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"Yes." I pulled a chair up alongside my own at the desk. "Sit here."

"I hate this stuff," he complained as he entered. He tried to narrow his vision just to me and the desk, but his eyes flitted from one side of the room to the other, the look on his face sad and as painful as a raw wound that refused to heal. He caught me scrutinizing him. "I don't come in here often," he confessed. "Anymore."

"I understand," I said.

Skepticism clouded his face and gave birth to a small frown. Did he think that because I had no brother or sister, I couldn't appreciate what it was like to lose someone I loved?

"It was really hard for me to look at things in our trailer that reminded me of my father after his terrible accident," I explained. Cary's skepticism faded as I went on. "I was closer to him that I am to my mother. And when he died, I thought the world had come to an end. It still doesn't seem the same. Nothing does."

He nodded, his eyes softening. "I wish I could have gotten to know him."

"I wish you had too. I wish this family wasn't so vindictive."

He tilted his head.

"Vin-what?"

"Cruel," I continued. "When you love someone, you don't hate them to death for mistakes they make. You try to understand them, help them, and if that doesn't work, you feel sorry for them. But you don't disown them forever and pretend they never lived."

He stared at me a moment and then he smiled and shook his head gently. "That's something Laura would say. She always looked for the good in everyone. The girls at school mocked her, ostracized her, were jealous of her, but she was always nice to them. We had lots of arguments about it," he said. "It was practically the only thing we argued about. We agreed about most everything else."

"Even Robert Royce?" I asked quickly. When he looked at me this time, there were shadows in the emerald depths of his eyes.

"That was something entirely different. She was blinded by--"

"By what?" I asked, intrigued.

"Blinded by his lies, his phony charm, his handsome face," he replied bitterly.

"How did you know he

was a phony?" I asked. His letter to Laura seemed sincere.

"I just knew," he insisted. "She always listened to me. We were close and not just because we were twins. We really did like the same things and feel the same things. We didn't have to speak to each other lots of times either. We just looked at each other and understood. She would smile at me or I would smile at her and that was enough.

"But after Robert . . ." His gaze drifted, his eyes growing smaller--darker--when he looked at Laura's picture on the dresser.

"What happened after Robert came into her life?" He turned to me, his watery eyes hard. "She changed. I tried to help her see, but she wouldn't listen."

"Maybe what she saw she liked," I offered softly.

He grimaced. "Why is it that girls who are normally smarter than boys are so dumb when it comes to boys?" he asked me.

I stared at him. He blinked his eyelids rapidly. He had long, perfect eyelashes, which most girls I knew would die to have.

"That's a matter of--"

"What?" he interrupted.

"I was going to say opinion, but it's really more a matter of the heart."

He blew air through the side of his mouth. "Matters of the heart," he said disdainfully. "An excuse for stupidity."

"Cary Logan, are you going to sit there and tell me you don't believe in love? You don't believe two people can fall in love?"

"I didn't say that exactly," he retreated. "But it's silly to think you can fall in and out of love the way you. . you catch a cold."

"From what I understand, that doesn't sound like a good description of Laura. She didn't have lots of boyfriends, did she?"