A Walk in the Sun

by Michelle Zink

  “I’ll miss you,” he said into the top of her head.

  She looked up at him. “I’ll miss you, too. But I’ll be back, and you can always shoot me an email if you want to meet up on the road.”

  His gaze scanned the fields, wet with rain, fog laying low in patches. “I don’t think so. This is where I belong.”

  “You know what’s really amazing?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “It’s never too late to change your mind. And if you don’t, I’ll still be here if you need me.”

  He smiled. “I’m counting on it.” He opened the door of the truck. “Better get a move on. Traffic’s going to be a nightmare.”

  She got into the truck and looked back at him. “I love you, Will.”

  He smiled. “I love you, too.”

  She turned the key in the ignition and put the car in gear. She had almost reached the end of the driveway when she caught sight of Buttercup frolicking in the rain with a couple of the other calves. But that wasn’t what got her attention. It was the tag missing from Buttercup’s ear.

  Maybe Buttercup would be waiting when she got back, too.

  She took her foot off the brake and continued to the end of the driveway. She only dared one glance in the rearview mirror. She saw it all. Will, standing in the rain with his hands in his pockets. The farm. Her father. Maybe even the shimmer of her mother on the porch. But they lived in her, too. She would carry them with her.

  And she would live. She would live.

  Fifty-Seven

  Two and a half hours later, she was creeping forward in bumper-to-bumper traffic, still five miles from the airport. The rain that had eluded them all summer now seemed like a waterfall overhead. The taillights in front of her were nothing but red smudges through the torrent, and she leaned forward in the seat, her gaze moving between the cars and the time on her phone.

  The plane Bodhi had booked them on was due to leave in a couple of hours. She thought she’d heard somewhere that you had to check in at least an hour in advance. What if she got there too late?

  She couldn’t think about that. It was too awful to imagine.

  She would get there. She had to.

  Fifty-Eight

  “We will now begin boarding for flight 9672 to Edinburgh. You may begin preboarding if you have small children or require special assistance.”

  Bodhi listened to the announcement with a mixture of relief and dread. He’d spent the last five hours in the airport, replaying every moment between him and Rose, starting with the first time he’d seen her. It seemed like a lifetime ago, but also somehow close enough to touch. Like it might be within his power to step into another dimension, one where he hadn’t made such a mess of things, where he’d told Rose the truth from the beginning. If he could, she might be here with him right now, and it suddenly felt like everything was out of balance, like the earth itself was wobbling on its axis.

  He dared a glance at the long tile walkway, then chided himself for doing it. Stupid.

  “Attention passengers for flight 9672 from New York to Edinburgh; we will now begin boarding Groups A through C.”

  He stood and picked up his pack.

  Fifty-Nine

  Rose parked the truck and put the keys in the glove box. Then she dragged Marty’s pack—her pack now—out of the backseat. Getting it on wasn’t easy, but the plane left in a little over an hour. She would have to run to make it, and she couldn’t run dragging the pack behind her.

  Heaving it onto her shoulders, she snapped the strap at her waist and took off for the terminal as fast as the giant backpack would allow.

  A TSA employee pointed her to customs, and by the time she got into line at security, her heart was pounding against the inside of her chest, and not just because she’d been running. Bodhi was here. In this airport. If she could just get through security in time, she would never make the mistake of walking away from him again.

  She bounced up and down a little, like that would somehow get her there faster, as she wound her way closer to the agent checking IDs and boarding passes. When she finally reached the head of the line, she thrust her paperwork at a bored-looking guy in his twenties with thin shoulders and a military haircut.

  He looked up at her. “This plane is already boarding.”

  “I figured,” she said, looking around him at the line in front of the x-ray machines.

  He blinked at her. “We’re not supposed to let you through if it’s boarding.”

  “I understand,” she said, “but this is an emergency.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “An emergency?”

  “Well, not like a medical emergency or anything, but a . . . a life emergency?” He didn’t say anything, so she kept going. “Please . . . if you don’t let me through, the love of my life is going to get on a plane without me, and he’s going to think I don’t want to go with him. But I do. I really, really do. And if I don’t, if I get stuck here and he leaves, everything will stay the same. I won’t get to see if my mother is still with me in Paris or Hungary, and I’ll never know if the life I have is the one I chose or just the one I settled for.”

  She was breathing fast when she was through. She wondered if the man would make her turn around, or worse, have her taken into custody for a psych evaluation. Instead he sighed, and she thought she saw something like understanding in his eyes.

  He circled the gate number on her boarding pass. “Better hurry. We don’t want everything to stay the same, now do we?”

  She grinned. “No, sir. Thank you!”

  She rushed forward, took off her shoes, and threw the pack on the belt. Less than two minutes later, she was running down the carpeted hall to the gate on her boarding pass.

  She raced past passengers with suitcases and a few with backpacks like hers, past Starbucks and Waterstones, past security guards and flight attendants. People stopped to stare, some of them smiling, some of them annoyed when she accidentally jostled them.

  Then the gate was there, ominously empty, up ahead. She didn’t stop running until she reached it, but by then, an airline employee in a blue suit was closing the door to the ramp that led to the plane.

