Page 43 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

“Ask Lonnie Pakootas,” he said as he swung open the door and pointed us out through it. I nearly stumbled on the frame, saved only by Zach’s ready and waiting hands.

“Lonnie?” I echoed. All of a sudden, that passage about L liking sappy, dramatic books was starting to make sense. Like Pepper, she’donce been employed by the local library—a thing that I, in my fervor to get to the bottom of this whole mystery, seemed to have forgotten. “You mean Pepper’s grandmother?”

“If anyone would know where to find that book, it’s her,” Jasper said by way of answer. His eyes took on a dreamy, faraway look, and I realized he was no longer standing with us. Not in any way that counted. “Once upon a time, Catherine and Lonnie were best friends in the whole world.”

15

CHLOE

Lonnie lived in one of the most beautiful houses in Colville. It wasn’t very big—few houses around here were—and it didn’t have many modern upgrades—a serious drawback in the heat of the summer—but the home sat on a huge patch of acreage near the top of Crystal Falls. On cold, clear nights, you could hear the cascading water from the back porch.

To be fair, you could also hear the teenagers who went there to party and drink when boredom offered no alternatives, but you couldn’t have everything in this world.

“Chloe!” Lonnie came out to greet me the moment my station wagon rambled up the drive. She looked well, all things considered, if a little thinner than the last time I’d seen her. My visits to Pepper’s grandmother didn’t happen as frequently as I would have liked, so I was never sure what to expect. Her cancer wasn’t an aggressive kind, and she’d had several successful surgeries on her neck, but she was under no illusions about how precious her last remaining years were. “Please tell me you brought your brothers and sister with you. I have a Kentucky butter cake inside that needs to be eaten. Theo’s the only one I trust to do the job right.”

“Theo would eat the quills off a porcupine’s back if you gave him thechance,” Pepper said. She slid out of the passenger seat and joined me as I made my way up the steps.

“No, he wouldn’t,” I countered. “He’d turn them into darts or throwing stars and terrorize the whole neighborhood.”

As soon as I reached the top step, I found myself engulfed in a hug so strong that I found it hard to imagine Lonnie not standing on the same porch offering the same comfort for the next three hundred years.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t help you out with Noodle’s accident,” she said. “That poor kid. What was he doing, running through the forest without looking where he was going?”

I was glad she hadn’t yet let me go. The longer I went without answers about what was going on with Noodle, the worse I felt. Jasper’s mystery was turning out to be the much easier one to solve.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He won’t talk about what happened. All he’ll say is that he’s sorry for being a bother.”

“That’s a Sampson for you.” She clucked her tongue and started ushering me inside the house. “Always running full speed at the wall and then apologizing when they don’t do anything but break their own backs in the process.”

“I don’t run full speed,” I protested. “In fact, I don’t run at all. I used to get last place in the mile in gym all the time. Ask Pepper.”

“Since I know very well that my grandma is talking in metaphors, I’ll do no such thing,” Pepper said. She took one look at the tidy, welcoming front room—and one deep inhalation of the sweet scent of baked goods—and relaxed. Today was obviously one of Lonnie’s good days.

“What wall have I ever apologized to?” I demanded.

“The wall of life,” Pepper was quick to respond.

“The wall of honest feelings,” Lonnie added.

Pepper went again. “The wall of ambition.”

So did Lonnie. “The wall of other people’s mistakes.”

Pepper held up her hand for a high five. “Oooh, good one, Grandma.”

Lonnie chuckled as she playfully swatted her granddaughter’s hand. She let her palm linger there and laced their fingers. An ache filled my throat at the sight of such easy, nonchalant warmth between the two women. I’d always been intensely jealous of the bond they shared, and of the bond the whole Pakootas family seemed to have with one another. Although I had plenty of siblings to go around, Pepper was an only child—not that there was anythingonlyabout it. She had heaps of relatives. Aunts, uncles, cousins, people who weren’t related to her by blood but who were as tightly bound as if they’d all shared a womb… Pepper couldn’t walk anywhere in town without being accosted by someone who claimed kinship with her.

That kind of network—of people who loved her, of people who cared—was something I’d never known. It was as if she’d been born with a safety net stretched tight underneath her. She could run off a hundred different cliffs in the woods, but no matter how hard she fell, she’d never touch the ground.

I, on the other hand, had never known my father, and any grandparents I might have had were lost by my mom’s inability to maintain a healthy relationship for longer than a few years at a time. From the moment of my birth, my mom had been my only safety net—a wispy, unreliable thing with more holes than support.

Somewhere in there was another metaphor about how one person couldn’t be a safety net alone, how they’d eventually get spread so thin that they were reduced to a bundle of loosely tied threads, but I wasn’t about to examine it too closely. Lonnie and Pepper could discuss the details after I was gone. For now, I was going to keep stretching, give my brothers and sistersomethingto hold them aloft, however flimsy I might be.

“Thank you for all those old Harlequins, by the way,” Lonnie said as she let go of Pepper’s hand. We followed her to the kitchen, where the promised cake glistened in a buttery ring in the center of the table.She cut us both generous slices and placed them in front of us. “I’m in the middle of a really good one where the heroine is pregnant and has amnesia, and she has to be saved by a retired Navy SEAL who does repo work. It’s calledPregnesia.”

Laughing, I held up a hand. “You can stop making things up. I’m not falling for that one. There’s no way that’s a real book.”

“It is! I’m only about halfway through, but I’ll finish it tonight. I can’t put it down.”