“Did you get the email, Em? Did you get it? I’m in the Ren faire cast—are you in? Did you get in?”

She finally took a breath—did she run all the way home from the bus stop?—while I pulled up my email on my phone. Sure enough, there was a message from the Willow Creek Renaissance Faire, welcoming me to this year’s cast. Caitlin gave me a quick hug of excitement and grabbed a soda from the fridge, then she was off to her room and I went back out to the car for the last bags of groceries.

I finished putting the groceries away, checked on the chicken slow-roasting in the oven—yep, it was still there—and looked in on April. She’d gone to her room to take a nap before I’d left for the store. Yep, she was still there too, just stirring from sleep.

“Did I hear Cait come home?”

“I think the whole neighborhood heard her come home.” I handed April the bottle of water on her nightstand and perched on her bedside. “Looks like us Parker girls are doing the Renaissance faire. You sure you don’t want to sign up too? I don’t want you to feel left out. Crutches are period. You could be an old beggar woman.”

“Funny.” She took a sip of water and struggled to sit up. I took the bottle from her and offered a hand for balance, but she didn’t take it.

“Oh, Marjorie came by just now.” Ambushed me when I’d pulled into the driveway more like, but April didn’t need to know that.

She groaned. “Oh, God. Did she bring another casserole?”

I nodded. “Mac and cheese this time. It’ll go with the chicken, so that saves me some work. I’ll make a salad.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s no trouble.” I shrugged. “Caitlin needs a vegetable in her life.”

April gave a thin smile at that. “No, I meant for running interference with Marjorie.”

“She seems nice,” I said tentatively.

“She is. It’s just . . .” She sighed. “This neighborhood has a lot of families, and that’s great. Kids for Caitlin to play with, you know? But the moms do things like get coffee together on Tuesdays.”

“Hmmm.” I nodded solemnly. “They sound like monsters.”

She whacked me on the arm. “They get coffee on Tuesdays at ten in the morning.” She raised her eyebrows at me in meaning, and then it clicked.

“When you’re at work.”

“When I’m at work. I don’t think they do it on purpose, but . . .” She shrugged. “I’m the only single mom on the block. I’m sure Marjorie’s perfectly nice, but I’m also sure that she wants to know how I’m doing so she can tell the other moms. It’s like the whole town wants to micromanage my recovery. She wants gossip, and she pays for it in casseroles.”

I thought about that for a second. “You want me to give it back? I could make some mashed potatoes.”

“No, that’s okay. I mean, it is mac and cheese.”

“The kind with the crunchy topping,” I said. “I peeked at it.”

“Oh, we’re keeping it then.”

“Yeah, we are.” I stood up. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll take care of it. Caitlin, Marjorie, the town. All of it.” I put the bottle back on the nightstand and stood up. “Light on or off?”

“On, please. I think I’ll read for a bit.” She settled back against her pillows. I lingered for a moment, but she was already lost in her e-reader so I went back into the kitchen and read the email on my phone again. First rehearsal was Saturday morning, dress comfortably. I made a note in my calendar app and went to make sure Caitlin had started her homework.

“Hey.” I knocked on her bedroom door before bumping it open with my hip. “Dinner’s ready at six.” I leaned against the doorjamb. “Got a lot of homework?”

“Not really.” She looked up from her textbook-scattered desk. “I think they’re being nice to us since finals are coming up in a couple weeks.”

“I don’t miss those days. Let me know if you need help studying, okay?”

“Well . . .” She glanced down at her books, then back up at me. “How good are you at geometry?”

I winced. “Not very. Let me amend that. Let me know if you need help with, say, English or history, okay?” Those subjects were more my speed, and Cait’s grin said she knew it. She was messing with me. Smart kid.

“Hey, Em?” Her voice stopped me as I started to head back to the kitchen. “Thanks.”

