The next morning, I sat across from Gray at the table while she ate a huge bowl of her favorite cereal and I sort of half-heartedly picked at a piece of toast. I wasn’t hungry. I’d been thinking a lot about what had happened with Raven in the woods yesterday. It wasn’t that it seemed like Ben was mad at her--maybe he was--it was her circumstances that were weighing on my mind. I didn’t understand how anyone could send their daughter off to live with strangers half a nation away. It was troubling and made me appreciate my parents even more than I had before.

We walked back through the woods toward Grandma’s house. Gray seemed to forget what had happened with the flower almost immediately, but it stayed on my mind. It seemed so weird that the bloom had just turned to sand in my sister’s hand. I was pretty sure that flowers weren’t supposed to do that--not normal ones anyway.“Who’s at your house ri

As much as I thought Sam could be a jerk sometimes, he was polite enough to hold the door for all of us while we walked into the diner, which was really nice. The moment I walked in, though, I stopped walking, right in the middle of the entryway, causing Gray to bump into me. It wasn’t that the diner wasn’t almost exactly what I’d been expecting. Th

As I stared at the fifty dollar bill on the table, Grayson made her way over from visiting with the guys who’d stolen her attention. I tried to pull my eyes away from the money, but it wasn’t until after Gray had introduced herself and forced Ben to scoot over, into me, that I realized what was going on. I slid all the way to the wall, barely making enough room for my sister, with Ben pressed up against me.

I wasn’t even all the way inside of the kitchen when Grayson started complaining about Sam to me. “Can you believe that jerk?” she shouted. “Where does he get off trying to tell me who I can and can’t talk to?”She went to the refrigerator and slung the door open so wide, it shook. I gave her a minute to get her drink and close the door.