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skin, dark easy curls cut short—the kind of girl who didn’t try too hard. The kind of girl Summer had been.
    Jane lowered the spatula, singing into it before slapping it against the top of a chocolate cake while Lauren stood next to the kitchen island, trying not to choke on her coffee. Ryan had offered to pay for retail space for Janey to open a bakery, knowing that she hated taking cash from their dad; offered to buy all the equipment and even a neon sign in girly pink font— Janey Cakes —but she refused every time. Her students at Powell Elementary were more important to her. She insisted that she was happier supplying sprinkle-covered cupcakes to her kids than to stuffy housewives who couldn’t be bothered to bake for themselves. She loved watching second graders smear sweet frosting across their faces, giggling in sugar-induced ecstasy.
    Lauren spotted Ryan watching them and gave him a ghost of a smile. A second later the music swelled when the kitchen door swung open and his sister’s friend stepped onto the deck with a chuckle, closing the door behind her. She tossed her blonde hair over a shoulder before shrugging against the cold.
    “Jesus,” she said, jerking up on the zipper of her hooded sweatshirt. “It’s freezing out here.”
    Ryan cracked a sideways smile and extended his free hand, swooping it outward as if presenting the snow-covered trees to Miss Lauren Harvey for the taking.
    “Yeah, yeah.” She ducked beneath the thin veil of her cotton hood.
    “You realize it’s, like, twenty degrees out here?” he asked. “Think that hood is going to help?”
    “I’m just waiting for chocolate cake,” she admitted, blowing into her hands before fishing a pack of cigarettes out of her front pocket. “I wouldn’t be catching pneumonia if Jane would let me smoke inside.”
    Had it been Ryan’s call, he would have let her smoke in every single room, if not just to stink up his father’s place, then to oblige his twin sister’s quite attractive best friend.
    Lauren tapped the hard pack against an open palm, her teeth clacking as she shivered. She noticed him looking and offered up a sheepish grin. “Bad habit, I know.”
    “You should quit. Three days.”
    “What’s three days?” she asked, lighting up a smoke and offering the pack to Ryan. He waved it away.
    “It’s how long it takes your body to get used to something. You know how diet soda tastes funny if you’ve never drunk it before?”
    “Tastes like a chemical dump,” Lauren brooded.
    “Drink it for three days and you won’t remember the difference. Same goes for quitting smoking.”
    “No shit?”
    “That’s what they say.”
    Lauren took a long drag. She gave him a wry grin, raising a shoulder in a shrug. “This is my last one,” she said. “I swear.”
    Ryan breathed a quiet laugh and looked away from her, surveying the endless wave of trees before them to keep himself from staring. He liked her. She was witty, charming, not afraid to crack a joke.
    The report of a gunshot echoed through the hills.
    “What the hell was that?” Lauren asked, startled.
    “Someone shooting their neighbor,” Ryan said. “Land dispute.”
    She gave him a look and he bit back a grin.
    “Probably just hunters,” he told her. “I think it’s turkey season or something.”
    Satisfied with his answer, Lauren sucked in a lungful of smoke. “So, we’re waiting for Sawyer?”
    “Sawyer and April.”
    Exhaling, she squinted at the burning tip of her cigarette, smoke and steam rising upward like a soul escaping a body. “You don’t think that’s going to be a little awkward?” she asked, plucking a bit of tobacco off the tip of her tongue, canting her head toward the kitchen. “Janey and him and some chick in the same house?”
    He drained his mug, coffee warming him from the inside out. “I asked her,” he said. “Like a million times.”
    “And she said she’s cool with it,” Lauren cut in, ashing her cigarette onto a patch of