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“Nice to see you too,” I say quietly, too stunned to say anything else.
Daisy lets out a snarl and storms past me back toward Dad’s room. Aunt Noreen gives me an apologetic look and follows her daughter.
Kerry remains behind. Her shock’s worn off, replaced with a bemused smile.
“Been a while,” she says with a shrug. “A lot’s changed. Anyway, welcome home, I guess.” She gives a laugh and shakes her head and walks off, disappearing into one of the back halls.
“If that’s how it’s going to be, maybe this week’s going to be harder than I thought,” War says.
And I think he has no idea how hard this is going to get.
Chapter11
War
“This is the famous Leader Ranch?” I squint out at a rolling expanse of weeds, bramble bushes, and scrubby trees. “It looks … nice.”
“Save it,” Melody snaps and strides forward, following some unseen path through the tall grass. I keep up, trying not to smile. “It wasn’t always like this.”
“You mean when your dad was healthy?”
“And when I lived here.” She’s staring off into the distance, remembering something. Her childhood spent blissfully romping through the wilderness with nothing but cattle and horses for company?
“What happened to it?”
She goes quiet and shakes her head.
The hike takes us across a field and toward a forest at the edge of the property. The path proper appears and Melody plunges down it, stepping over roots like she was born knowing where they were. At least her pace slows as she looks at the woods, moving slowly now, thoughtfully. I stay to her left and slightly behind, trying to see this place the way she’s seeing it, but failing.
From my vantage, this is just a bunch of half-dead trees and bushes and vines and a whole bunch of ticks just waiting to descend on my delicious blood-filled body.
“Looks smaller,” she says and pauses beside an old log. “When I was a girl, I used to dig under this thing. I’d try to find the grossest beetles and worms and stuff so I could bring them back to throw them at my cousins.”
“Sounds fun,” I say, thinking that sounds like the worst game imaginable. If I were her cousin, I’d shove her face in mud for slinging insects at me like that.
“It was more about revenge than fun.” She tilts her head, side to side. “My cousins weren’t nice.”
“Why not?”
“I was the heir.” She steps over the log and keeps walking.
“Which means what?”
“Dad’s favorite. The inevitable head of the family.”
“You’d think that would make the cousins be nice.”
“It didn’t.” She glances at me. “They wanted to take my place. It’s hard to get a kid to understand tact.”
“They bullied you?” I ask but I already know the answer based on the way Daisy treated her back at the house.
“That’s putting it mildly.” She stretches and breathes deep. “I came out here a lot when I was younger. My cousins were always indoors people, despite growing up around here and working the ranch like everyone else. They never followed me into the woods and I made it into my own little paradise.”
“Looks more like hell than heaven,” I mutter, and she shoots me a glare.
“I thought this place was enormous, like I could never explore the whole forest all by myself. But now it’s like—I don’t know, it feels smaller.”
“A lot looks smaller years after the fact.” I think back to my old life—to the houses, the cars. I can’t compare then to now because all that’s gone, but I can picture what Melody’s feeling. It would be strange to march back into our old mansion at this point, years and years after it was sold and leveled so the land could be developed into a strip mall.
