He smiled and nodded in return. “ ’Lo, Ayisha.”

Then Ayisha turned and her dark brown eyes landed on me.

And she smirked. She always smirked. When she was born and placed in her mother’s arms, I would bet real money she opened her tiny baby eyes, looked at the woman who created her, and smirked. But she especially liked to smirk whenever she looked at me. There were reasons.

“You were blushing, too,” she added deliberately, knowing it would irk me.

Which it did.

“I was cold. It’s cold outside. My cheeks were getting beat up by the wind, which made them red.” A total exaggeration; the notorious Oklahoma wind had been behaving, but it was cold. I was absolutely not blushing.

“Uh-huh,” Ayisha said in a way that made her disbelief quite clear.

I turned away from her and set the now-very-well-scrubbed pot on the drying rack then grabbed another and began scrubbing anew.

Ayisha didn’t offer to help. Instead, she began making cinnamon tea in a teapot with a poinsettia design. Her hands were slender and elegant. She took care of them in a way I never did of my own. Especially her nails. They were always epic; their long acrylic designs changed often. The theme this week was red and green and they stood out in beautiful relief against the dark brown of her skin. There was no way I would be able to pull off a look that effortlessly cool. Ever.

She caught me staring at her tea-making and raised a single perfectly sculpted dark eyebrow. She didn’t offer an explanation since it obviously was for one of the inn’s guests—we had about six at the moment, which, along with Dad and me staying here, was a full house.

Dad finished his sandwich then smiled at me and Ayisha before turning his full attention to me.

“You want to come by later for a match?” he asked.

He meant chess. Dad and I had been playing chess since I was able to move the pieces around the board. It was our thing. And while we didn’t always have big talks when we played, it was an opportunity if either of us wanted to engage.

I guessed this was his way of setting us up for “a talk,” specifically about “the situation” with him and Mom. We hadn’t actually done that yet. You’d think we would have by now, but if there was one thing my family could do well it was avoid confronting difficult topics. We could win medals at it.

“Sure. After dinner’s done,” I replied. Maybe this would also turn out to be a good time to float the idea of me not going back to Barrington, too.

He nodded then left the kitchen.