“Cool?” I raised one eyebrow.

“Yeah, you know—cool. Kick ass. Awesome. Etcetera.”

In spite of myself, I laughed. “Joshua Mayhew, the sunny optimist?”

Joshua grinned. “Always. Which means we need to celebrate.”

“And how exactly are we going to do that?”

Smiling wider, Joshua didn’t answer. Instead, he pushed himself into a standing position and turned to face me.

“I, for one, have to get to dinner at the Mayhew house, since I’m at least an hour late.”

“Oh,” I said, frowning.

I’d completely forgotten about his need to return to a family at the end of a day. Or his need to eat, honestly. These things were necessary for him. And he obviously needed to leave to do them. The ache in my chest curled at the thought of watching him drive away, but I tried to keep the sound of it out of my voice.

“I guess . . . I’ll see you tomorrow, or something? We’ll celebrate then?”

A strange look passed over Joshua’s face, one I couldn’t place. As he had when we’d spoken yesterday—was it really only yesterday we’d had our first full conversation?—he ran one hand through his hair and left it on the back of his neck.

After a moment of awkward silence, I realized what I was missing: Joshua looked shy, even embarrassed. Bold, confident Joshua Mayhew actually seemed nervous about something. He stared at me for a moment and then must have gathered up the courage to ask one, halting question.

“Actually, I was thinking you might like to come over tonight to meet my family?”

I blinked, unsure of what to say. I didn’t even want to mention how little I wanted to “meet” his grandmother, despite her inability to see me. Slowly, I stumbled through my answer.

“Joshua . . . well, I’d love to. But isn’t this a little . . . fast? Considering they can’t really meet me back?”

Joshua ducked his head down, but not before I saw him flush a deep pink.

“Yeah, you’re probably right. Too fast,” he muttered, trailing off at the end. His eyebrows drew together as a small, embarrassed smile tugged at his lips. Kind of a flattering look on him, really.

I bent slightly forward to watch his face for a moment longer. He couldn’t seem to meet my gaze; and, for some reason, his discomfort made the little ache in my chest curl pleasantly outward. I took a quiet breath for courage and then asked, “Are you worried about my opinion of your family?”

“The other way around wouldn’t make much sense, would it?”

“No,” I said. “It wouldn’t. But are you afraid I’m—what?—not going to like them?”

“No, you don’t seem like the type. I’d still like to know your opinion, though. I . . . I have a feeling it’s going to matter.”

He said it like a confession, as if the words had some underlying meaning. He didn’t have to explain that meaning, though. I felt exactly the same way.

“Well,” I said, giving him a quick, bright smile. “Let’s go form my opinion then.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Chapter

Ten

By the time Joshua pulled his car off the main road and onto a rough gravel path, the sun had finally set. The sky—at least the part I could see through the branches of the tall pines—had varied itself from a dark navy in the east to a pale, pinkish violet in the west.

I found myself suddenly grateful for the deepening of the shadows around us; they provided ideal cover for my growing discomfort. I felt as if I was about to take some kind of test. Not that I was afraid of seeing the Mayhews per se; even the witchy grandmother didn’t really worry me.

But Joshua would undoubtedly be watching me, gauging my reaction to everything I saw. More importantly, I knew he wouldn’t be able to communicate with me while his family was around. No sidelong glances, no whispers, no notes. He would have to deal with my presence very carefully, as if I wasn’t there at all.

So, ultimately, I would probably spend the next few hours in an intimate family scene, and I would basically do it alone.

Before I had time to feel truly sorry for myself, the car looped around a corner and a large house came into view. I’m not sure what I’d expected. Maybe some modest Oklahoman ranch house or one of the new brick-and-stone monstrosities that had begun to pop up all around this area. Whatever image I had in my mind, and whatever worries I’d been previously nursing, they all evaporated in the face of the lovely old home that rose before us.

The house was green clapboard, with white-railed porches that wrapped entirely around its first and second stories. At every gable and eave, between every free stretch of wood, were windows: huge bay windows framed by swoops of curtain; tiny, round windows promising only a tantalizing fraction of a view; stained glass windows exploding with color. From every window shone a warm glow that contrasted charmingly with the dusk that now settled over the house. Even in the pleasant violet gloom, I could make out the shape of the garden through which Joshua now drove—clusters of rosebushes, wisteria vines, and dogwood shrubs tangled in a gorgeous chaos around the house and the cottonwood trees surrounding it.

This was a fairy-tale home.

I didn’t even bother to shut my mouth while Joshua parked behind the house. After closing his own car door, he came around to open mine. When he offered me his hand, I took it, as much to steady myself as to feel his skin. Normally, my entire focus would have been centered on the contact of our hands. My attention, however, was elsewhere.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that the back of the Mayhew house would be even more marvelous than the entrance. Still, my mouth gaped farther when I took in the sight of the lawn stretching out before me.

The thickets of pine and cedar, so ever-present in southeastern Oklahoma, had been trimmed back to form a kind of wall around the Mayhews’ yard. Within the backyard, enormous maples and cottonwoods dotted the lawn, their branches lacing into a sort of dome overhead. Through the leaves I could just make out a few glimpses of the night sky.

Winding through the yard and around each of these trees was a stone walkway. But this wasn’t your average back patio. The stones, which were various shades of blues and grays in the dark, branched all around the lawn into twisting, almost labyrinthine paths. Some paths meandered around the yard and then back into each other, while others broke into sets of steps, leading to iron-railed platforms. In a few places, paths turned into covered bridges, canopied with heavy wisteria vines. Underneath the elevated portions, a thick sea of ivy and flowering plants swelled up from the ground.

At the far end of the yard stood a wooden gazebo, its walls enclosed by a ring of tall cypress trees. The entire scene was illuminated from above by huge white lanterns hung on sturdy electrical wires stretched between each of the trees. The lantern light nearly hid the flicker of hundreds of late-summer fireflies that hovered in the dark tree line surrounding the yard.

“Dear God,” I breathed aloud.

“Yeah.” Joshua nodded. “My mom owns a landscaping company. She really knows what she’s doing, doesn’t she?”

“You could say that.”

Joshua turned to me with a half smile but then frowned a little. Staring at me, he knitted his eyebrows together.

“What?” I asked sharply as a wave of self-consciousness washed over me. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Do you know you sort of glow in the dark?”

“Oh. That.” I looked down at my hand, still locked in his, and then back up at his face.

Light from the lanterns above us brightened some of Joshua’s features, while the darkness of the night shadowed others. My skin, however, looked exactly the same as it had during the day, unaffected by the change from daylight to darkness. It was something I was used to, and the reason I’d immediately recognized Eli as a ghost: the flat, unreflective nature of our skin against the dark. To me, Eli had looked like a black-and-white image against a three-dimensional one. To Joshua, I apparently looked like I glowed.