Karson.
My heart skipped.
He’d grown up. Gone were the lanky arms and legs. Gone was the shaggy hair in need of a cut. Gone was the youth from his face.
This was Karson Avery, a man who stole my breath. But he’d done that at nineteen too.
Those beautiful hazel eyes studied me, then darted to the car as he came toward us. A crease formed between his eyebrows as he took it in. Then they moved to me and that crease deepened.
My stomach did a cartwheel. Please recognize me.
If he didn’t . . . I clung to August’s hand, drawing strength from his fingers. It would break my heart if Karson had forgotten me. Because in all these years, he’d never been far from my mind.
Karson’s feet stopped abruptly and his entire body froze. Then he blinked and shook his head. “Clara?”
Oh, thank God. I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Hi, Karson.”
“I can’t believe it.” He shook his head again, then his gaze shifted to August. “Hi there.”
August clutched me tighter and murmured, “Hi.”
“Is it really you?”
“It’s me.”
“It’s really you.” A slow smile spread across his face, wider and wider.
It hadn’t changed. There, on the face of a man, was the smile from the boy I’d loved.
The boy I’d loved before his life had gone one direction and mine had gone the other.
And between us streaked those dotted lines.
Chapter Two
Clara
Twelve years earlier . . .
“Here.” Aria tossed me the dry-erase marker.
I caught it and rubbed my fist on the van’s wall, erasing yesterday’s number. Then, popping the cap, I wrote today’s number in blue. The sharp scent of the marker had become the smell of hope.
Sixty-one.
We had sixty-one days until our eighteenth birthday. Sixty-one days until we could leave the junkyard as legal adults and get on with our lives. After three years of living in this van without electricity or heat or air conditioning, our time here was coming to a close.
I’d thought as the days had ticked away, I’d be more excited to say goodbye to this shitty old van. I guess leaving any home was hard, even a dirty one. Even my uncle’s. Though any shithole was better than living under that bastard’s roof.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to Montana?” Aria asked from her bedroll where she was bent, tying her shoes.
The laces had been white at one point, just like the laces on mine. But after nearly three years, they were permanently a brownish red—the color of the dirt outside that we did our best to keep from tracking in.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “That’s where Londyn, Gemma and Katherine went.”
“Exactly my point.”
“Don’t you think we should, like, find our own place?”
“Yeah,” she muttered. “I guess so. Then where?”
“LA?”
“Hell to the no.” She stood up and plucked her favorite black hoodie from the backpack that was her closet. “I want out of California. Forever.”
“I just want out of this freaking town.” I took one long look at the number on the metal wall, then recapped the marker and tossed it into my wooden crate.
Sixty-one.
The excitement would come. Eventually. Right?
“Will you water my plants for me today?” Aria asked.
“Sure.” I had nothing else to do.
On the days when I wasn’t working, life in the junkyard was boring. The day would stretch without TV or a phone or . . . anything. So I’d water her plants. I’d sweep out the van with the handheld broom I’d gotten from the dollar store a couple years ago. Both chores would take an hour total. Then I’d have to find something else to do.
“What do you want me to bring you back from the restaurant?” she asked.
“Food.”
My answer was the same as always. Just like Aria’s answer on the days when she was stuck here and I went to work at a truck-stop diner. I washed dishes for six dollars an hour. It was below minimum wage but since the owner paid me in cash under the table and didn’t ask questions about why I hadn’t been in school all last year, it was worth the cut.
Staying off the grid was the only way we’d made this living arrangement work.
For sixty-one more days, Clara Saint-James was a ghost.
Then Aria and I would leave here and rejoin society with a real address and social security numbers and birth certificates—the documents tucked away beneath my bedroll in a plastic bag. We’d made sure to take them from our uncle before we’d run away.
Maybe when we got out of here, we’d actually get driver’s licenses. A credit card. A bank account.
“Any requests?” Aria asked. She worked as a dishwasher too at a greasy spoon about a thirty-minute walk from here. The owner of her restaurant had actually asked for an application.
Aria had listed me as her mother’s name, the junkyard as our address. Thankfully, they hadn’t tried to call the fake phone number she’d put on the application. Or if they had, they hadn’t asked why the call hadn’t gone through.
Like me, she was paid under the table, so why her boss had needed an application, I wasn’t sure. Whatever the reason, all that mattered was that we both worked in restaurants. The food was worth more than the hourly wage.
On the days we worked, neither of us had to worry about a meal. And normally, there’d be enough left in the kitchen for an extra sandwich or two to bring home.
“Ham and cheese,” I said. It was Karson’s favorite, not that I’d tell Aria that was the reason I always asked for it.
“’Kay. I’m out.” She stood at the mouth of the van, waiting.
I walked over and wrapped my arms around her.
The night our parents had died, I hadn’t wanted to give my mom or dad a hug good night. I’d been in the middle of a game of Fallout on my PlayStation. I’d gotten to level eight and the blocks had been falling so fast. My fingers had flown over the control. And when my parents had kissed me goodbye, when they’d told me to have fun and be good for our babysitter, I’d dismissed them with a grunt.
Hours later, on their way home, a drunk driver had crossed the center line and crashed into their car.
Ten-year-old me hadn’t understood that life was short. I’d been so worried about a stupid video game that I hadn’t hugged my parents goodbye.
I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
“Be careful.” I let Aria go and watched as she hopped out of the van.
When her shoes hit the dirt, she looked up at me and waved. “Bye. Have a good day.”
“You too.”
I didn’t like the days when we walked into town alone. Yes, we’d been doing it for nearly three years, but that didn’t mean it was safe. Until we were gone, until we left Temecula and turned eighteen, we would never be safe. Not until we had control over our own lives.
Aria didn’t head for the small gate in the junkyard fence that served as our own personal door. Instead, she rushed over to Lou’s shop, disappearing into the bathroom.
I stayed standing at the end of the van, waiting until she came out. Then with another wave, she disappeared through the rusted cars and stacks of metal parts.