That night after my sister and I close up Milton’s, it’s not a long ride home. Then again, Grace is in an extra yappy mood, which makes any ride with her endless.

“You should see Mandy’s wedding dress,” she says. “I mean, you will see her dress because we’re both going to the wedding, but you’ve gotta see it sooner than that. It’s a scoop-neck lacy A-line, and instead of a veil, she’s going to wear her hair long with white flowers woven through it.” Grace barely takes a breath before she’s onto the next subject. “Say, those contractors from Climax Vineyards weren’t in tonight. Too bad, because they’re cool guys.”

My pulse starts thudding as I think of muscles … and dark eyes … and that damned hot smile. “They were at the diner earlier for lunch.”

“They were?”

“Gracie, if you’re all excited about the guy with tats—”

“His name’s Quinn.”

“Whatever his name is. He hit on me, too, so I wouldn’t bother with him if I were you. I’m sure he’s one of those pervos who pantyraids every woman he sees.”

Grace is knitting her brows at me as the moonlight slides through the truck’s windows. “What’re you talking about? Quinn never hit on me.” She bounces in her seat. “Did he hit on you?”

I’ve said too damned much, and I press my lips together.

“Details, Gwen, details!”

As much as I don’t want to talk about this, I actually … kind of do. Despite our bickering, Grace and I are two peas in a pod, yin and yang, whatever and what-have-ya. In other words, I tell her my private shit because she’s my other half and we can read each other most times anyway. So I let loose to her about Quinn’s offer for me to try Climax’s wine with him. However, I leave out the part where he said I could bring Grace. In fact, I leave out quite a bit, including how tempted I would be to accept his invitation if only I were a freewheeling, fun-loving kind of girl just like Grace herself.

“Hubba,” she finally says, nudging my arm. “You should go for it.”

I shake my head.

“Why not?”

I shrug.

“Do you have eyes?” She moves her shoulders, doing some more hubba. “He is cah-yute. And ripped. And … oh boy. Stop me before I do a twin switch and pretend to be you so I can go on that date myself.”

Then she starts in with one of her Grace-a-logues about what that date with Quinn would be like. Ho-hum. Instead of listening, I think about how Grace and I haven’t traded identities since elementary school, and even back then the teachers weren’t fooled. It was kind of a dead giveaway when Grace couldn’t stop talking to the other students, especially the boys. Aside from that, we could’ve gotten away with switching because, in spite of the airheady act my sister puts on, she’s really a smart cookie. It’s just that, when my piece-of-shit dad was alive, she learned to play stupid, pretending she didn’t know half the things she knew, just so she could fly under his radar. I refused to do that, and that’s why he would yell at me and sometimes give me a shove to get me to do whatever he thought should be done around the house. Grace and I would always protect each other as well as Mom, but that never stopped him from being a raging asshole. The only thing that did stop him was that car accident, and the monster just had to take someone else’s dad with him.

But you know what? I already spend too much time in life thinking about this crap. I don’t need to dwell on it any longer, so I start listening to Grace again just as she sighs and says, “With a guy like Quinn, there would be fireworks at the end of the date, if you know what I mean.”

I don’t comment as we pull into the driveway of the ranch house.

Grace nudges me again. “Come on, Gwen, go for it. You don’t want your lady bits to shrivel up from disuse.”

“Says the girl whose vagina is in the public domain.”

I cut the engine, and we look at each other. Then we both laugh. More power to Grace for exercising her sex drive. It’s only my style to be a little warier.

Okay, a lot warier.

When we enter the house, Mom is in the kitchen filling the fridge with groceries. She obviously had the energy to get out there and go to the market, and her dull blonde hair is pulled back into a low-maintenance ponytail. She’s wearing jeans and a flannel shirt and humming an old Patsy Cline tune.

Grace and I exchange a glance, then I walk over to her. “Mom. You didn’t have to do this. Grace was going shopping tomorrow morning.”

“Oh, I decided to go out, so why not shop for my girls, too?” She smiles at us, and her eyes are as faded as her blue jeans. Although she looks more rested than usual, it isn’t enough, and I squeeze her thin arm, then take over grocery duty.

As I stock the shelves, Grace hops up on the Formica counter, her long legs dangling. “Guess what, Mom? Gwen has an admirer.”

Urgh. “Don’t listen to her.”

Mom leans against the counter next to Grace, looking very interested indeed. “What’s he like?”