  “Wait!” She stopped, panting. “Wait. That’s my . . . that’s my plane.”

  “Sorry. The captain has already secured the cabin door.”

  Panic spread like a wildfire inside her. Bodhi was on that plane, and he was leaving without her, without even knowing how much she loved him. “Please . . . I have to get on that plane.”

  “It’s against FAA regulations,” he said, locking the door. “We can’t open it now.”

  She stepped backward, dropping her pack on one of the chairs. She was too late. It was over, and she almost doubled over with the unfairness of it. She had finally chosen to live, and the person who had made her want to do it was gone.

  “Rose?”

  The voice came from far away, familiar but impossible. Still she turned toward it, and he was there, right in front of her. He pulled his backpack off his shoulder and let it drop to the ground.

  “Bodhi . . .” She looked back at the locked door, the plane visible through the window, pulling away from the gate. “Your plane . . .”

  He stepped toward her. “Our plane. It was supposed to be our plane.”

  “But why aren’t you on it?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Decided a new beginning was more dependent on company than location.” He sighed. “I just want to be with you, Rose. I don’t care where we are.”

  “Me too.” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I . . . You were right. I was scared, and I used you as an excuse instead of admitting it.”

  “And now?”

  She saw the caution in his eyes, a scar from all the times he’d been hurt and let down before. She took a step closer to him. “The truth?”

  “Always.”

  “I’m still scared.” She laughed a little. “Terrified actually.”

  “Would it help if I said I was scared, to
o?” he asked, sliding his arms around her shoulders.

  “A little,” she admitted.

  “I’m scared, too,” he said. “But nothing could ever scare me as much as living without you.”

  She nodded. “So we’re in it together then.”

  “I think so.”

  “What about our plane?”

  He bent his head until their lips were only inches apart. “We’ll catch the next one.”

  She smiled, and when she closed her eyes she could see them all, everyone who was scared and sad and lost but living anyway. She saw Marty on the back of a motorcycle, clutching Tseng’s waist, weaving through a market full of exotic fruit and strange languages. She saw Maggie Ryland, missing her dead husband but cooking for neighbors and daring to open her heart to people like Rose and Bodhi and Rose’s father. She saw her dad, too, starting again, riding Mason as the sun came up, orange and pink and gold.

  They were all scared sometimes, but they were brave. They were living.

  Bodhi slipped his arms around her waist and pulled her to him. Then his mouth was on hers, and she knew that it would be okay. She and Bodhi would be brave, too. They would live.

  And they would do it together.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks again go to Steven Malk for continuing to have informed my career in the best way possible. I feel so lucky to be his client, and just as lucky to have on my side the passion and wisdom of everyone at Writers House. It’s true what they say: no agent is better than a bad agent. But let me tell you; a great agent is worth his weight in gold, and I am lucky enough to have worked with one for the past eight years.

  Thank you to Jennifer Klonsky, for making this process so collaborative, for contributing your special brand of wit and wisdom, and most of all for being willing to invest in me and my work. Getting to be one of your authors is a high point in my career. I hope we get to do lots more books together!

  Thanks also to HarperCollins Publishers and everyone at HarperTeen who has given my work a home. This is especially true for publicist Stephanie Hoover, who goes above and beyond to get the word out, and associate editor Catherine Wallace, who sees to a million and one important things behind the scenes. Thanks also to Alison Klapthor, Alison Donalty, and Sarah Kaufman for keeping it fresh with this lovely cover even when it meant going back to the drawing board, and to copy editor Beth Potter for seeing to the little things I’m sometimes too distracted to see.

  Thank you to Allison and Rich Blazeski, who so generously shared their farm and memories of their beautiful son, Alex. It is extraordinary to open your hearts to those around you when suffering such a terrible loss. Allison and Rich have done this in spades, both with me personally and with our community. Because of them, Alex lives on in our hearts, and I hope in some small way I’ve managed to capture his unique love for farming and the very best parts of small-town life. Alex and the whole Blazeski family are certainly one of them. Any technical errors are my own.

  Thank you to dear friends M. J. Rose, Jenny Draeger, Anne Rought, Tonya Hurley, Jenny Milchman, and everyone who makes the writing community warm, welcoming, and inspiring. Thanks also to those of you who are such loyal readers and staunch supporters online. You have all seen me through a dark day somewhere along the way.

  To my mother, Claudia Baker, and my father, Michael St. James: finally . . . FINALLY I wouldn’t want to be anyone but me. Thank you.

  And to Kenneth, Rebekah, Andrew, and Caroline, for showing me how to be brave, and most of all, how to live. You have my thanks, and my heart.

  Excerpt from Lies I Told

  Read on for a peek at Michelle Zink’s Lies I Told

  Prologue

  Looking back, I should have known Playa Hermosa was the beginning of the end. We’d had a good run, and if things were sometimes tense between Mom, Dad, and Parker, it was nothing a new job couldn’t fix. Just when they’d be at each other’s throats, we’d move on to another town.

  And there was nothing like a new town to remind us which team we were on.

