Hot Date. Amy Garvey

one-year-old, a cookie is a surefire bribe.”

      “I’ll have to remember that,” Grace said, and sat down beside her. “Where’s Jilli?”

      “Jilli is hiding behind Uncle Toby’s leg,” Toby said, glancing over his shoulder. A small red head and a bright purple jacket were just visible behind him. “Forget everything your mother’s told you,” he whispered to the child. “Grace doesn’t bite.”

      “Toby!”

      He waggled his eyebrows. “Just kidding. Come on, Jilli, let’s show Grace where we hide the cookies.”

      “I can’t believe how big they’ve both gotten.” Grace stood in the doorway to the upstairs living room. Both kids were parked in front of the TV, watching Sesame Street with a plate of apple slices and cookies between them.

      “I can’t believe you’ve been here for two days and you haven’t called me, you rotten friend,” Casey said, shaking her head. She slung an arm around Grace’s shoulders. “Thank goodness I have Toby to deliver news.”

      “I’ve been a little distracted.” Grace turned around and hugged Casey for the third time in fifteen minutes. “It’s so good to see you. Really. I was going to call today, I swear.”

      “After you finished pitching stuff out the window, I presume,” Casey said with a wry tilt of her head. She’d cut her hair a little bit shorter since Grace had seen her last, but she still looked like the same Casey who had been Grace’s other half since sixth grade. She sat down on the floor in the hall and patted the space beside her. “Join me. If we even tiptoe in there, the spell will be broken.”

      Grace slid down next to her and nudged Casey’s shoulder. “Something you’re not telling me?”

      “I could ask you the same thing,” Casey said with a laugh. “You’re full of surprises, huh?”

      “What else is new?”

      Casey’s laugh was gentle, but she was all business as usual. “So what are you going to do now?” she asked. “Do you have a plan? Where are you going to work? Live?”

      “I slept on the couch last night, you know,” Grace told her archly. “I’m still trying to clear a path into my bedroom. I haven’t thought too much beyond that yet.”

      “Okay, well, what about your bank account? Did you go down to First National yet? Have you forwarded your mail? Did you call a lawyer?”

      Grace’s shoulders sagged. “I didn’t think about that.”

      Casey’s smile was sympathetic. “Which?”

      Grace winced. “All of it?”

      “Grace.”

      She sighed and let her head fall back. “I know.”

      “Have you even called your dad yet?”

      “I’m having dinner with him tonight,” she said with a grin. “I get points for that, right?”

      “You do.” Casey reached for her hand and squeezed it. “I’m sorry, honey. About all of this.”

      “I’m not.” She trained her grin directly on Casey this time. “It’s going to be good, Casey. Really. I need to do this. And this time I’m going to make it work.”

      At four o’clock, Toby stood in the side yard, surveying Grace’s handiwork, a bottle of water in one hand and something that was half frown and half smile on his face.

      Leave it to Grace, he thought. That room upstairs had been collecting junk and dust and cobwebs for years, and within days of her arrival half of it was, well, littering up his side yard and part of the driveway, but still. The room was almost clean now.

      Grace didn’t think twice. Okay, sometimes she didn’t think ever, but at least she got things done. Did things, took chances, even if they sometimes—okay, most of the time—backfired.

      It was a hell of a lot more than he could say for himself.

      He glanced up at the sound of shuffling footsteps and found Quinn Barnett, his next-door neighbor, ambling up the driveway.

      “Hey, kiddo,” he said, and wound an arm around the girl’s bony shoulders. She was fifteen going on forty, as serious a kid as he had ever met. He adored her.

      “I hate it when you call me that,” she said, eyebrows drawn together in a precise frown.

      “I know,” he said easily. “What’s up?”

      “I should ask you.” She waved a hand at the junk on the grass. The glass face of a broken clock glittered up at them in the late afternoon light. “What happened?”

      “A friend of mine is here,” he said with a fond smile. “She’s going to stay for a while.”

      “And trash the place?” Quinn said dubiously. She wriggled out from under his arm and poked at one pile of debris with her booted toe, unearthing an ancient camera. “Hey, can I have this?”

      “You can have it all, as far as I’m concerned.” He let her poke through the piles and leaned against the hood of his old Celica. “And she’s not trashing the place.” Yet, he added silently, trying not to smile.

      “So what is she doing here?” Quinn asked. She was squatting on the pavement, idly flipping through the pages of a water-damaged book on botanicals.

      “Starting over.” He shrugged when she looked up at him, eyes sharp under the dark fringe of her bangs. “Seriously. She left her husband and she’s…I don’t actually know what she’s going to do yet, but the thing of it is, she’s not scared, you know?”

      Quinn nodded slowly, something like envy in her eyes, the book still clutched in one hand.

      “I can’t imagine doing that,” Toby said, and heard the awe in his voice as if from far away. “I mean, I think about it for a good long while before I decide to order mushrooms instead of sausage on my pizza, you know?”

      Quinn smiled sadly, and it took Toby a minute to remember she was only fifteen, just a kid, really. Not that she’d ever seemed like much of a kid, even when she was seven, curled up on her front porch with a book, a tattered stuffed snake draped over her shoulders. Snakes don’t get enough love, she’d told him then.

      “Yeah. I do know,” she said now, and turned her gaze back to the book in her hand, something very close to a blush heating her pale cheeks.

      “She’s trouble, no doubt,” Toby told her, walking over to join her beside the clutter, pawing through it idly. “But sometimes I think trouble is underrated.”

      At seven o’clock, armed with her best positive attitude and a big appetite, Grace walked into the Canal Street Café for dinner with her dad.

      She loved him, she even liked him, but spending time with him had always been a test of her patience. If she was the hare, her father was the tortoise—on sedatives, and with one broken leg. Ordering a meal usually took a good fifteen minutes, and that only after weighing the pros and cons of each entrée, sometimes wandering down a few lanes of trivia concerning the origins of certain pasta dishes or the historical uses for chickens.

      The Café was one of Wrightsville’s institutions, a little converted cottage overlooking the water, as famous for its mismatched china and tablecloths as it was for its food. There were only a dozen tables aside from the counter in the back, which was half lunch spot and half bar, and Grace could smell cheeseburgers frying when she walked in the door.

      She could also see her father, the man who usually preferred books, if not the History Channel, to other human beings, chattering happily with Georgia Griffin and her son, Nick.

      Good God, the man was everywhere she looked.

      Georgia spotted her hovering near the door and waved. “Grace, dear! Come join us!”