Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(5)

“OK,” Dylan says. “Then describe what you’re seeing right now.”

“A movie theater,” she says.

“Is that all?”

“Invasion. Injustice.”

“Fear?” he asks.

“That, too. The girl on the poster looks very afraid, just like she always does.”

“The girl that’s supposed to be you.”

“Well, she doesn’t look like me. Her hair’s still brown, for one, and I’ve got about fifteen pounds on her. And they changed some of the letters in her name, so there’s that. One in the first, one in the last. My father saw to that part, you know, ’cause he’s such a kind, considerate, selfish, motherfu—sorry.”

“Since when did I say you couldn’t curse?”

“Well, if you had, I’d probably just do it anyway and then leave.”

“You’re free to leave at any time. You know that.”

“I do.”

“But I wish you wouldn’t, Charlotte. I wish you’d keep talking.”

“Honestly, it’s easier when you try to read my mind.”

She sits, looks at him for the first time since she stormed into his cramped office, which always smells of burned coffee from the AA meetings downstairs.

It’s not easy looking Dylan Thorpe in the eyes, and not just because he’s basically appointed himself her psychiatrist now. It’s hard because he’s one of the most astonishingly handsome men she’s ever seen. The kind of handsome that seems two-dimensional and unreal even when it’s sitting across from you, like it might slide from view if you swipe up on your phone.

Another woman, a woman without Charlotte’s walls, might have tried to seduce him after their first chat downstairs. Even after it became clear that he’d sought her out as a kind of pet project.

By his own admission, Dylan had sensed she didn’t truly belong in the AA meetings at the Saguaro Wellness Center. That she gravitated to them because there was something about the sharing—all those honest, unguarded expressions of hopes, insecurities, and fears—that quieted her soul, even though she’d never been what anyone would call an alcoholic.

It would take another few weeks before Charlotte admitted she liked the meetings because they made her feel close to her late grandmother, with whom she’d lived for almost a decade after fleeing her father.

They were both survivors, she and her grandmother. The woman almost drank herself to death following the disappearance of her daughter and grandchild. But even before Charlotte’s rescue—Trina’s rescue, if they were going to be technical about it—Luanne found sobriety and became a pillar of the small 12-step community in Altamira, a little town just south of Big Sur and a short drive inland from the Pacific Coast Highway, a place she’d called home for thirty years. After Charlotte went to live with her, Luanne made a habit of bringing her to the open AA meetings in town, the ones that allowed nonalcoholics to just sit and listen. That’s where Charlotte first heard slogans like “First things first,” “Easy does it,” and her personal favorite, “Keep it simple, stupid.” That’s where she had seen that people really could change. That we’re not all doomed by our genetics or our pasts.

The eight years she’d spent with her grandmother, three of them as an almost-normal high school student and the rest as an assistant manager in Luanne’s pet supply store, were the happiest in her entire life. Idyllic compared with what came before and after. The long walks they took together along Altamira’s rocky coast, the open skies that were often filled by great, towering clouds, the steadiness of her grandmother’s grip, and the quiet wisdom of her recovery, even the biting chill of the Pacific winds—all these things made her time on the Bannings’ farm seem like a memory so distant it might one day fade entirely.

Then one afternoon, walking home from the store, Grandma Luanne died of a sudden, massive heart attack, a quick and painless death, but one that tore a hole in Charlotte so deep she could barely speak for weeks afterward. This is what it means to have real family, she’d realized as they lowered the casket into the ground. This is part of loving and being loved, and without it, you cannot have the other parts, the joyful parts.

In her will Luanne left Charlotte her house and the small pet supply store she’d run for thirty years. Six months later, one of the big chains opened in the next valley over, close to the 101 freeway. Sales dropped precipitously. Her grandmother’s AA friends chipped in what they could, but it was obvious that even selling her grandmother’s house would not be enough to keep the store afloat.

When her father refused to help, Charlotte snapped.

Desperate, she decided it was time to demand at least a respectable portion of the money she’d earned for him over the years—something she could use to start a new life. And it was time to demand it with a lawyer.

She won, but with her victory came the sad realization that there was a lot less money saved than her father had led everyone to believe. Still, she got enough to pay for a legal name change and her house outside Scarlet.

In short, combined with the sale of her grandmother’s house, she managed to get just enough money out of him to become Charlotte Rowe.

In the three months since they started these chats, she’s shared all this with Dylan. She doesn’t harbor any delusions about him, about what their sessions mean to him. She’s just something rough and real for him to cut his teeth on after years of listening to big-city, high-paying clients whine about their perfect lives. And she’s fine with that. It keeps her safe, installs the kind of boundaries and structure her life has always lacked.