The Perfect Homecoming (Pine River #3)

Emma imagined all these things a few afternoons a week.

She was acutely aware that it was a weird thing to do. She couldn’t even say why she did it. She wasn’t crazy—she didn’t need a trip to the psych ward like Libby had last summer. But for reasons that Emma had long ago allowed to escape her, these kids, this fantasy, made her feel good. It made her feel normal. Lovable. As if she could be part of something like this.

It would be easier for Emma to understand her compulsion to see these kids if she’d had a difficult childhood, but her childhood had been okay. Even when her mother had tried to reconcile with her absentee father, it had been relatively normal.

Emma was nine or ten when Grant had shown up in California with Libby in tow. Of course Emma had been thrilled that her father had appeared at her house to live, instead of the occasional holiday or quick weekend trip to the beach with her and her mother as had been the norm for the first years of her life. Emma had never really understood where her father went in between those short visits. She’d asked her mother about him, had even imagined that he was an important person, like a soldier, or the president—someone whose job was so critical that he couldn’t come around more often than he did.

But then, like magic, he’d appeared on their doorstep with Libby, a robust figure, his smile as infectious as his laugh. “I’m going to marry your mother,” he’d confided in Emma, and Emma had worshipped him.

Unfortunately, the reconciliation was a fiasco. Her parents never married. They survived only eighteen months of each other, and then it was over. Her father disappeared from her life again, and so did Libby. A few months after that, Emma’s mother met and eventually married Wes.

Wes was a single father. Emma would never forget the first time she met his daughter, Laura. She was only a few months older than Emma and had short auburn hair, sparkling blue eyes, and a wide grin. She was sunny and outgoing—all the things Emma was not. Laura also had a motorized scooter, a huge point in her favor.

They were quickly friends and soon after, sisters. Emma adored Laura. They wore matching socks, braided their hair the same way, and giggled about boys. They attended public school together, attended sleepovers, and were elected cheerleaders to the same squad. They’d even experienced their first kiss on the same beach on the same night.

Emma confided everything in Laura. She believed Laura was just like her, a cosmic twin, the closest thing to her in mind and spirit as could possibly exist. It was a perfect union, a perfectly melded family. Perhaps the only imperfect thing about it was that Emma’s mother loved Laura, too. Loved her so much that, at about the age of thirteen or fourteen, Emma had begun to feel as if her mother loved Laura more than her. Laura could do no wrong. Laura was effervescent and happy and, as her stepfather had explained, “socially adept.”

“Whereas you can come off as sullen and strange,” her mother had matter-of-factly added.

Still, Emma couldn’t complain about her childhood. It was pretty good as those things go, right up to the summer of her seventeenth year. What happened that summer had not tainted her childhood—it had tainted everything going forward and had sent her spinning off in a destructive direction. That summer, she learned what men saw in women, what they really wanted from life: sex.

That wasn’t all Emma had learned that summer. She’d also discovered just how hard and deep a slash of betrayal could penetrate a person. Bone deep. Marrow deep. Emma had been thoroughly slashed by two people she’d believed had truly loved her, social awkwardness and all.

“Ugh,” she groaned, and looked away from the happy tableau of frolicking children for a moment. Why did she do this? Why did she relive the insanity of what had happened ten long years ago? It was over and done. And what the hell was she doing in this park every day? Trying to re-create her childhood? Or did she come to shake the pervasive feeling of melancholy that seemed to envelope her lately? Did she come to pretend that in some universe, families like this really existed? That not every family was a dysfunctional mess as hers had turned out to be?

Trying to figure out how her mind worked and what she was after was overwhelming for Emma. These days, it seemed like thinking in general exhausted her. She wanted only to exist for a time. Not think. Just be, quietly. Without drama, for God’s sake. Without tall, dark-haired men with incredible gray eyes showing up to harass her about more things she didn’t want to think about.

It was her own damn fault, but she still blamed Carl for the fact that her refuge here had been breached.