LJ went back to the counter and started washing the dirty pan, his shoulders hunched tightly.

“Well, I guess it came in handy,” Andra said, wanting to draw the attention back away from him. She kept her voice light, testing the waters. “I guess New Orleans wasn’t the magical cure after all. So much for all the voodoo magic you told me you were putting in your food.” She tickled LJ’s side, and his abs clenched under her fingers.

“It’s no big thing.” His lips tipped up toward a smile, and a little bit of hope crept in under her disappointment.

Even after all that, they weren’t treating her as if she were crazy. But then, they wouldn’t, would they? LJ had told her how nervous it made him when it rained, and last week Rose had pointed out with a shaking hand where her grandmother’s piano used to sit, before the floodwaters washed it away. These people weren’t untouched by their past, and they didn’t expect her to be, either. Her father had always been so upset by her attacks that she’d never considered that in a certain way . . . they were normal.

LJ’s smile grew. “Besides, I’m going to have a great time telling Ty it was his ugly old face that sent you into fits.”

“Please don’t.” She cringed. “He’s been so sweet. When you were on that landscaping job the other day, he and Tash came over to teach me guitar chords. Even after Tash gave me up as a lost cause, he was so sure I’d get better and my fingers would stop getting twisted all up and hitting the wrong things.” She paused. “Wait, weren’t you two supposed to be doing a drywall job together today?”

LJ glanced at the clock and said a word that had his mother frowning at him. “I gotta run. Will you be okay?”

“Depends on if I mess up the roux, I think, and how fast your mom can find a weapon.”

He dropped a kiss on her cheek. “I’ll hide the knives.”

She went to the sink and stared down at the pan he’d been working on. Now that he was gone, she needed to wrap her mind around the idea that she might be crippled by these panic attacks forever.

She swallowed. They had gotten better, and that would have to be enough. It was a little easier with LJ and his mom, because they understood having an ugly past, and all the messy ways it butted into the present. But not even that would do Andra much good, considering they lived thousands of miles away from her.