“Sorry, I was a little busy. Some guy decided to drop my mother on my doorstep without warning.”

Andrew sighed, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “What was I supposed to do, Lizzy? Let her keep walking? She would have gotten here eventually. You realize that, right?”

“That isn’t the point.”

“It is, actually. She’s not some drifter I just picked up. She’s your mother.”

“Stop saying that!”

“Okay. Okay. There’s some bad blood between you two. I get it. I also get that this isn’t really any of my business, but at the risk of stepping over the line, maybe it’s time to work through your issues. For Althea’s sake, if nothing else. She’d want the two of you to work things out.”

“How would you know?”

“Because we talked.”

Lizzy’s eyes narrowed. “About me?”

Andrew suppressed a wince. He hadn’t intended to mention his conversations with Althea. Especially the one they’d had about Lizzy’s tortured relationship with her mother. He’d known instinctively that she wouldn’t appreciate being discussed, even by her grandmother, but he’d opened the door now, and maybe it was time.

“Yes,” he said carefully. “Sometimes we talked about you. We talked about Rhanna once too. About what happened before she left, and the effect it had on you. She made a lot of messes, that’s for sure, but she did come back. That’s got to mean something. Maybe she wants another chance. And maybe deep down you want to give her one.”

Lizzy cut her eyes at him. “The only thing I want to give Rhanna is a ticket back to wherever she came from. Don’t look at me like that. You know what she’s like. You saw her that night in the fountain, making a spectacle of herself. That’s who you picked up and brought here.”

Andrew blew out a sigh. Yes, he’d seen her. Half the town had seen her. And the half that hadn’t seen her had certainly heard all about it. And about every other damn thing she’d ever done. But he’d also seen Lizzy’s face when Rhanna stepped out of his truck, that instant of recognition, of relief, before she’d retreated behind her outrage, and he couldn’t help wondering if all that anger was masking something deeper, something she wasn’t willing to acknowledge—pain. The kind people lived with when their hearts had been broken. Yes, there was history, and, no, he didn’t know all of it, but surely thumbing three thousand miles across the country—even for a self-professed gypsy—counted for something.

“Maybe she isn’t that woman anymore,” he said quietly. “Maybe she’s changed. People do, you know?”

Lizzy cocked an eye at him. There was a smear of soot on her right cheek, like an angry bruise. “She just hitchhiked across the country with a knapsack and a guitar. She had to sell her van to pay off some debts. She tells fortunes and crashes on couches. Does it sound like she’s changed to you?”

“I think it’s too early to tell. And she is here. I know you have every right to be angry, but I also know you’re not the kind of person who could just toss her mother into the street. For starters, she’s broke. And this is her home. She came home, Lizzy.”

Lizzy kept her eyes on the ground as she scraped a streak in the soot with her bootheel. “She gave up the right to call this home a long time ago. And she’s never been my mother. She had me when she was sixteen and handed me over to Althea before the midwife was done cleaning her up. We shared a house, toothpaste, shampoo. We were never mother and daughter.”

“Maybe she thought she was doing what was best for you.”

“Now you sound like her.”

Andrew shrugged. He was annoying her now, and that wasn’t why he’d come. He dropped down beside her, picked up a stick, and began to trace a circle in the ash. After all these years she was still an enigma, a puzzle he felt driven to solve.

“That bit before,” he said finally. “About the dream. You asked how she knew Althea was dead and she said she had a dream. What did she mean?”

Lizzy’s eyes slid away. “Nothing. She didn’t mean anything. She just says things.”

“I saw your face when she said it, Lizzy. It wasn’t nothing.”

He could see the wheels turning as she weighed her response, her lower lip caught between her teeth. Finally, she looked at him squarely. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

The question caught him off guard, or maybe it was the way she’d asked it, as if she were testing him. “If you mean do I think some part of us remains after we die, then yes, I guess I do. For a while, after my father died, I used to think I could hear him up in his room, crinkling the pages of his newspaper.”

