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hold that over you.”
    She made it sound so simple.
    “Okay, I’ll be your maid of honor, but just be honest with me. If things get … awkward, I’ll hand over my bouquet to someone else—no questions asked.”
    “I promise. If that happens, I’ll speak up. But I need you to do something else for me.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Since I’m stuck over here until mid-May, you’ll need to do some of the footwork. We’d like a small, intimate wedding, and I don’t want my mom to get carried away.”
    Uh-oh. Another potential crisis. There was no way Mrs. Delacourt would take a backseat on planning her only child’s big day. “I’m not sure I can help out there. Your mom is going to insist upon calling all the shots.”
    “I know. And that’s what you’re going to help me prevent.”
    Shana never had been able to stand up to her mother, and Cassandra Delacourt could be pretty intimidating when she put her mind to it. In fact, Kristy wasn’t looking forward to bumping heads with her, but she would—for Shana—if push came to shove.
    So she relented. “All right, I’ll help. And I’ll keep you posted.”
    “Good. Then I’ll let you get back to sleep. I’ll talk to you in a couple of days, okay? And thanks a million, Kristy. I really appreciate this.”
    “No problem.” But as she hung up the telephone, a bevy of goose bumps shimmied over her, and she ran her hands along her arms to chase them away.
    What had she gotten herself into?
    Renee sat in the center of the old green throw rug she’d slept upon and yawned. She’d stayed awake for hours last night, until exhaustion chased away her fear of the dark.
    Now she had a crick in her neck, and her back hurt.
    As the rays of the morning sun peered through the cracks of the wooden walls, dust motes danced and glistened in the beams like fairy dust.
    Weird, huh? And it was even weirder to think of a tree house as her home, but for a girl who’d never really had a bedroom to call her own, it was actually kind of cool. A memory she’d have to tell her baby about some day.
    She wondered what time it was. Seven o’clock? Eight? Too bad she didn’t have a watch. She knew it was Wednesday, though.
    Reaching into her backpack, she dug around until she found the last granola bar. She hoped it would be enough to take the edge off the hunger pangs she’d woken up with, but even if it wasn’t, she planned to be first in line when the church opened the soup kitchen at eleven. Then she would eat her fill, making it her big meal of the day.
    After nibbling on the bar and making it last as long as she could, she grabbed a toothbrush, a nearly empty tube of paste, and a comb from her backpack. Then she shoved them into her pockets so she could use both hands while climbing to the ground.
    She planned to freshen up in the park restroom, then hit the city streets, looking for a job. There were a couple of cutesy-looking shops and eateries on Applewood, across from the park. Maybe one of them was hiring.
    As she began to climb out of the tree house, holding on to the doorway and carefully placing her feet on the wooden steps, a young voice sounded behind her. “Hey! What are you doing?”
    She glanced over her shoulder, where two kids stood. The bigger one, a dark-haired boy about nine or ten, had his arms crossed. He nodded to a faded, hand-painted sign on the side of the tree house. “Can’t you read?”
    Before finishing her descent, Renee glanced at the scrawled words she’d disregarded yesterday: No Grils Allowed.
    Great. Now she was getting evicted. If she had a quarter for every time that had happened to her, she wouldn’t be living in a stupid tree.
    Once on the ground, she turned to face them. “Is this your fort?”
    “Yeah.” The smaller boy, a younger kid with light brown hair, used his finger to push his glasses along the bridge of his freckled nose before looking her up and down. “Who are you?”
    “My name’s Renee.” She offered him a smile.