Carolina Moon by Nora Roberts

fall back into the habit of skipping meals again. When she neglected her body, it was more difficult to control her mind.
    She’d go to the bank, open accounts, personal and business. A trip to the
Progress Weekly
was in order. She’d already designed her ad.
    Most of all, while she set up the store in the next weeks, she needed to be visible. She’d work on being friendly, personable. Normal.
    It would take time to weather the expected whispers, the questions, the stares. She was prepared for it. By the time she opened for business, people would be used to seeing her again. More, much more important, they would become used to seeing her as she wanted to be seen.
    Gradually, she’d become a fixture in town. And then she would begin to explore.
She
would ask questions. She’d begin to look for the answers.
    When she had them, she could say good-bye to Hope.
    Closing her eyes, she listened to the night sounds, the chorus of peepers, so cheerfully monotonous, the sharp and jarring screech of an owl on the hunt, the soft groans of old wood settling, the occasional sly riveting of mice making themselves at home behind the wall.
    She’d have to set traps, she thought sleepily. She was sorry for it, but she didn’t care to share her space with rodents. She’d put mothballs under the porches to discourage snakes.
    It was mothballs, wasn’t it? It had been so long since she’d lived in the country. You put out mothballs for snakes and hung soap for deer and protected what was yours, even though it had been theirs first.
    And if the rabbits came to nibble at the kitchen garden, you laid out pieces of hose so they thought it was the snakes you shooed away with the mothballs. Else Daddy’d come home and shoot them with his .22. You’d have to eat them for supper, even though you got sick after because you could see how cute they were twitching their long ears. You had to eat what God provided or pay the price. Getting sick was better than getting a beating.
    No, don’t think about that, she ordered herself, and shifted on the hard floor. No one was going to make her eat what she didn’t want to eat, not ever again. No one was going to raise a strap to her or a fist.
    She was in charge now.
    She dreamed of sitting on the soft ground by a fire that snapped and smoked and burned the marshmallow she held into the flame on a stick. She liked it burnt so that the outside was black and crackled over the gooey white center. Lifting it out, she blew on the fire that came with it.
    She singed the roof of her mouth, but that was all part of the ritual. The quick pain, then the contrast of crisp and sweet sugar.
    “Might as well eat charcoal,” Hope said, turning her own candy so that it bubbled gold. “Now, this is a perfectly toasted marshmallow.”
    “I like them my way.” To prove it, Tory got another from the bag and stabbed it onto the pointy end of her stick.
    “Like Lilah says, ‘To each his own, said the lady as she kissed the cow.’” Grinning, Hope nibbled delicately on her marshmallow. “I’m glad you came back, Tory.”
    “I always wanted to. I guess maybe I was afraid. I guess I still am.”
    “But you’re here. You came, just like you were supposed to.”
    “I didn’t come that night.” Tory looked away from the fire, into the eyes of childhood.
    “I guess you weren’t supposed to.”
    “I promised I would. Ten thirty-five. Then I didn’t. I didn’t even try.”
    “You have to try now, ‘cause there were more. And there’ll still be more until you stop it.”
    The weight was lowering again so that her eight-year-old chest strained under it. “What do you mean, more?”
    “More like me. Just like me.” Solemn blue eyes, deep as pools, looked through the smoke and into Tory’s. “You have to do what you’re supposed to do, Tory. You have to be careful and you have to be smart. Victoria Bodeen, girl spy.”
    “Hope, I’m not a girl anymore.”
    “That’s why it’s time.” The fire climbed