Page 17 of Paranoid

“Doughnut in the bag,” Rachel said, pointing to the white sack. “Juice in the fridge.”

“Just coffee.”

“You drink coffee?” Dumbfounded, Rachel eyed her daughter. “Since when?”

“I dunno. A while.”

This was news to Rachel.

Harper yawned. “Three more days of it and then a cleanse.”

“A cleanse? Like a diet?” Rachel skewered her daughter with a glare as she found two coffee cups in the cupboard. She eyed Harper’s slim frame and said, “You don’t need to diet,” as she poured from the glass carafe.

“It’s not to lose weight, Mom.”

Was there just the hint of a know-it-all sneer in her daughter’s voice?

Great.

“It’s healthy.” Harper reached across the counter and into the cupboard for the sugar bowl, found a teaspoon in the drawer, then shoveled three spoonfuls into her cup. In the refrigerator she found a carton of hazelnut creamer, then added a thick stream into her cup and searched the refrigerator again. “Don’t we have any syrup? Oh, wait, here it is.” She extracted a brown plastic bottle and squirted two thick blobs of chocolate into her concoction.

Rachel’s stomach turned over. “So . . . what’s in this cleanse?”

“Lots of good stuff.” Harper looked around the kitchen countertop, found her phone on the counter, then added, “Like, y’know, lots of juices . . . Tea maybe, fresh stuff, no sugar . . . y’know to detox your body.”

Rachel frowned at her daughter’s cup, now filled with enough sugar to cause a diabetic coma. “Now you’ve got toxins?”

Harper made a sound of disgust. As if her mother were the most stupid woman in the world. “Everybody does,” she said and took a sip of her coffee, scowled, and found the sugar bowl again. Another heaping teaspoonful went into her cup.

“You could always take up sports again.” Harper had been a track star just a year earlier, one of the fastest runners at Edgewater High, but as her interest in boys had increased, her dedication to the team had waned and this year she hadn’t bothered with track. No amount of talking had convinced her otherwise.

Rachel said, “If you don’t want the doughnut, we’ve got granola and yogurt or eggs or just the whites or fruit or multigrain bread for toast.”

Harper scowled, giving Rachel a look that said more clearly than words: You just don’t get it, Mom.

Probably not.

“I think since I’m starting Monday this would be okay.” She opened the bag with Reno looking on, hoping that Harper would drop a crumb or two.

“Your brother up?”

“Dunno.” Harper shrugged.

“Dylan!” Rachel glanced at the clock, saw that they were going to be late. Carrying her own cup, she made her way down the hall and rapped on the door. Ignoring all the dire warnings glued to the panels, she pushed the door open. “Hey, bud,” she called, annoyed when she saw him in the same position he’d been in an hour earlier. He was breathing steadily, his lips parted, his thick eyelashes sweeping his cheek. His head was propped on the wound-up corner of his duvet, his pillow having slid to the floor to settle onto a paper plate that showed the leftover crust of a take-out pizza. “Time to get up.”

He moved, pulling the covers over his head.

“School.”

A groan as he threw back the coverlet and squinted open one eye. For a second he looked so much like his father, Rachel blinked. He wasn’t Cade’s doppelganger by any means, but the Ryder genes were evident in her son. Cade and his brothers had been blessed with strong jaws; heads of thick, dark hair; sharp features; and intense hazel eyes that seemed to vary in color with the light. Dylan was no exception.

If only he’d been blessed with some of his father’s work ethic.

“I think I’ll pass,” Dylan said.

“On school? Nope.” Leaning a shoulder against the doorjamb, she took a swallow from her cup. “Get up, bud.”

“It’s almost the end of the year.”