But not where I was going.

“I’ll see you at Christmas,” I promised. “Only six weeks away.”

“We’ll miss you at Thanksgiving.”

“I’ll miss you, too,” I said.

But not enough to jeopardize my job, I thought as we ended the call. Not enough to disrupt my life.

They would all have to get along without me, Meg and John, Daisy and DJ, Momma and Daddy. Beth. Amy. Even Aunt Phee and old Mr. Laurence.

And Trey.

My heart tripped. My decision to stay away had nothing to do with Trey.

I scowled into my wineglass. Nothing at all.

Iwas fifteen the summer Trey Laurence came to live with his grandfather.

“The boy next door,” Amy called him, which I thought was ridiculous since he lived a mile away up the road.

Our big orange barn cat, Weasley, had gone missing the day before. Beth was making herself sick, worrying he had encountered a coyote. More likely a truck, I thought, but I’d promised her to keep an eye out when I went for my run.

So when I saw the orange shadow slink through the gap in the hedge by the Laurence place, I was relieved. Well, relieved and annoyed, because now I was going to have to break pace, and it was going to be really hard to get my body moving again. Also, I had no idea how I was going to get the cat home. But I pushed through the bushes anyway, scratching my arms, whistling the way Beth did when she was calling the cats to feed them.

Naturally, Weasley ignored me, streaking toward the antebellum-style house.

I jogged up a long gravel drive through an avenue of trees like a dirt-scratch farmer come to beg a favor at the Big House, growing hotter and sweatier and more exasperated by the minute. Damn cat. If I hadn’t promised Bethie . . . I whistled again, following the flick of the cat’s tail as it rounded a corner of the porch.

And there, sitting on the back steps, was a boy scratching our cat under the chin.

I stopped, eyeing him warily. He was about my age, with dark curly hair and faintly golden skin.

He looked up at me and smiled. “It’s not a dog, you know. It won’t come when you whistle.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “It’s my cat.”

“I’ve been feeding it.”

I noticed the open can of tuna on the ground beside him. “Which explains why Weasley hasn’t come home for two days.”

“Weasley, huh?” The cat leaned into his fingers. “Ron, I presume.”

A fellow Harry Potter fan. “Well, he’s definitely not a Ginny. Eighty percent of orange cats are male.”

He raised an eyebrow in acknowledgement.

I uncrossed my arms. “I’m Jo March. I live down the road.”

He nodded. “I see you sometimes. You and your sisters. I’m Trey.”

Trey. Theodore Laurence III.

I’d heard of him, of course. In the country, you might not see your neighbors every day, but you talk about them plenty. Even I knew about old Mr. Laurence’s son, who ran off to Miami and married a club singer. He’d died a couple months ago, along with his Cuban-born wife—a boating accident, the gossips said.