Well Matched (Well Met #3)(16)

But this whole moving-away thing had thrown her for a loop. And that was my fault. I should have broken it to her more gently, maybe found a way for it to make more sense to her. Or I could have apologized and listened to her side of things. But all that was hard to do when she wasn’t speaking to me. Her silent treatment continued, and I did my best to stay out of her way when it came to the home improvements I had planned.

Sunday afternoon, my sister showed up as promised, wearing old clothes and carrying a plate of lemon squares in her hand. “Leftovers from work,” she said, putting the plate down on my kitchen island. “I think Simon’s getting a little sick of them.”

“You can bring them here anytime. You know they’re Caitlin’s favorite.”

“I do know that. So what are we doing?” She adjusted her ponytail, and not for the first time I wondered how she could make her hair do that. We grew up with the same curly brown hair, and I’d even passed it on to Caitlin. But while Emily could pile it up on her head and make it look effortless, I chose to tame my curls with the blow-dryer, making my hair smooth.

I passed a hand over my own ponytail—no riot of curls here—before answering. “I figured I’d start with your old room. It gets the least amount of use, so it should be pretty unobtrusive.”

“Staying out of Caitlin’s way?” Emily craned her neck to look down the hallway before pitching her voice lower. “Is she home?”

I nodded with a sigh. “In her room. As usual.” She’d come out for breakfast and later for some snacks, but otherwise had shut herself away.

“Ooof.” Emily blew out a long breath. “It’s that bad, huh?”

“Yeah. Who knows. Maybe the lemon squares will help.”

“Never underestimate the power of baked goods.” She followed me back to the guest room, stopping short in the doorway. “Wow,” she said. “So weird to be here when it’s not my room anymore.”

“No kidding.” It had taken me a good year to stop thinking of it as Emily’s room. When she’d first come here she’d been practically a stranger, but when she’d moved out, first to her tiny apartment and then eventually into the house that she and Simon had bought together a few months ago, not long after their wedding, she’d been . . . well, she’d been Emily. My little sister. Family.

The kind of family who showed up on a Sunday afternoon to help you with home renovations. “So are we painting?” The eagerness in her voice was refreshing after the one-word answers and stone-faced expressions I’d been living with lately.

“Hopefully,” I said. “We need to get everything off the walls and the furniture covered up first.” My house was a good size, but there was nowhere to put the bedroom set while we painted, so I hoped that shoving everything into the middle of the room and throwing old sheets over it all would be good enough.

It was. The small double bed and dresser didn’t take up a lot of space once they were pushed together, and the framed beach landscape photo I’d taken in the Outer Banks was off the wall and stuck in the closet temporarily. All that was left was my medal rack by the door.

“I don’t remember this.” Emily tilted her head while she looked at the aluminum rack screwed into the wall. Hanging from it on individual hooks were the handful of medals I’d earned from the footraces I’d participated in over the years. I’d never been an elite runner or anything, but the races had been fun.

“I put it up over the winter.” I grabbed three of the medals by their ribbons and took them down, shoving them into the top dresser drawer. Emily unhooked a couple more.

“These are so cute!” She tilted one that looked like a crab. “Since when do you run?”

“Since before I got T-boned in my car.” I took the medals back a little more aggressively than necessary.

“And you don’t do it anymore? I’d think you’d be healed up well enough by now to—”

“No, I don’t do it anymore.” I’d tried. Once. A year or so after the accident, I’d laced up my old running shoes and even dug up and charged my GPS watch. But while the spirit had been willing, the flesh was . . . way out of shape. I’d barely made it a mile before I had to turn around and walk home, my breath coming hard in my lungs and my legs feeling like rubber. All that fitness, gone. The logical part of my brain knew that starting over was inevitable, and I’d be able to work my way back to where I’d been before. But the emotional part of me threw my running shoes in the back of my closet and told myself I’d try again later.

Later never came. The medals were pretty though, and I was proud of the reminders of the 10Ks and half marathons I’d completed. Hanging the medals up had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now that Emily was handling them and asking questions, all I wanted to do was hide them away again.

“I’m just saying,” Emily said as she applied a screwdriver to the medal rack, taking it down off the wall, “if you wanted to get back into it, I bet Simon would have some advice. He’s been running, God, most of his life, I think.”

“Really?” How did I not know this? Because I’d never asked, that’s how. I liked Simon a lot, he and Emily were great together. But for all the time I’d spent with him, I could probably count the things I knew about him on one hand. And vice versa.