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“I had no idea you were such a huge fan,” Landon commented, biting back a grin.
“A fan of green eyeshadow and old lady rouge?” she tossed back.
“Of Heartthrob Warfare,” he answered, his expression softening.
“She’s a huge fan, Uncle Landy, like that lady who sewed your head onto a pillow,” Aria blurted.
“She’s seen the pillow?”
“I’ve got the pillow,” Aria said and skipped to one of her suitcases.
“You gave her that thing?”
“She liked it,” he answered with a shrug.
Aria yanked the pillow from her bag and held it up.
Landon reared back. “What did you do to it?”
The child admired her handiwork. “I gave you devil horns and cat whiskers with a marker. Sorry, Uncle Landy, I did it when I was mad about having to live in your house.”
“I love it, Aria,” she gushed, laying it on a bit thick before sealing her lips to stop from laughing her ass off.
But her respite from being called out as Landon’s biggest fan ended when Aria tossed the pillow onto the bed and took her uncle’s hand. She walked him around the pile of her childhood Landon Paige memorabilia collection that, from this day forward, would be known as the heap of complete and total mortification. “Forget the pillow. There are so many pictures of you in Harper’s boxes,” the child continued. “And the ones with girls in them either have their heads scratched out or have Harper’s scary face taped on top.”
Dear universe, a tsunami has never struck landlocked Colorado, but feel free to send one over right this very second to wash away the city of Denver.
She didn’t dare look at Landon. Faced with the evidence strewn about the floor, there was no way to hide the truth.
“Look,” Aria called. “Here’s something that doesn’t have Uncle Landy on it.”
Thank God!
“It’s a notebook with a picture of four girls on the front,” the child added, then held it up. “Is that you, Harper?”
She grinned at the photo and accepted the notebook. Blessedly, she didn’t look like the tween version of Tammy Faye Bakker in this one. “That’s me and my friends, Charlotte, Penny, and Libby when we were in fourth or fifth grade,” she answered, grateful the kid had found something without Landon’s symmetrically perfect face plastered to it. She opened the notebook and cringed as the urge to throw herself out the window returned.
“Can you read what it says on the inside?” Aria asked, staring at the page.
“They’re names of songs I wrote when I was a little girl.”
“What are the titles?”
Her cheeks might as well have been on fire. “There are three songs,” she began, tossing a glance at Landon. “The first is titled ‘Charlotte’s Dad Sucks.’ The next is ‘Penny’s Sisters Can Suck a Dozen Eggs,’ and the last song is called ‘Libby Lamb, Stop Chasing Butterflies and Suck on a Lollipop.’”
Landon and Aria stared at her with their heads cocked to the side.
She flicked her gaze from the pair and studied a doodle she’d drawn of Penny’s older twin sisters looking quite uncomfortable with eggs jammed into their mouths. “I dealt with a lot of negative emotions through song.”
“And sucking,” Landon muttered. The man’s eyes watered as he pressed his lips into a tight line. Now her stupid heartthrob husband was the one who looked ready to explode with laughter.
But Aria wasn’t laughing. She studied the page, then ran her fingertips across a line. “How did you make each line a different color? Did you use a highlighter?”
“That’s exactly what I did. It helped my brain to do it that way,” she answered, taking in the stripes of color. The neon highlighter had faded to a rainbow array of pastels.
“You highlighted the lines in a book, too,” the little girl said, fishing a copy of one of theBaby-Sitters’ Clubbooks from the bottom of the pile.
“I forgot I still had these. My friends and I loved these books.” She opened to a random page and took in another set of faded rainbow lines.
