Page 99 of The Lost and Found Girl

“Did you just get in from England?”

“Yesterday.”

“You must be dead on your feet. Put down your suitcase and go get some sleep.” Then the toast popped up and her mom put it on a plate, slathered it in butter and set it on the table. In direct opposition to her words, she clearly thought Ruby needed food before sleep.

She took a juice cup down from the cabinet, and Ruby interrupted that. “I’ll take some coffee. I can’t go to sleep. I need to stay up. Otherwise I’m never going to get back on the right time zone.”

“What’s the rush?”

“I start at the historical society in a few days,” Ruby said.

“In a few days.”

“It doesn’t make any sense to let the grass grow under my feet. To sleep when I could just as easily power through and acclimate.”

“You sound like your father.”

“Who sounds like me?” Jed McKee walked into the room then, putting a hat over his bald head. His face had the set look of a man who smiled sparingly, but when he saw Ruby, the change was immediate. “Well, as I live and breathe.”

“Good to see you, Dad,” she said.

She found herself swept nearly off her feet as she was pulled in for a big hug, a decisive kiss dropped on her cheek. “Good to see you, kiddo. And you’re back with us. For keeps now.”

“Yeah,” she said. She waited for a sense of claustrophobia or failure or something to settle over her. But it didn’t.

“So, are we moving you into your old bedroom?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t have a place yet, but I’m going to find one.”

“I’m sure that there will be a lot of people who can find space for you,” her mom said.

“I don’t want the Ruby discount.”

It was a joke in her family. Free coffee, free candy and free ice cream had been a hallmark of Ruby’s growing up years. Another thing that she’d had to get used to when she’d gone away to the real world. People did not shower her with free items or treat her like she was a special, magical creature in any way.

And no, that wasn’t the reason she’d come back home.

“Does that mean I can have it?” her dad asked.

“By all means,” Ruby said.

“You know, we finished renovating the shed for Dahlia. There are two bedrooms in there now. Not sure it’s hugely different than living in the house here, but you don’t have your parents breathing down your neck.”

The shed was misnamed, because of course nothing under her father’s watch was anything half so shabby as a shed. Ruby preferred to call it a cottage, which was infinitely more charming and romantic. It had started its life as a shed and become a very cute garden cottage.

“Dee is living in the cottage?” Ruby asked.

She hadn’t seen her sister in the five months since graduation, but she would have thought she’d have mentioned that.

“She’s working her way up to a full-time position at theGazette, plus doing freelance writing, so she quit the job at the coffee shop.”

She’d have thought she’d mentionthattoo.

“Oh,” Ruby said. “Well, good for her.”

One point for the cottage was that it was on the opposite end of the property to the farmhouse, which would have her in proximity to her parents, but distant proximity. And she and Dahlia had shared a room as kids, so a two-room cottage would be spacious compared to that. It butted up against the neighboring pear orchard, and John Brewer was an utter recluse that she would never have to worry about encountering.

“If you’d like the other bedroom in there, Rubes, it’s all yours.”