  But Playa Hermosa was different. It was like another world. One where the old rules didn’t apply. Like the exotic birds on the peninsula, we were suddenly all on our own.

  Except it didn’t feel like that right away. In the beginning, it was business as usual. Plot the con, get into character, work our way in, stick together.

  I don’t know if it was my relationship with Logan that tipped everything over the edge or if the signs had been there long before. Either way, I tell myself it was for the best. The universe seems to have its own mysterious plan. I guess we’re just along for the ride. I can live with that. The harder part, the impossible part, is living with what I did to Logan and his family.

  We knew what we were doing. Knew the risks. But Logan and his family were good. Maybe the first really good people I’d ever met. They loved one another, sacrificed for one another. Not because they didn’t have anyone else, but because that’s what love is.

  What happened to them is my fault. And I’m still trying to figure out how to live with that.

  Then there’s Parker. Deep down, I know the choice was his. But I can’t help wondering if he stuck around because of me. If he hadn’t, everything would be different, and he’d probably be drinking beer in Barcelona or coffee in Paris or something.

  I can’t think about the other stuff. Thinking about it forces me back to the question: Why didn’t I see it? Had the end of our family been one sudden, impulsive decision setting into motion a string of events that changed everything? Or had it all been a long time coming? I think that would be worse, because if it was true, it meant that I was hopelessly, unforgivably naive.

  And there’s no crime as unforgivable as naivety when you’re on the grift.

  One

  I swam my way up from sleep, trying to remember where I was against a mechanical roar outside the window. The room didn’t help. Filled with the standard furniture and a few unpacked boxes, it could have been any bedroom in any house in any city in America.

  I ran down the list of possibilities: Chicago, New York, Maryland, and then Phoenix, because that was where we’d worked last. But it only took a few seconds to realize that none of them were right. We’d arrived the day before in Playa Hermosa, a peninsula that jutted out over the Pacific Ocean somewhere between Los Angeles and San Diego.

  It was like a different world, the slickness of Los Angeles falling away as we entered an almost tropical paradise, shady with low-hanging trees and dominated by Spanish architecture. I caught glimpses of the Pacific, a sheet of shimmering blue silk in the distance, as my dad navigated the Audi up the winding roads and my mom pointed things out along the way. Parker sat silently beside me in the backseat, brooding and sullen like he always was when we started a new job. We’d passed fields, overgrown with dry brush, that led to turnouts where people could stop and take pictures. We didn’t take any, because that was one of the most important rules: leave no proof.

  And there were more rules where that one came from, rules that allowed us to run cons in affluent communities all over the country, worming our way into the lives of wealthy neighbors and trust-fund babies with more money than sense. Rules that allowed us to make off with tens of thousands of dollars, staying in place just long enough after every theft to insure that we weren’t under the cloud of suspicion. That was one of the worst parts: staying put, pretending to be as shocked and innocent as everyone else.

  Only after the dust settled would we move on, citing a job transfer or start-up opportunity for my dad and changing our identification through one of his underground sources. If anyone ever suspected us of committing a crime, we were too long gone to know about it.

  A portion of each take was split between us, the rest of it used to set up the next con. From the looks of things, it hadn’t been cheap this time around.

  The roar of the leaf blower outside grew louder as it moved under the window, and I put my pillow over my head, trying to block out the noise. We
’d spent the last few weeks in a hotel in Palm Springs, preparing for the Playa Hermosa job, but I still wasn’t ready to face my first day in a new school. There had been too many of them. Right now, in this unfamiliar room, I was in a pleasant kind of limbo, the last town far enough away to be a memory, the new one still a figment of my imagination.

  But it was no use. The down in my pillow was no match for the rumble outside, and I finally tossed it aside and got out of bed, digging around in a still-packed box until I found a hair tie. My gaze was drawn to the reflection in the mirror over the dresser. The brown hair was a surprise. I hadn’t been a brunette since Seattle, and I still approached every mirror half expecting to see my face framed by a sheet of straight, shiny blond hair. My eyes—a dark blue—were the only thing I could count on to be the same when we moved from city to city. But they were a little different now, too. Older, shadowed with something weary that echoed the way I’d felt ever since our near miss in Maryland the year before.

  Lately, it had begun to feel like too much. Too much lying. Too much risk. Too much work. I had been eleven when I was adopted by my mom and dad. I’d spent a year thinking my life would be normal, then Parker joined the family and we were quickly initiated into life on the grift. It had been nonstop ever since. I hadn’t been this tired since my fifth foster home, back when survival meant dodging a woman who was a little too quick with the back of her hand, her son a little too generous with the creepy glances.

  I leaned away from the mirror and took a deep breath, forcing the past back into the dark corners of my mind where it belonged. Then I reached into the unpacked box, feeling past my books, the little makeup I owned, the one framed photograph I had of our family. When my hand brushed against a smooth wooden container, I pulled it from the box.

  It was a simple unfinished rectangle, the kind you could buy in any craft store for five bucks. It was meant to be a jewelry or treasure box, but I’d never gotten around to decorating or staining it. I probably never would. Its contents were against the rules. I’d never be able to keep it out long enough to make it look nice.