Dad considers this, but he looks dubious. Understandably so. Someone with a head injury bad enough to give them amnesia would have found it remarkably difficult to travel across five states before seeking medical attention. There probably would have been a lot of blood.
Lacey’s been observing this exchange with a confused look on her face. The girl is a pro, though. She knows when to keep her mouth shut. She moves silently into the room, coming to sit down at the kitchen table beside me. It’s a casual and very familiar movement that says she’s been accepted into the Romera household. My parents are collectors of waifs and strays; it doesn’t take much for that to happen. It just shocks me that Lacey has taken so well to the environment. My dad sits beside my mom and takes her hand, only smiling cautiously when she beams at him through her watery eyes. He’s still hesitant to believe my story, but he’ll pretend he buys it for her sake. For now. I’ll probably get the third degree when he and I are alone. My safest bet is to avoid that at all costs. He turns to me and frowns, eyes narrowing again.
“I didn’t see the car out front. Where did you park it?”
Oh, holy crap. I completely forgot about the run-down piece of junk that he refuses to replace. He’s had the thing since we were kids. I borrowed it under strict instructions to return it in pristine condition. Ha! Not only am I not going to be able to return it, Julio’s probably had the car compacted by now. Or something equally as destructive. I can imagine the old station wagon being eaten by hungry flames out in the desert somewhere. What the hell am I going to tell him? Think, think, think! “Uh…” Yeah, so far I have nothing. Maybe if I just start talking something believable will fall out of my mouth. “About that, Dad…”
Thud, thud, thud.
A loud and decisive rapping on the door prevents me from spinning more lies. It’s not a neighborly knock—the kind made by knuckles meeting wood. It’s the kind of thudding made by the side of a balled-up fist. I’ve heard that knocking before, once, when it was incessantly trying to hammer my front door down.
Oh, fuck! Seriously?
I rocket up out of my seat, nearly sending my chair flying in my haste. “I’ll get it!”
But my father, on the other side of the table, is closer and quicker than me. He shoots me a perplexed look. “You don’t live here, pumpkin. It’s probably Jehovah’s Witnesses, anyway. They always show up at this time of day.”
It’s not freaking Jehovah’s Witnesses. The man on the other side of that door couldn’t be any further from a Jehovah’s Witness. I really want to shove my pop out of the way and race to the door like I used to when I was a teenager and a boy was picking me up from the house—meeting my dad was one way to put off a prospective boy for life—but I can’t. That would look far too suspicious. And besides, it’s already way too late.
Both Mom and Lacey are giving me weird looks. I realize I’m chewing on my thumbnail like a wild animal as I listen to the sound of the door opening and voices talking. I tuck my hands under the table, shrugging hopelessly. Might as well just go with it now. I mean, how bad can this be?
I catch sight of the goofy photos of me from when I was a teenager, still growing into my gangly, tall body. A couple from when I just started at college, so excited to be away from home and studying. They’re plastered all over the damn walls, in between the religious images and the framed copies of my degrees. They haven’t even hung any photos of Alexis to take the pressure off—my mom cries every time she sees my sister’s face, so they’ve boxed them up in the attic. It’s a like freaking shrine to me in here; Zeth is gonna have a field day. I almost choke on the laughter that bubbles up inside my throat at that thought. How bad can it be? Really, absolutely, monumentally bad.
My father re-enters the room, and I brace myself, waiting to be fixed in his disapproving glare. But…something’s not right. My dad is smiling. He’s actually smiling. “Sloane, I can’t believe you left your friend waiting outside in the car. Poor guy could have been having a cup of tea while we chatted.”
Zeth enters the kitchen after my dad and my whole world turns on its axis. He’s lost the leather jacket; he’s wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, pulling tight enough across his chest that you can make out the taut curve and bulge of defined muscle, and he isn’t scowling. In fact, he seems…relaxed? He seems something anyway. Something I haven’t seen on him before. And just as I expected, the first thing he does is take in all of the ridiculous pictures…and he gives me that private, scandalous smirk. He’s gonna have a thing or two to say about this later, I can tell. “Oh, that’s okay Dr. Romera. I was just replying to work emails. I told Sloane to go on ahead,” he says.