Page 48 of No More Secrets
“Thanks for calling, sweetie. Talk soon.”
Summer hung up and stuffed the phone into her back pocket.
“Now you’re the one hiding.” The voice behind her, so familiar in such a short time, sent a warm tingle up her spine.
Summer turned to Carter, his face shadowed in the waning evening light.
“Hi,” she said quietly.
“Did you get anything to eat?” he asked.
“I’m not really hungry,” Summer admitted.
Carter nodded, studying her. “Your parents?”
“Eavesdrop much?”
“I live in Blue Moon. They teach a class on it in junior high.”
“It was my mom. I was just checking in with her.”
“And that made you sad?”
She could have had the phone call with her mom in New York and not a single person she came in contact with afterwards would have noticed it made her sad.
“My relationship with them is ... strained.” She chose her words carefully.
“Let’s take a walk.” Carter slung his arm over her shoulders and led her further away from the house.
She let him. For just a few minutes she wanted to pretend to have someone to lean on. Someone she could trust. She wondered if Carter felt that way about all of Blue Moon.
“You’re all very lucky to have each other. I never knew it could be like this. Back home, we don’t trust anyone. Not our neighbors, not our co-workers, and certainly not strangers on the street. Sometimes not even family. We kind of operate like everyone else could be out to get us.”
“It’s not healthy, seeing everyone as a potential threat,” he ventured.
Summer nodded. “You know, I’ve never met my next door neighbor. And the only conversation I’ve had with the lady across the hall is when she accused me of stealing her cat.”
“Did you?”
Summer smiled. “No. Her ex-husband did. But look what you have. A whole town turned out today to help a man who didn’t even ask for it. And now it’s a party with music, and food, and a campfire.” She gestured toward a clump of Mooners who were dancing and swaying and giggling under a cloud of blue smoke.
Carter sniffed the air. “Honey, that’s not a campfire.”
“Oh.”
“What about your family? Do you have siblings?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Only child.”
“What are your parents like?”
“They’re RV-ing in Alaska right now.”
“That’s what they’redoing. That’s not what they’relike.”
Summer weighed her words. “They’re retired. My mom was a social worker and my dad was a journalist turned journalism professor. We used to be really close, my dad and I. He’d read the Sunday paper to me like it was a bedtime story. He was old-school journalism, you know? Independent, unbiased, advertisers and politics be damned.”
“What happened?” Carter kept their pace slow and even as they followed the edge of the field.
