Free His Everlasting Love: 50 Loving States, Virginia by Theodora Taylor

wouldn’t interfere if you decided to take things further with my Sawyer. Interfere or blame you. One of my biggest regrets in the afterlife is not having slept with more men while I was alive. And perhaps a woman or two—I’d always wondered about that while at Mount Holyoke…but then Quentin came up from the academy for our Winter Weekend party, and things moved fast after that. We fell in love so quickly, I dropped out of school as soon as he proposed. Really I was too young to get married—only nineteen—but that’s how girls like myself did it back then...”
    Okay, time to go.
    Seriously , she thought as she rushed away from the rest of Kate’s story. Now Sawyer’s mother was trying to get the two of them to hook up ?
    Willa raced around the house and back down the hill, toward her own side of the river. She really, really should have stuck to her policy about not speaking to ghosts outside of her property lines. With the son and with the mother.
    Finally making it to the foot bridge, she ran across it to her own property.
    But it wasn’t enough of an escape. By the time she reached the car, she could feel his eyes back on her. Staring her down.
    “Don’t do it,” she whispered to herself.
    But it was already too late. While her mind was telling her what not to do, her body was already turning itself around to look for him.
    She found him easily. He was on his balcony. Staring straight at her. Even on crutches, he gave off the impression of a king of old. Surveying everything he called his. Including her.
    “He does that a lot,” a voice said behind her.
    Willa didn’t realize she’d been caught staring again until her sister snapped her out of it.
    She turned to see Thel standing there, the key ring attached to the vehicle’s squat key fob hanging off her index finger.
    “I’ve seen him out there every night when I’m singing,” she said, coming to stand beside her. “But he’s usually sitting down, and this is the first time I’ve seen him out there during the daytime.”
    Willa forced herself to look away from Sawyer and say, “Thanks for bringing out my key.”
    “No problem.” Thel nodded to Pappy’s old wooden cart, which still sat behind the house, fully ready to take a trip into town despite the death of both of its owner and its horse. “Saw it on the bookshelf by the back door and I came out here to see if you were maybe hanging out with Pappy. Thought maybe you’d want me to go into town to pick up Trevor.”
    “Thanks,” Willa mumbled, happy to know her sister would have picked Trevor up if it came down to it.
    But then her sister looked around and said, “Maybe you should start parking back here. There’s plenty of room next to Pappy’s cart.”
    Willa shook her head and started toward the car at the front of the house, refusing to acknowledge the man watching them from his balcony. “No, let’s definitely keep parking in front of the house.”
    “Why?” Thel asked as they approached the car. “The driveway goes all the way around and there’s more room back here.”
    How to explain about Trevor? All the lies and omissions? “It’s just better if we park in front. And it’s my car, so just do it Thel, okay?” she snapped. She then held out her hand. “Can I have my keys now?”
    Thel, who’d never been the one to put up with people snapping at her, narrowed her eyes at Willa: the quiet sister who’d rarely gone against her when they were kids, and who hadn’t snapped at her once, not even when she showed up out of the blue in Germany after nearly five years of radio silence.
    “I think I’ll drive into town with you to pick up Trevor,” Thel said, keeping her voice level. She went around the car and got in on the passenger side. With the key still in her hand, so Willa would be forced to demand the key back and kick her all the way out of the car if she wanted to avoid going into town with her.
    Which of course, she wouldn’t. It wasn’t Thel’s fault