He hardly knew her or her twin sister, Hailey. So, what did he expect? That they’d remained frozen in time? Still. The girl he remembered and this teenager didn’t even seem like the same person. It would have been easier to believe this was a stranger rather than the girl with the sparkly shoes.

Blair and Hailey had been babies when he’d left home. During his years in Atlanta, his mom and dad had repeatedly reached out to him. They’d even shown up on his doorstep with the girls occasionally. Each time, seeing them had made him feel like dirt. The last time they’d forced a family visit the twins had probably been six.

After he’d gone to prison, his parents had insisted on coming to see him there, too. He’d told them that interacting with them was hard for him, but if they had to come for reasons of their own, they could. However, he’d asked them not to bring Blair and Hailey to the penitentiary. It had been bad enough for his parents to see him in a jumpsuit. There was no way he wanted young girls to see him that way, to be brought into that environment. His parents had honored his request.

Since he’d come back to Misty River, he’d talked to his parents on the phone a couple of times, and they’d come by here once. They frequently invited him to their house.

He hadn’t taken them up on that.

Estrangement was easier and less painful for everyone. He wished—had wished for a long time now—that they’d let that happen.

The central truth of his life was that he’d let himself down. But he’d also let his parents down. Horribly. He knew it. They knew it. Every time he spoke with them, he was confronted by all his mistakes.

Blair pointed to the puppy pen. “Do you have a dog?”

“No. I’m just fostering one at night for a couple of days.”

“Because of your job at Furry Tails?”

“Yeah.”

“It seems like a strange job for a guy like you. Why are you working there?”

“I just am.” If she was almost sixteen, how come she looked like she was twenty-one?

She finished her surveillance of his apartment and turned to him. “Do you want to do some heartwarming brother-sister activities? We could bake cookies,” she suggested with sarcastic sweetness, “or play Chutes and Ladders.”

“No.”

She stuck her hands in her jacket pockets. “You know, people tell me that we look alike, but I don’t see it.”

He did see the resemblance, and it was unsettling. She was tall, somewhere around five foot nine. Slender and strong, she had a long nose, a sharp jaw. They had the same shade of brown hair, and her eyes were hazel, like his.

“Why’d you come here?” he asked.