t know which room she’d be in, so I left them at the top of the stairs.” He paused, leaning in, dropping his voice. “I need to talk to you.”

There were things she needed to say to him too, but now wasn’t the time. She jerked her chin toward the counter, littered with chopped vegetables. “I’m a little busy just now. It seems I’m giving a dinner party, and I need to go kill the fatted calf.”

Andrew let the prodigal-daughter reference pass. “After supper then. It’s important.”

An hour later, they were all seated around the kitchen table. Lizzy would have been happy to eat in silence, but Andrew seemed determined to draw Rhanna out.

“So I have to ask. What on earth possesses someone to hitchhike from California to New Hampshire?”

Rhanna flashed him a grin. “The same thing that motivates someone to hitchhike anywhere, I guess. Empty pockets. Or nearly empty. I had to sell my van to take care of some people I owed, which left me with exactly eighty-nine dollars, my guitar, and my thumb.”

Andrew looked at her in astonishment, and perhaps the tiniest bit of admiration. “You left California with less than a hundred dollars in your pocket?”

“I’ve always been resourceful.”

Lizzy rolled her eyes. “That’s one word for it.”

Andrew acknowledged the snipe with the barest of glances, then returned his attention to Rhanna. “What did you do in San Francisco? I remember you used to paint.”

“I did, but I had to give it up. Couldn’t afford the supplies. I sang in coffee shops, read cards, told fortunes. I didn’t make much, but it was enough to feed me most of the time, and I had friends who’d let me crash on their couch when things got really tight. It was your basic ‘Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves’ existence, but it suited me.”

Lizzy put down her wineglass with a snort. “And what about now? Does it suit you now?” She was glaring at Rhanna openly, disgusted by the entire performance, as if she were some fascinating bohemian simply marching to the beat of her own drum. Did she honestly believe anyone was going to buy that after the disasters she’d left in her wake?

Rhanna’s smile slipped. “I’ve learned to take life as it comes.”

“Better known as leaving your messes for other people to clean up.”

Andrew caught her eye, as if hoping to stave off the scene he knew was coming. Lizzy met his gaze without apology. After years of not knowing whether Rhanna was alive or dead, she’d been blindsided by her sudden return. She was entitled to a scene.

She pushed back her plate, swiveling her attention back to Rhanna. “Do us all a favor and skip the clever banter. You might have been too stoned to remember how things were—how you were—but my memory’s fine. Shoplifting from the drugstore. Passing out drunk at the Fourth of July parade. Picketing the VFW on Veterans Day. Every time I turned around, you were doing something to embarrass us.”

Rhanna met her gaze, shoulders hunched. “Lizzy, please—”

“Please what? Please don’t shame you like you shamed us?”

“I never meant—”

“Why don’t you tell us what you’re really after, Rhanna? Because we both know you weren’t homesick. You took off and never bothered to let anyone know you were alive. Now, you show up expecting me to roll out the welcome mat. Did you really think that’s how this would go?”

“Of course I didn’t. I know what you think of me—what everyone thinks of me.”

“Then why did you come?”

“I told you . . .”

“I know what you told me. Now I’m telling you—if you schlepped halfway across the country with your guitar on your back because you thought your ship had come in, you wasted your time.”

Rhanna looked as if she’d just been slapped. “That’s what you think? That I came here for money? You know me better than that.”

If Lizzy hadn’t been so furious, she might have laughed out loud. Know her? In what world would such a thing have ever been possible? When she was usually too drunk or high to remember her own name, let alone the name of her daughter?

Lizzy pushed her chair back and stood. “That’s where you’re wrong, Rhanna. I don’t know you at all. I’ve never known you. You made sure of that.”

TWENTY-TWO

Bloody hell.

Andrew stood at the edge of the orchard, his gut knotted like a fist. He had smelled the ash long before reaching the scene, had even imagined what he would find when he arrived, but nothing Evvie said had prepared him for what he was looking at: blackened trees, scorched ground, a heap of charred timber where the shed once stood.

Arson. Evvie had whispered the word out in the garden, explaining that the investigators had discovered a pair of kerosene torches among the rubble. The thought made his blood run cold. It could just as easily have been the house.

He’d touch base with Guy McCardle first thing in the morning. Randall Summers might not take his job seriously, but Guy was a straight arrow. If there was something to know, he’d know it.

He turned and headed east, the setting sun at his back as he walked the perimeter of the orchard, peering down each row as he went. Lizzy was here somewhere. He had known it instinctively when he left the house, ignoring Evvie’s suggestion that he let her have some time to herself. They needed to talk, now, and not just about the fire.

He found her ten minutes later, sitting cross-legged with her back against an old stump, head bent, eyes closed. Was she crying? Praying? Did she pray? He’d wondered a lot of things about her over the years, but never that.

His chest tightened as he approached her. He’d run through a dozen conversations in his head on the way here. Now, suddenly, he didn’t know what to say. She didn’t lift her head, but he could tell she knew he was there. “Lizzy.”

She looked up, fixing him with a withering stare. “What do you want?”

“I want to talk to you about this.” He waved an arm, indicating the scorched ground and blackened trees. “Evvie gave me the Reader’s Digest version while we were in the garden. I assumed you’d fill in the blanks at dinner, but you didn’t say a word.”