The Perfect Homecoming (Pine River) by Julia London

Mostly women. They always eyed her as if they thought she was going to steal their husbands, which Emma chalked up to her looks. She didn’t consider herself conceited in that regard, but realistic. Why pretend?
    That’s why she loved Leo so much. Emma had never met anyone like him. Not anyone with MND, but like him. She’d known from almost the moment they’d been introduced that Leo was similar to her because he called it as he saw it, too. He just had more finesse with his opinions. He wasn’t “socially awkward” as Emma’s stepfather always said of her. But like her, Leo was realistic; he knew he was going to die and didn’t hide behind useless hope or prayer or whatever it was that people did to keep from facing awful, irrevocable truths. And it was an awful truth, one that sometimes kept Emma awake at night. Yet she loved that Leo could look headlong at his reality. He was braver than anyone she had ever known.
    Emma understood the rest of the world didn’t think like she and Leo did, and it didn’t bother her that men like Bob decided they distrusted her and then stuck there. So when Bob stepped into the kitchen and told her that some guy was looking for her, he looked almost gleeful about it, as if he’d finally been proven right—she was not to be trusted.
    “I know,” she said, and dropped the tops of Leo’s drinking tubes into a pot of boiling water. What the hell was Cooper doing, following her here? Her pulse began to race again. She didn’t like this, being the prey. She was always the one to do the stalking. Not as blatantly as this—she never had to put much effort into it, really—but still.
    Bob squinted at her, his eyes disappearing into folds of skin. “So who is he?”
    Emma glanced up, hoping her face didn’t betray her. “Just a guy.”
    “ Just a guy doesn’t just show up in Pine River,” Bob gruffly pointed out.
    Emma shrugged and turned back to her task.
    “Well? Are you coming?” Bob demanded.
    Before Emma could answer, she heard Cooper’s low voice in the living room, followed by Leo’s. “Nope,” Emma said, and reflexively hitched her shoulders, as if try ing to shake off Cooper’s voice from her skin. “Not coming. I’ve already talked to him and I don’t have anything more to say. I have things to do.”
    “No, no, no,” Bob groaned, and rubbed his forehead with both hands. “Jesus, please don’t do this here, Emma. Don’t bring your drama into my house and around my son.”
    “ My drama! You’re the one being overly dramatic,” she said as she removed the bottle tops from the boiling water and set them in a rack to dry.
    “Oh, am I?” he said sarcastically. He leaned backward, glanced into the front room a moment. “You gotta come talk to him,” he almost whispered, presumably so Cooper wouldn’t hear him.
    “No, I don’t.”
    Bob glared at her with a Law and Order glint. He stepped closer—which took him across the tiny kitchen to the bar that separated him from Emma. “Just what are you hiding, girl?”
    “Nothing,” she said, and ignored the tingling in the nape of her neck that said she was. “No law says I have to talk to every guy who comes to my door.”
    “Maybe, but he came to my door. Who is he? What does he want? How the hell do I know this guy ain’t stalking you and looking for trouble?”
    He had a point. Emma turned off the burner and faced Bob. “He’s a guy from LA. That’s all. He’s no one to me, I swear.” Jesus, another lie. For someone who always wore the truth as her shield of armor, that was two whoppers on the day. “As for why he’s here? I don’t really know. But he’s not violent.”
    “You don’t know that,” Bob said.
    The sound of Leo’s laughter wafted into the kitchen. “Yep, she’s got two eighty-five horsepower,” they heard Leo boast. “She’ll blow any car off the road.”
    Bob rolled his eyes, as he often did when Leo talked about that van.
    “That’s amazing,” came Cooper’s