“You did not tell me so. They’re just here to say good-bye.” Eby hesitated. “Lisette, I’m going to need your help with inventory. I’m going to need your help with this move.”

The fine bones of Lisette’s jaw were set. She wrote on the pad around her neck, I told you. I am not leaving.

“But I am. Come with me. You can take the chair,” Eby offered.

Lisette had never fully acknowledged that Eby knew about the chair. She always gave a little start when Eby mentioned it, like a child caught doing something she shouldn’t.

I am staying. Go away. I have lunch to make for our guests.

Eby left the kitchen thinking this would be so much easier if Jack had come. Now she had to find another way to make Lisette—and her ghosts—leave.

Chapter 3

3

The roadside stand ahead on the highway had been promising fresh fruit, peach cider, and cinnamon pecans for miles. They had passed at least six signs for the stand, each hand-lettered and littered with exclamation points. Kate found herself looking forward to seeing the next sign, a tension building in her body that only the truly lost can feel, starting in her stomach and spreading to her shoulders and fingertips, where her hands clutched the steering wheel. In twelve more miles, there would be fruit. Ten. Eight.

Kate and Devin began to yell with each sign, the closer they got.

Six more miles!

Four!

Two!

Finally, like magic, the stand appeared, and Kate pulled to a stop in front of the gray shack on a dead circle of gravel just off the highway. Dust, gnats, and wavy heat surrounded the place like a bubble, as if it could float up at any moment and travel to another spot of land on another stretch of rural highway somewhere.

She cut the engine of the Outback, and the sudden lack of vibration made her limbs feel heavy. Devin jumped out and ran to the tiny front porch of the shack, which was covered with rusty advertising signs for RC Cola and Pink Lady apples. This reminded Kate so much of hot, sticky road trips with her parents when she was young. Her father would fill the tank with gas and drive until the gauge went down to half, then they would drive back. They’d scoured back roads all around Georgia, finding motels with pools, highway junk shops, and old fruit stands.