“You don’t think it’s just wishful thinking?”

He took his time with this one, sensing a new and more critical test. “I don’t,” he said at last. “I think most of us leave this world with unfinished business. Things we never said, chances we never took, wrongs we never righted. Maybe they keep us here. Like Jacob Marley and his chains, we’re tied to this world by our regrets. We can’t move on until we’ve cleaned them up, or at least made our peace with them.”

There were tears in her eyes suddenly, trembling on her lashes, threatening to fall. She tried to blink them away, but it was too late. They spilled over, tracing a path through the streak of soot on her cheek. “Sometimes I wonder . . .” She shook her head and glanced away, letting the words dangle.

“What?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“Talk to me, Lizzy. You wonder what?”

She pushed back her hair, leaving a fresh soot mark on her forehead. “Sometimes I wonder if Althea . . . if some part of her might still be here, trying to clean things up.” She hesitated, eyes darting. “I feel her sometimes. I turn around, expecting her to be there. She never is, though.”

“Just because you can’t see her doesn’t mean she isn’t here.”

“You believe that?”

“I do,” he said matter-of-factly, because somehow it rang true for him. It would be just like Althea to hang around, to make sure the people she loved were okay, and, if possible, to put the broken pieces of her family back together.

“The thing Rhanna said on the steps—the perfume thing—it’s happened to me too. Not always, but every now and then. And then there’s this journal she left, with all these herbs and flowers pressed between the pages, like lessons she left for me. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s like she’s still here, talking right to me.”

“It doesn’t sound crazy at all. It sounds like Althea. She loved you. And if you ask me, there’s no better reason to stick around than that.”

The corners of her mouth trembled, not quite a smile. “Thank you for that. I thought you came out here to scold me about being a bad hostess. I wasn’t expecting . . . this.”

Neither was he. He’d come after her because he wanted to talk about the fire. And maybe about Rhanna, about what might actually lie at the base of all her anger. Instead, she had dropped her guard and, for the first time, allowed him to see her stripped of her armor. But now that she had, he found himself on shaky ground.

She was still looking at him, waiting for him to say something, her face all angles in the gathering dusk. She was a Moon through and through. Porcelain skin, hair the color of midnight, luminous quicksilver eyes. Like something from a grown-up fairy tale, but real enough to touch.

“We’d better go,” he said, pushing to his feet. If he sat there much longer, he was going to say something stupid, something he couldn’t take back.

TWENTY-THREE

It was full dark by the time Lizzy returned to the house. Dinner had been cleared away, the dishes washed and left to dry in the rack. She was glad, though she did wonder where Rhanna had gotten to. Perhaps she realized the Lazarus act wasn’t going to fly and was already on her way back to California.

But a burst of muffled voices from upstairs put a quick end to that hope. Lizzy mounted the stairs with growing dread. The light was on in what used to be Rhanna’s room, and whatever was going on didn’t sound pleasant. The voices grew more distinct as she approached the landing: Evvie growling about hippies and flophouses, Rhanna snarling about being bossed around in her own room. Their heads turned in unison when Lizzy walked in.

“What’s going on in here?”

Evvie’s chin jutted like a sulky child’s. “I’m trying to clear a place for her to sleep in all this mess.” She paused, waving an arm at the stacked boxes and discarded household items crowding the room. “I finally get the bed cleared off, tell her there are sheets in the closet—”

“I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in weeks,” Rhanna bristled, matching Evvie sulk for sulk. “I don’t need sheets. I need to crash.”

Evvie folded her arms, eyes narrowed. “In this house you need sheets. Just like in this house we wash the dinner dishes and put them away when we’re through.”

Apparently, the battle had started in the kitchen. Not surprising, given Rhanna’s aversion to all things domestic. Evvie had almost certainly made her opinion known. It wasn’t in her DNA to hold back when something needed saying.