I shrugged. “No problem. Sorry I can’t help with the geometry, but I know more about—”

“No.” She turned in her chair, sitting sideways to face me head-on. “I mean thanks for signing up for the Renaissance faire with me. So I could do it.” Her face fell a little and she cast uncertain eyes toward the hallway. “Mom wouldn’t have.”

“Sure she would. She just can’t because of the accident.”

She shook her head, her brown curls—so much like her mom’s, so much like mine—bouncing around her face. “I don’t think she knew. About having to volunteer with me. And if she had, she would have said no.”

“I don’t know about that.” I came into the bedroom, quietly pushing the door closed behind me, and sat down on the edge of Cait’s bed. “Stacey said at tryouts that your mom was going to volunteer. So I think she was really planning to before all this happened.”

But Caitlin looked skeptical. “She would have changed her mind.” She looked guiltily toward the bedroom door and lowered her voice. “Mom doesn’t like doing stuff, you know? She doesn’t volunteer.”

I tried to think of something comforting to say, but the truth was she was right. April wasn’t a joiner. She hadn’t needed me to take over anything extracurricular for her while she was laid up, and she wasn’t terribly involved with Caitlin’s school. Just as she didn’t want people knowing her business, she didn’t really care to know anyone else’s. My sister seemed to live a pretty lonely life. But she also seemed happy with it for the most part, so who was I to judge?

I took Cait’s hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “Well, I’m here now, and apparently I do volunteer. So I hope you’re ready for this.” I looked back at her when I reached her bedroom door. “Come help me set the table about five thirty?”

“Yep.” But she was already frowning over her geometry textbook, and I hurried out of there before she could ask for help again.

* * *

• • •

Saturday was, in a lot of ways, a repeat of that tryout morning. We pulled into the parking lot five minutes late. Caitlin zipped ahead to find her friends who had also made it into the cast. I hung out toward the back of the auditorium, because I had no friends to find. Yeah. This wasn’t awkward at all.

But to my surprise, the awkwardness didn’t last.

“Hey, there you are!” The chipper voice made me look up from my phone, and I smiled at Stacey, the volunteer who’d gotten me into this mess in the first place. “Why are you all the way back here?” She hooked a hand around my arm and gave a tug. “Come on, you need to join the rest of the group.”

I wasn’t used to this kind of aggressive friendliness, but I let her drag me down toward the front of the auditorium to mingle with the rest of the cast.

“I’m in charge of the wenches, by the way,” Stacey said. “And since you’re the only other one who signed up, that’ll be an easy job for me this year.”

“Only two of us?” I remembered my days of tending bar, the panic when coworkers called off on their shifts, leaving me to do the work of two or three people at once. My feet started to hurt from the memory. “Can we do that?”

She waved off my concern. “Oh, easily. We’re not really tavern wenches. I mean, yeah, we’ll be serving drinks and flirting with patrons and speaking with an accent. But there will be plainclothes volunteers doing most of the actual work. We’re there for color. You know, to look pretty.”

I wasn’t entirely convinced, but I let Stacey lead me toward a seat in the third row, introducing me to people along the way. I didn’t have a prayer of remembering any names, but I did my best. We’d barely settled in the third row before we were all told to stand up again and sit in a giant circle on the floor of the stage.

Oh, boy. My anxiety shot up again. I’d taken a few theatre classes in college, but stage fright had driven me away from performance and back to the books and my English major. I wasn’t worried about role-playing the part of a tavern wench on a one-on-one basis, but the second I was asked to get in the center of the circle and say or do something with lots of people staring at me, things were going to get ugly. Projectile-vomiting kind of ugly.

My anxiety wasn’t alleviated by a woman stepping into the middle of the circle almost immediately. She was definitely one of the older adults of the group. Her hair could have been light brown, dark blond, faded gray, or a combination of all three. She wore it in a long braid down her back and was dressed in well-worn jeans and a faded T-shirt but carried herself with an authoritative air. She had the look of someone who could be anywhere from twenty-seven to fifty-five.