I might as well let this play out as Grace absently kicks her legs, her boots lightly knocking against the cabinets until Mom stills her with her hand. “You might’ve seen him in the diner all five hundred times he’s come in,” Grace says to Mom. “Tall, dark hair, built like a superhero. He’s got really sexy tattoos, too. Like knife blades going up his arms.”

“Tattoos,” Mom says softly. “Sounds like your father.”

That puts a major damper on the conversation, and something heavy presses against me as well. Does Quinn have something in common with my father? Sometimes tats tell the tale.

Grace quietly says, “Quinn resembles Dad in no way. He’s got ink for sure, but he’s nothing like that man. He’s definitely nicer than Dad ever was.” Then she brightens. “He wants to take Gwen to try the new winery he’s in charge of building.”

“He does?” Mom is smiling now. “Gwen, you should go. Have some fun for once. Try something new.”

“I don’t think so.” I close the fridge now that I’m done loading it. “He’s a know-it-all, and he’d be riding my last nerve before you know it.”

Grace giggles. “You should let him ride a lot more than that, Gwen.”

Mom laughs.

“Hilarious,” I say. “He straight out told me that Milton’s needed an update, as if I asked him for his opinion or something.”

“Well,” Mom says, “I wouldn’t disagree with him.”

“Me, either.” Grace hops down from the counter and grabs an apple from the nearby wicker basket. “It looks to me like the diner has been around before the first ice age.”

I hold up a finger. “Milton’s is old school. That’s why people go there.”

“You’re old school,” Grace says.

“If you mean I have a work ethic and solid values, you can call me old school all night.”

“Old school.” Grace grins, then emphatically munches into her apple and waves goodnight. She heads to her room down the hallway.

Mom considers me with a tilt of her head. “Gwen, eventually something’s got to change. I’ll have to retire sometime, and you two work night and day. You can’t keep doing that. There’ll come a point when you’ll want a family and actual lives.”

A family? Huh. I’m thirty and single and loving it. Basically. But that’s not what has my shoulders slumping.

“We don’t have any choice but to work hard,” I say. “We can’t afford to hire more staff and pay them what they deserve.”

We’ve had this conversation a million times. Mom and Grace want something to change, but they don’t know how to change it. And I won’t change anything without a concrete plan.

Mom looks worn out again, and I feel that way. I go to hug her.

“Thanks for the groceries,” I whisper against her hair. “Next time it’s on me.”

Then I head down the dim hallway, where family pictures hang in silence. We took down any photos with my dad in them a long time ago, so we’ve cleansed this place of him. I go into the bathroom to get ready for bed, not giving him another fucking thought.

After I’m done, I hole up in my room. It’s the opposite of Grace’s — where she has paintings of women in vintage dresses and gowns from the fifties and sixties, I have framed comic book panel illustrations that Seamus gave me not too long ago. Our busboy/waiter wants to create graphic stories one day, and I’m going to be able to say that I knew him when. He’s that good.

I huddle into my bed dressed in a flannel shirt for pajamas, and then grab a hardcover book on my nightstand. I can hear Grace’s TV murmuring from her room. That’s how she gets to sleep, whereas I like to read something in old-school print until my eyes blur. I’m in the middle of Jane Eyre, but bless the mousey governess’s heart, I can’t keep my mind on the story. I keep thinking about Quinn Maxwell and …

Okay, I admit it. He’s hot. And I’m kind of hot just thinking about him. Hell, it’s been longer than I remember since I last got some action. Not as long as Grace implied with her crack about my nethers shriveling up, but if I named my cooter Rip Van Winkle, it wouldn’t be too far off the mark.

Every time I think about Quinn, something starts to wake up down there.

But no. Hell no. I’m not going to drink wine with some stranger. The rare times I do drink, it’s with people I trust one hundred percent. Plus, I never drink when I drive, which I would most certainly be doing if I went to Climax Vineyards, because I sure wouldn’t accept a ride from him because that could get awkward at the end of the night. I mean, I guess I could take a Lyft there but...

Ack, just no. Jeez, he invited me to a winery named Climax, and that presents more than a few expectations, right? They just should have called it “place where people go to drink too much and then fuck each other.” Yeah, Quinn Maxwell definitely knew what he was doing when he invited me there. I’ll bet Romeo has probably even brought a few female cherries from this valley out to the winery already, and I’m not going to join the club.

With my mind firmly made up, I try reading my book again, losing myself in it, because when tomorrow comes, nothing will have changed. I’ll have to get up and run the diner, then do it all over again.

And that’s the way it’ll always be.