That did it.

Sydney went to the edge of the bed and sat. She put a hand over her mouth as she cried so Bay, singing quietly in the next room, wouldn’t hear.

Ten days on the road.

She needed a bath.

Claire looked prettier, and cleaner, than she did.

Grandma Waverley was gone.

Bay liked it here, but she didn’t yet realize what being a Waverley meant.

What was David doing?

Did she leave behind any clues?

So much had changed, but her room was exactly like she’d left it.

She crawled to the pillow at the top of the bed and curled into a small ball. She was asleep seconds later.

CHAPTER

3

There was an art to the male posterior. That’s all there was to it.

Well, that was most of it.

The young runners on the university track had such verve and tone and, probably best of all, if Evanelle ever felt the need to give them something, she could never catch them. Obviously her gift knew that and never decided to kick in at the track during the school year. But in the summer there were slower, older people on the track, and sometimes Evanelle had to give them little packets of ketchup and tweezers. She even had to give one old woman a jar of sourwood honey one day. They gave her strange looks on the track in the summer.

That morning, instead of going to the track, Evanelle decided to walk downtown before the shops opened. There were always runners around the square. She followed a few of them until she came to Fred’s Gourmet Grocery and happened to look in the window. It was well before he normally showed up for work, but there was Fred, in his stocking feet, getting a container of yogurt out of the dairy section. His rumpled clothing was an obvious indication that he’d spent the night there. Evanelle supposed the rose geranium wine didn’t work on James, or maybe Fred decided not to use it after all. Sometimes people who had been together for a long time got to imagining that things used to be better, even when they weren’t. Memories, even hard memories, grew soft like peaches as they got older.

Fred and James were a steadfast couple, everyone knew that. The fact that they were gay had been overlooked a long time ago, when it was obvious they were one of the always-togethers, a distinction usually reserved for very old couples. She knew Fred. She knew that what people thought was important to him. He was a lot like his father that way, though he’d never admit it. Once someone told him something critical, he would hold on to it for a long time, change everything he did just so he wouldn’t face the same criticism again. He would hate for anyone to know that he and James were having problems. He was an always-together. He had so many expectations to live up to.