Then, twenty minutes before we needed to leave, a loud knock echoed from the front door.
Mason poked his head out of his room. “Who’s that? We’re not expecting anybody.”
“No idea,” I said. “Probably a delivery. Let’s go, we can’t be late.”
All three of us came down the stairs together, laughing about something, Micah still fighting with his cuff link.
I opened the door.
And I froze.
There, on my porch, in the late afternoon light, stood Tara.
Seventeen years older. And it showed — not just in the lines on her face, but in something harder underneath them. The glamour I’d heard about was gone. Her clothes were nice but a season or two behind. There was a tiredness in her that no amount of money had apparently been able to hold off, and a watchfulness in her eyes that I didn’t like at all.
She looked at the two tall young men standing behind me — her sons, whom she had last seen as swaddled newborns — and she gave us a cold, careful little smile.
