Falling for the Babysitter

Chapter 1

1

Remy

The trash smells disgusting. “God, did something crawl in there and die?” my friend Clara says beside me as I wheel the trashcan out to the curb. She’s stayed over for horror movie night, a monthly tradition we’ve held since we were twelve.

I hold my breath, face scrunched up tight. “Yeah, whatever that thing was my mom tried to feed us last night.”

“What was that?” Clara says.

“Tofu.”

“Is that some kind of bird, because if it is, it should be hunted until it’s extinct.”

I laugh. Poor Clara. Her family is strictly meat and potatoes. She never even saw a Brussel sprout until we met. She thought it was the cutest little baby cabbage until she actually tried it. Now she calls them devil warts.

“It’s made from soy beans, I think.”

risen. There’s a mist curling off the cement as the day warms up. The sky, with its layers of vibrant orange and yellow, looks

across the lawn in bare feet to get to the newspaper before it’s ruined. No matter

Prius, so I know it’s

off and it takes a minute for the driver to exit the vehicle. Then Deacon steps out of the driver’s side and my heart explodes in

god,” I

neighbor’s house. “Holy

I grab her by the

we’re talking,”

“We are talking.”

so I can stare without being obvious I’m staring,” I say as I

grumbles. “Fine. But hurry up.

used to own the house, then sold it to Sam after he married. I remember sitting in my old tree house, watching as he loaded his boxes into the U-Haul, half tempted to go next door and put each box back in the house so he couldn’t leave. That was

he did back then. A little more mature, maybe, and thicker with muscle than I remember. Clearly that confident swagger never went away. That’s easy to tell even at this distance as he goes to

is what’s in the back seat of the truck. I squint to see better. Is that the top of a car seat I see

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