Read Online Coming Back by Emma South - Free Book Online

made my skin crawl.
    Speaking of Nick, there was no sign of him.  I’d told him I didn’t want him to come, but he must surely have parked just out of sight, maybe near whatever cop had pulled the short straw to watch our house today.  I doubted he would be too far away.
    Other than those sunglasses, I wouldn’t have picked her for somebody who could buy entire racks of designer clothes.  With jeans, a t-shirt, and sensible shoes, she looked like she could have been any small town girl.
    I stepped away from the window while she was still looking for the house number on the letterbox and went to loiter in the hallway.  It was time to get rid of this obstacle.
    For somebody who was so close, it was a long time before she knocked.  I almost went back to the window to see if she’d been hit by a bus or something, but knock she did.
    I opened the door. “ Harper .”
    I tried to put as much venom into it as I could without raising my voice, without losing control.  Harper’s face, already a picture of sadness though still painfully pretty, sank a little further.
    “Hi Christabelle,” she said quietly and then, after a pause, “can I come in?”
    I stepped back, pulling the door with me, and gestured inside in the general direction of the living room.  I pulled my lips into a tight line.  She’d already sidestepped the first thing I was going to set her straight on.  She didn’t have the right to call me Christie.  Not her, not ever.
    Her sunglasses were gone, presumably in her handbag, and she kept me in the corner of her eye when she stepped in and looked around the hallway warily as she kicked off her shoes next to the pile of my sister’s and mother’s.
    Harper clutched her handbag to her side and faced me as I closed the door.  It looked like she was trying to figure out what to say but kept on changing her mind.  I gestured for her to follow me into the living room and pointed at the couch.
    “Take a seat.”
    She did, setting her bag down next to her, and she looked so relieved when I sat down at the other side of the same couch that I almost stood up again.  We stared at each other from the trenches of our respective seats at each end, the no-mans-land between us so much bigger than the single cushion width that could be seen by a casual observer.
    I wondered if she could see the same resemblance I could.  We looked kind of similar except, you know, she was younger, prettier, richer, and living a blessed life.  She looked like a better version of me and I hated her all the more for it.  I wanted to punch her in the face, ruin that perfection, make her hate what she saw in her mirror as much as I hated what I saw in my own.
    “Did you… really kick him in the balls?” Harper asked sheepishly.
    It was the last thing in the world I had expected to be brought up in conversation today, and it caught me completely off guard.  She was talking about the first non-teacher-mandated interaction Nick and I ever had.  There were consequences to putting glue in an eight-year-old girl’s hair.
    I blinked and shook my head as if clearing the cobwebs.  “I… uh… well, yeah.  It’s hard to believe now, but at the time I was actually bigger than him.”
    Harper’s efforts to reconcile that idea with the hulking Marine that Nick had grown into were obvious and endearing.  I scolded myself internally, feeling like my assault on the Hollywood starlet was already on the back foot.
    She surprised me again when, after a couple quivers of her bottom lip, tears started flowing down her cheeks and she looked down at her hands in her lap.  I felt my anger stumbling and I did my best to hold on to it, to wrap it around me like armor.
    Remember , this is the woman who took Nick.  This is the face of everything that’s been taken from you.  Hate it, or walk back into the woods and never come out again.
    My own thoughts sounded like they were coming from somebody else, somebody I wouldn’t have liked very