Chapter 4

I quickly changed my clothes, then carefully picked my way across the bedroom, trying to avoid any rogue pieces of glass embedded in the carpet. I hurried downstairs, grateful Mom still slept. Thank goodness for my room’s location above the kitchen.

Upon reaching the bottom of the stairs, I grabbed a pad of sticky notes and a pen from the entryway desk. I didn’t dare turn on any lights, and my phone was still dead, so I tilted the pad toward the moonlight streaming through the window and scribbled a quick note in case Mom did wake up and find me gone.

“What are you doing?”

I whirled with a squeak to find Jillian standing there, arms folded. She wore a dark tank top and light-gray shorts that almost glowed in the shadows.

“I, um,” I began, not sure how to explain this to my thirteen-year-old sister. I should have known the glass would wake Jillian. Sometimes I wondered if she ever slept, considering she scrolled social media all hours of the night.

“Let me guess,” Jillian said. “You tried to sneak out your window but broke it, so now you’re using the front door.”

“Every word of that was wrong.” I was too dignified to sneak out a window and climb down a tree, and I intended to sneak out the back door, not the front. “Go back to bed.”

“You don’t want me to do that.”

I groaned inwardly. Would she wake Mom? “Jillie . . .”

“If I go back to bed, you’ll trigger the alarm system on the doors and wake Mom up. Then she’ll make me help you clean up all that glass, which, by the way, I’m not doing. But I will disable the alarm if you ask nicely.”

Ask nicely meant her services required the right bribe. Sometimes she scared me with how smart she was. “You do this often, don’t you?”

“Only when I can’t sleep. I go into the yard sometimes and look at the stars.”

My sister looked exhausted enough that I believed her. She did have a history of insomnia. “I’m sorry for waking you. Hunter promised to clean up all the glass and replace the window.”

“He better. Don’t worry, I was still awake. I couldn’t fall asleep with everything . . .” She waved as if gesturing to the entire room.

I didn’t get it. “Everything what?”

“You graduating, going to Europe with Mom for your senior trip. Me having to go live with Grandpa for nine days while you’re gone.” She sighed. “He’s so clueless when it comes to fashion, I don’t know what to say.”

I hid a smile. Grandpa Howie did seem like a lot sometimes. “Just put the phone down and enjoy yourself. We’ll be back before you know it.” Even the thought of my trip tomorrow made my heart pound. A lifetime of dreaming and I would be standing on Paris soil—er, concrete. Cobblestone? The ground, anyway, in less than twenty-four hours. “I’ll call you from Paris every night, okay? ”

Jillian frowned. “Don’t make promises you won’t keep. You’ll be too busy to even think about me.”

“Not possible. I’ll be thinking about you every minute, wishing you were there with us.”

“Then why can’t I just come with you? I promise I won’t get in the way. I want to see Paris too.” Even in the dim light, I could see her lips pulled into a grumpy pout.

“Because it took Mom a year to scrape together the funds for the two of us. Besides, when you graduate, you’ll get your own trip with Mom. Maybe you can start planning it while we’re gone.”

I expected that to work. Distraction usually did with Jillie. But instead, her frown deepened and her voice went quiet. “I hate being left behind.”

In an instant, I saw my sister’s heart, so much like my own. I hated that Dad left us here. I hated that Alexis went with him. I could only imagine how much like betrayal it felt that Mom and I were doing the same thing, if only for a week and a half.

I pulled my sister in for a hug that she didn’t return. “After this trip, I’m not going anywhere. The college is only twenty minutes away and I’ll still be living here, so it’ll be the three of us until the sky falls in. Maybe even after that. You, me, and Mom forever. Okay?”

She grinned a little at the reference to a children’s book we’d both loved. “Whatever,” she said, trying unsuccessfully to hide her grumpy tone. “Just do whatever you’re gonna do and be back before Mom wakes up.”

“So you’ll disable the alarm? Just like that?” I’d expected a solid bargaining session.

“My graduation present to you. You’re welcome.” She shrugged. “Besides, Hunter said he’d give me twenty bucks to help you sneak out.”

My sister hurried down the hall before I could throw something at her.