Almost Perfect Read Free

beautiful features he would never forget onto the face of someone else. There was no way Liz Sutton was back in Fool’s Gold.
    Instinctively he moved closer, but the road with the barricades was between them. The redhead looked up again, this time facing him. She removed her sunglasses and he saw her wide green eyes, the full mouth. From this distance he couldn’t see the freckles on her nose, but he knew they were there. He even knew how many.
    He swore softly. Liz was back. Except on the back cover of her books, he hadn’t seen her in over a decade. As of five seconds ago, he would have told anyone who asked that he’d forgotten her, had gotten over her. She was his past.
    She looked away then, as if searching for someone. Obviously not him, he thought, then grinned. Liz back in Fool’s Gold. Who would have thought?
    He eased his way through the crowd. He might not be able to find her now, but he had a feeling he knew where she would be later. He would meet her there and welcome her home. It was the least he could do.
    Â 
    L IZ KEPT A TIGHT HOLD ON Tyler’s hand on their way to the local grocery store. The crowd around the bike racewas big and seemed to be growing. She’d been foolish to think she could find two girls she’d never met in the throng of tourists. It wasn’t as if she even knew what they looked like.
    She pointed toward a vendor selling shaved iced and bought Tyler his favorite flavor. Blueberry.
    All around them, groups of people laughed and talked about the race. She heard something about a new bike racing school and a new hospital being built. Changes, she thought. Fool’s Gold had changed in the past ten years.
    But not enough for her to forget. Despite having to detour around blocked roads, she easily found her way down side streets, and back toward the house where she’d grown up.
    â€œYou lived here before you went to San Francisco?” Tyler asked.
    â€œUh-huh. I grew up here.”
    â€œWith my grandma Sutton?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œShe’s dead now.”
    He spoke the words as information, because that’s all they were to him. He’d never met Liz’s mother.
    When Liz had first left town at eighteen, running away with a broken heart, she’d found her way to the city by the bay, had struggled to find work and a place to stay in a glorified shelter. Then she’d found out she was pregnant.
    Her first instinct had been to go home, but that initialphone call had made her wary. Over the next year, she’d phoned home twice. Both times her mother had made it clear her daughter was no longer a part of her life. The rejection had hurt but hadn’t been much of a surprise. Her mother had also taken great delight in telling her that no, Ethan Hendrix never called or asked about her.
    When the woman died four years ago, Liz hadn’t cried, though she felt regret over the relationship they never had.
    Now, as she crossed a quiet street, she found herself in her old neighborhood. The houses were modest, two- and three-bedroom homes with small porches and aging paint. A few gleamed like bright flowers in an abandoned garden, as if the neighborhood was on the verge of being desirable again.
    The worst house on the street sat in the middle. An eyesore of peeling paint and missing roof shingles. The yard was more weeds than plants or lawn, the windows were filthy. Plywood filled the space where one was missing.
    She used the key she’d found under the front mat to let them in. She’d already done a brief tour of the house, to see if the girls were there. Judging from the school books piled on the dirty kitchen table and the clothes on the girls’ bedroom floors, she would guess summer break hadn’t started yet.
    Now she walked through to the kitchen with tonight’s meal. Half the cabinets were gone, as if someone had started remodeling then changed his mind. Therefrigerator worked, but was empty. There was