“Do you?” he asked again.

“Yes,” I whispered.

When he kissed me, it was like tumbling off a cliff. Falling headfirst into the past. Time unspooling in reverse so that we both were impossibly young again, Junie a speck on some future horizon we hadn’t even imagined yet. And we tore at each other as if we could somehow start over, re-create what had already happened and make it turn out differently this time around, undo what had already been done.

But in the end, with my lips swollen from his mouth, his back marked by my nails, nothing had changed. It was too late. We were still strangers. And our daughter was still dead.

FOURTEEN

I might have lied to Land about never having seen Junie’s father again, but the rest of the story was true. It was a fuck-and-run. A one-night stand. No-strings-attached sex. It was all those things, but more than that, too. Even before the reality of Junie was born, that night was always more than its on-paper definition.

Sunday nights at the diner were slow. Dinner service stopped at five, and only drinks and desserts were available until the doors closed at eight. It was the only night Thomas ever got a break, and he always drove away at five o’clock on the dot, leaving a single waitress to man the diner. It was a shit shift, no tips because there were never more than a couple of customers, at most. Because I was the newest waitress, hired at the start of summer, I was the one working that sticky mid-July night when Zach Logan walked through the door.

I’d never seen him before, glanced through the plate glass window and realized I’d never seen his dark blue SUV, either. He wasn’t from around here, which made him instantly interesting. And his looks didn’t hurt, either. Slow half smile when he saw me, hair ruffled from the wind, slight farmer’s tan on his neck where his T-shirt pulled away from his skin. “You open?” he asked, swinging onto a counter stool before I answered.

“We close in five minutes,” I told him. I’d never been shy, but I moved through life with a certain watchfulness, wary of unexpected movements, faces. But something about him drew me closer. I was almost amused, observing myself from a distance. So this was attraction. I’d slept with a half dozen guys already, had endured untold numbers of sloppy make-out sessions behind the school or in the woods near my mama’s trailer. Always waiting for that buzzing in my belly, that heat in my cheeks that happened to other people. And here it was. Came sauntering right through the diner door when I’d least expected it.

I served him a piece of key lime pie and a cup of lukewarm coffee, locked the front doors and put out the Closed sign while he ate. Accepted his invitation to sit next to him, tried not to notice the way the tiny hairs on my arm stood up every time his hand brushed against my skin while we talked.