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“So, are we moving you into your old bedroom?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t have a place yet, but I’m going to find one.”
“I’m sure that there will be a lot of people who can find space for you,” her mom said.
“I don’t want the Ruby discount.”
It was a joke in her family. Free coffee, free candy and free ice cream had been a hallmark of Ruby’s growing up years. Another thing that she’d had to get used to when she’d gone away to the real world. People did not shower her with free items or treat her like she was a special, magical creature in any way.
And no, that wasn’t the reason she’d come back home.
“Does that mean I can have it?” her dad asked.
“By all means,” Ruby said.
“You know, we finished renovating the shed for Dahlia. There are two bedrooms in there now. Not sure it’s hugely different than living in the house here, but you don’t have your parents breathing down your neck.”
The shed was misnamed, because of course nothing under her father’s watch was anything half so shabby as a shed. Ruby preferred to call it a cottage, which was infinitely more charming and romantic. It had started its life as a shed and become a very cute garden cottage.
“Dee is living in the cottage?” Ruby asked.
She hadn’t seen her sister in the five months since graduation, but she would have thought she’d have mentioned that.
“She’s working her way up to a full-time position at theGazette, plus doing freelance writing, so she quit the job at the coffee shop.”
She’d have thought she’d mentionthattoo.
“Oh,” Ruby said. “Well, good for her.”
One point for the cottage was that it was on the opposite end of the property to the farmhouse, which would have her in proximity to her parents, but distant proximity. And she and Dahlia had shared a room as kids, so a two-room cottage would be spacious compared to that. It butted up against the neighboring pear orchard, and John Brewer was an utter recluse that she would never have to worry about encountering.
“If you’d like the other bedroom in there, Rubes, it’s all yours.”
“I should...probably talk to Dahlia about it?”
“She doesn’t pay rent on it,” her dad said. “My money renovated it.”
It was a pragmatic take, for certain, but Ruby would be the one who had to live with a sister filled with resentment if she didn’t want her there, not her dad.
“I’ll talk to Dee,” she said.
“You can stay in the house, for now, though, right?” her mom asked hopefully.
“Yes, of course,” Ruby said.
In fact, she really wanted to do that. Because honestly, she was too exhausted to do any sort of taking care of herself. And that was the greatest and best thing about being back home. Her mother’s cooking. And hopefully soon some of her mother’s coffee.
She had coffee with both of her parents before her father went out to start work, and then her mother ushered her upstairs to her bedroom. Initially, she’d shared a room with Dahlia, but once Marianne and Lydia had moved out, she and Dahlia’d had their own rooms, and they were still much the same as they’d been when she and her sister had moved out.
Ruby’s room was sweet and girly with a floral, yellow bedspread and a gold daybed. She had a tatted rug that covered the newly refinished wood floor. Her father, of course, refinished the floors every time they started to look worn.
Her mother took her suitcase out of her hand and swept it over to the bed, popping it open.
Ruby blinked, giving belated thanks that she had not packed too many intimate things in that suitcase. She had been traveling with a carry-on, and she hadn’t wanted airport security going through her personal items right in front of her.
The condoms she’d bought in Europe had stayed in Europe. And good thing too, since her mother was now pulling things out of the suitcase and beginning to put them away.
“Mom,” Ruby said, “you don’t have to do that.”
