“Rowan’s brother.”

She gave herself away by jerking her gaze back up to his.

“You with him or something?” he asked.

“Of course not. No. Nope. I just met him.”

“That’s a lot of denial. And you know what they say about double negatives, they cancel each other out.”

Piper pinched the bridge of her nose. Shorthand for Gavin was driving her nuts again. It was a short drive, and there’d been a time in their lives when he’d taken great pride in sending her on the trip. But he was too miserable at the moment to even be proud of himself. “Sometimes the amount of time you’ve known him doesn’t matter. Shit happens.”

“It matters to me.” Piper drew in a deep breath. “I don’t have time for a relationship.”

“Who’s talking about a relationship?”

She snorted. “One-night stands are more your thing.”

Touché. “Were my thing.” He tried to take a few cheese puffs, but Piper hugged the bag to her chest the way his grandma used to clutch her pearls. He considered wrestling them from her, but she could probably take him.

“Last time we had any sort of real conversation, you were seeing like five different guys,” Piper said.

“Like I said, things change. And don’t turn this on me. If you didn’t get dumped, what are you doing hiding in the closet, stuffing your face and writing”—he looked at her journal—“a list of why emotions suck.” She’d written three items so far:

1. They’re annoying.
2. They’re a waste of time.
3. They’re stupid.

“All true,” he acknowledged. “But that doesn’t tell me why you’re here. In the pantry. At midnight.”

“Go back to bed before you turn into a pumpkin.” She accompanied this with a go-away shooing gesture.

“And what about you? You won’t turn into a pumpkin?”

“I’d have to believe in fairy tales for that,” she said.

“Pretty cynical for thirty-one.”

She slid him a death glare. “Thirty. And I will kill you where you stand.”

He laughed, and it sounded rusty even to his own ears, but it felt good. “I missed you,” he heard himself say, startling the both of them.

She stared at him for a beat and then into the bag, like it held the secrets of life. “Funny way of showing it, staying away for so long.”

Two months of rehab. Six months of trying to make it stick. He’d hit a bit of a pothole in the making-amends portion of his recovery. Like the rest of his life, this part wasn’t going to be easy. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”

Worry was a groove between her brows. “You ever going to tell me what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, now that I’m home.” He paused. “Do you miss them, Piper?”

She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Mom and Dad? Of course. Always.”