Page 70 of Where Roads Lead

“What?” I said, high-pitched and weak. “No.”

“You don’t have to lie.” Ava stared at me, analyzing every square inch of my face in a way that made me shift uncomfortably. “It’s just, I feel a little jealous of you. You’re free and unrestrained, and you seem to have everything going for you. It makes it hard to be around you. I don’t want to feel that way, but I do. I guess I’m just bitter.”

“You’re jealous of me?” I made a noise that was halfway between a laugh mingled with a gasp. “I’m not free, Ava. I’m lost. And unemployed. And almost completely broke.”

And that was just scratching the surface of everything going wrong in my life.

“Besides, do you think I’m not jealous of you and your beautiful hair and this established life you have? I’d give anything for that.”

She touched her hair with a proud smile. “You think my hair is beautiful.”

“Please,” I deadpanned. “You could practically be the star of a Pantene commercial.”

She laughed, looking a little bit lighter than she had. That was a success in my book.

“Hey, Elsie?” Ava said, staring over at me with meaning in her eyes.

“Yeah?”

“I really don’t like kids.”

I laughed until the sound of the fire alarm blaring startled us both into action.

“Oh my God.” Ava leaped to her feet. “The cookies!”

I rushed after her, following the scent of Ava’s burned hopes for the evening into the kitchen, which was encompassed by a cloud of smoke.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” she groaned, reaching for the oven mitts in frantic haste.

She pulled open the oven door, letting a burst of heat explode outward, and snatched the cookie tray in her mitted hands. We both coughed on the smoke while I dove to open the kitchen window.

I rushed around looking for a broom until I found one in a hall closet. Grabbing it, I rushed back until I was directly below the fire alarm and started jumping up, whacking at it with the broom as if it were some flashy arcade game, rather than the contraption that was about to wake our feral child back up.

“I can’t get it to turn off!” I yelled over the noise.

She pushed a chair over, climbing on top of it, her hands still protected by the polka-dot oven mitts as she reached for the broom. “Here, let me try.”

When she assumed my position, I took the opportunity to run to the kitchen door, hoping to air out the smoke-infested room.

But when I pulled open the door, instead of a gust of fresh night air, I was met with something even chillier.

The disappointed, disgruntled stare of Will Hughes himself.

“Elsie?” He gaped, eyes taking in Ava on the chair with the broom, the cloud of smoke that was still dispersing, and finally the cookies burned to a crisp on the kitchen table. “Ava?”

“Hi, Will,” she said, letting the broom drop to the ground.

“What the actual hell is going on?”

“Oh, you know,” I laughed nervously, “just baking cookies?”

And in my heart, I believed that every scathing look Will had spent his whole life perfecting had been mere practice for this one, specific moment.

Lucky me.

Chapter Nineteen

Will