“You read them all in three days?” I asked. “That’s insane.”

Elliot frowned, narrowing his eyes. “You think I’m lying?”

“I don’t think you’re lying. How old are you?”

“Fourteen, last week.”

“You look younger.”

“Thanks,” he said flatly. “I was going for that.” He blew his breath out, puffing his hair off his forehead.

A laugh burst free of my throat. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Thirteen. My birthday is March eighteenth.”

He nudged his glasses up. “You’re in eighth grade?”

“Yeah. You?”

Elliot nodded. “Same.” He looked around the empty space, surveying. “What do your parents do? They work in the city?”

I shook my head, chewing my lip. Without realizing it, I had really enjoyed talking to someone who didn’t know that I was motherless, hadn’t seen me broken and raw after I lost her. “My dad owns a company in Berkeley that imports and sells handmade ceramics and art and stuff.” I didn’t add that it all started when he began importing his father’s beautiful pottery and it sold like crazy.

“Cool. What about your—”

“What do your parents do?”

He narrowed his eyes at my outburst but answered anyway. “My mom works part-time in the tasting room at Toad Hollow. My dad is the town dentist . . .”

The town dentist. The one dentist? I guess I hadn’t realized how small Healdsburg was until he said that. In Berkeley, there were three dentists’ offices on my four-block walk to school.

“But he only works three days a week, and you can probably tell he doesn’t like to stay still. He does everything around town,” Elliot said. “Helps at the farmers’ market. Helps with operations at a few wineries.”

“Yeah, wine’s a big deal around here, isn’t it?” I realized as he spoke about it how many wineries we passed on the drive here.

“Wine: it’s what’s for dinner,” Elliot said with a laugh.

And there, right there in that second, it felt like we had something easy.

I hadn’t had easy in three years. I had friends who stopped knowing how to talk to me, or got tired of me being mopey, or were so focused on boys that we no longer had anything in common.

But then he ruined it: “Are your parents divorced?”

I sucked in a breath, oddly offended. “No.”

He tilted his head and watched me, unspeaking. He didn’t need to point out that both times I’d visited this town, I’d come without a mother.

I released my breath what felt like an hour later. “My mom died three years ago.”

This truth reverberated around the room, and I knew my admission irrevocably changed something between us. The simple things I was no longer: his new neighbor, a girl, potentially interesting, also potentially uninteresting. Now I was a girl who had been permanently damaged by life. I was someone to be handled carefully.

His eyes had gone wide behind his thick lenses. “Seriously?”