When he died, Jessie had started fresh with a house of her own, and had cut off all ties to her past until her father tracked them down when Sara won a scholarship to Tulane and had her name listed in the New Orleans paper.

Her mother had refused to speak to her father. And Sara had been too scared to take the scholarship and move to New Orleans, which would entail defying her mother, who claimed to hate her family and New Orleans, with no explanation as to why. So Sara had gone to Florida State instead, and never found the peace she’d been looking for, the connection to her mother, the need to understand what had motivated her for her entire life. Never got to hear her mother’s true feelings about losing her own mother at such a young age.

Now Sara was the one who had lost her mother, and she hadn’t dealt with it any better than her mother before her had.

“I did grow up here,” Gabriel said, cutting across the street diagonally. “I can’t live anywhere else.” He glanced back. “What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing. The city. Why?” She pushed her sunglasses up on her nose.

“Because you forgot to watch your feet. So I knew you were thinking hard.”

Sara stopped walking. He was right. She’d forgotten to watch for holes in the sidewalk. Yet it made her sound like such a freak. “I wasn’t thinking hard. I was just thinking about the fact that I was smart not to take the scholarship I got to Tulane . . . that it was stupid at seventeen to think that I should leave home and all my friends to come here, where I was born, for no reason.”

“Really? Then why did you want to come here in the first place?”

That was the goddamn rub, wasn’t it? “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” And how completely annoying that Gabriel had homed straight in on the crux of her dilemma. She wanted answers, wanted to know why her mother had made the choices she had. And the truth Sara needed to come to terms with was that there probably were no answers to her questions.

Side hurting again, Sara rubbed it with the palm of her hand, and looked around her. “Where are we, anyway? This isn’t the way we got here, is it?”

“No. We’re going in the opposite direction. To the cemetery.”

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Gabriel had expected Sara to protest. It was clearly on her lips to say no, but she surprised him, just like she had with his suggestion to head to Bourbon Street. She had agreed to the cemetery trip simply by following him. Only now they were at the gates of St. Louis #1, having crossed North Rampart to the shortest “Walk” sign ever created, and the cemetery was locked.