The Last Breath. Kimberly Belle

go, Gi. You’re suffocating me.” Lexi wriggles her hands in between us and pushes me to arm’s length. The skin around her eyes crinkles in a smile. “And besides, I want to get a good look at you.” She surveys me up and down, her gaze settling on the denim hanging loose from my hips. “Good Lord, you’re a walking advertisement for anorexia.”

      “And you are as gorgeous as ever.” Honey hair that falls perfectly straight down her back, bowed lips curved into a flirtatious smirk, sinuous limbs begging to be draped over the hood of a Corvette. My sister may be a little older now, her designer denim a little tighter, but Sexy Lexi Andrews is still every inch Miss Cherokee High three years in a row.

      She turns and smacks a palm on the bar, demanding the bartender’s attention. “Jake, you handsome devil, have you met my sister Gia yet?”

      If Jake is surprised this is a family reunion, he doesn’t show it. He flicks the towel over a shoulder and extends a long arm over the bar. “Jake Foster. Nice to meet you, Gia.”

      His grip is firm, his hand warm and smooth in mine. “Nice to meet you, too.”

      “Fire up your fry-daddy,” Lexi tells Jake. “We’ve got to get some meat on my sister’s bones, pronto.” She winks at me. “There’s not a soul within fifty miles who’s not put on at least ten pounds since Jake opened this place five years ago. Wait’ll you taste his food. You’ll know why he’s got girls all over town flinging their panties at his front door.”

      Jake gives her an appreciative grin and pours two generous glasses of wine. When he tells us about the special—seared duck breast and oven-roasted kale and sweet potato hash smothered in jus—my mouth waters and I smack my lips. Jake notices, and he gives me a cocky grin.

      “Don’t laugh,” I say. “My last real meal was a watery stew with questionable chunks of what the cook swore was goat. The stray dog population took a hit that day, though, so I don’t think he was being entirely honest.”

      “I don’t know whether to be offended or relieved,” Jake says.

      Lexi snorts. “Try disgusted.”

      He throws back his head and laughs, a deep rumble that vibrates through my bones, and then disappears into the kitchen with a twirl of his towel and our orders.

      As soon as he’s gone, I whirl on my stool to face Lexi, and the words tumble out of my mouth like stock cars at the Bristol Motor Speedway, racing to the finish line. “Did you know that vice principal Sullivan still lives next door—his house is a dump by the way—and is a raging alcoholic?”

      “That’s not exactly a 411, you know. By now that man’s liver is so pickled, you could batter it, fry it and serve it on a platter.”

      “And his family? What happened to them?”

      Lexi sips her wine. “Gone. Hightailed it out of here after what must have been his fourth or fifth DUI.”

      The professor’s words—What do you think he’s hiding from?—skitter through my mind, but I switch gears. Dean Sullivan’s fall from grace, though intriguing, is the least of my worries.

      I move on. “This law professor from Atlanta came by the house earlier, and you wouldn’t believe what he said about Dad.”

      Lexi scowls and plunks down her wineglass, her gaze fishing over my right shoulder. “Why is it that every time somebody gets saved at Light of Deliverance church, they turn into a dowdy old frump? Surely that outfit can’t be what Jesus intended for his fans.”

      I don’t bother checking. My sister is the Carrie Bradshaw of Appalachia, and not many people can live up to her fashion standards. And besides, I know this tactic. By interrupting me with some ridiculous nonsense, Lexi is hoping to distract me from a subject she hasn’t spoken more than a few words about in almost sixteen years: our father.

      “I think they’re called followers,” I say, not backing down, “and we were talking about Dad’s case.”

      “Whatever. That woman is a What Not to Wear episode waiting to happen. Oh, Lord. Now she’s passing out flyers.” She snorts and rolls her eyes. “Probably for their next snake handling.”

      “Could you focus, please? This professor is writing a book about wrongful convictions. He thinks Dad’s is one of them.”

      And now, I think, I’ve got my sister’s attention. Her gaze whips to mine, her good-humored expression fades and her brows slide into the ghost of a medically frozen V. She reaches for the wineglass and drains it, knuckles tightening ever so slightly around the stem. And then she dabs her glossy lips with a napkin and the storm on her face vanishes as quickly as it came, like a twister sucked up into a dissolving cloud.

      “You’d think people would’ve heard by now that snake bites everybody.” Her voice is a little too loud, and a lot too vehement. “Even holier-than-thou Bobby Humphrey. By the time they got him the antivenom, he was foaming at the mouth. Besides, I thought the whole point was prayer, not antivenom. Isn’t that kind of cheating?”

      “Lexi! We have to talk about Dad.”

      She leans across the bar, snatches the bottle of wine and fills her glass to within an inch of the rim. “The hell we do.”

      A familiar frustration ties a string of knots across my shoulders. My sister has always been a great believer in the power of denial. How else can I explain her staying in the one place where she will always be the murderer’s daughter?

      But what if what Jeffrey Levine said is true? What if all this time, I’ve been running from something my father didn’t do?

      “Did you hear me? This professor thinks Dad might be innocent. What if he’s right?”

      She shakes her head definitively, almost violently. “He’s not.”

      “But what if he is?”

      “He’s not!” she shrieks, shrill enough that I jump. Everyone jumps, in fact. A young couple at a table to our left, three friends sharing a plate of fried calamari at our backs, two pot-bellied men in trucker hats three stools down. Even Jake looks up from the beer he’s pulling at the opposite end of the bar, and hell’s bells, I catch pity in his expression.

      But Lexi has always preferred the part of sexy bombshell over damsel in distress, and really, who can blame her? Our life has been distressing enough. She tosses him a beauty-queen smile and reaches for her wineglass with a shaking hand, and all around us, conversations pick back up one by one.

      I lean close, lower my voice. “Why do you refuse to discuss the possibility he may not be guilty?”

      She glances over, and I see a flash of my sister. The real Lexi. The unguarded and devastated Lexi. “Because it’s a whole hell of a lot easier than praying he’s innocent.”

      And then she flicks her perfect hair over a perfect shoulder and real Lexi’s gone.

       5

      WHEN THE KITCHEN door swings wide a few minutes later revealing Jake coming at us with two plates piled high with tonight’s special, I realize I’m ravenous. Outta-my-way-and-let-me-at-it ravenous. He slides our dinners onto the bar, and I scoop up a bite and shove it in my mouth before he’s pulled back his hand.

      “Omigod,” I mumble around the food, slicing off an even bigger bite of duck, stuffing it in with the half-chewed hash. I say more, but judging by the confused look on Jake’s face, none of it very intelligibly.

      He blinks at Lexi. “What did your sister just say?”

      She watches me take another monster bite, and her pretty nose wrinkles. “I don’t know, but you better back up.”

      When you live in an area mired in chronic famine, it’s easy to forget how food is supposed to taste. Meals are freeze-dried and carried down dusty roads to distribution