ALoveSoDeep by Lili Valente Page B

to be able to resist if you see me naked?”
    “No,” I confess as I open the door and urge her inside. “That’s why you’re going in, and handing the shirt back through a crack in the door.”
    She laughs, but the sound fades quickly, and when she turns back to me, she looks scared. “Aoife can’t take Emmie away, can she? I mean, surely even she can see that Emmie is better off staying with the only family she’s ever known, right? Maybe if I try to talk to her again today, and keep my temper in check…”
    I shrug. “It doesn’t matter. If Aoife sees that what she’s doing is selfish, great. If not, I’ll hire the best lawyer money can buy, and you’ll crush her in court. And I’ll start looking into her story this morning, see if I can find anything we can use to blackmail her into going away. No matter what we have to do, we’ll take care of it. Emmie is staying with you. Where she belongs.”
    Caitlin looks comforted, but I’m glad when she hides behind the door and hands out my shirt, and I’m spared looking into her eyes. I want her to get her rest, but I’m not sure everything is going to be okay. The more I think about what Bea said, the more I worry that whatever my parents had against me is something no amount of muscle or money or quick thinking it going to be able to make go away.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Caitlin “Earth’s crammed with heaven…
But only he who sees takes off his shoes.” -Elizabeth Barrett Browning
    You never forget your first funeral.
    Mine was for Great Uncle Tom, who had a heart attack in his peach orchard while checking to see how his new stinkbug poison was performing. He was dead almost two days before Great Aunt Maryanne finally went looking for him. She found him curled up next to his John Deere, bloated in the mid-summer heat, and attracting flies.
    The body was in terrible shape, but Maryanne insisted on an open casket. I heard the funeral home director tried to talk her out of it, but Maryanne was a stubborn cuss—the only reason she was able to stay married to a cranky bastard like Uncle Tom for fifty-eight years. She insisted on an open casket, and on Tom being squeezed into the good Sunday suit he hadn’t worn since the day a decade previous when he’d told Maryanne he was too old to waste a perfectly good Sunday bruising his ass on a church pew.
    The funeral was held in a tiny country church out a long dirt road, somewhere close to Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary’s farm, though I can’t remember seeing it before, or since. But I remember stepping through the door, into the stifling heat of a one-room wood plank building with no air conditioning.
    I remember holding Aoife’s hand so tight the sweat building between our palms dripped onto the dusty floor, and the gray, lumpish face of Uncle Tom peeking up above the top of the casket, looking like something out of a horror movie. I remember the way his chin seemed to be sliding back into his neck, and how terrified I was that his mouth was going to open up and something was going to come flying out. Daddy had said something to Mama in the car about flies laying eggs in dead bodies. I was in the backseat with all the windows rolled down, and wasn’t meant to hear, but I did.
    I had nightmares for weeks after Uncle Tom’s funeral. I’d wake up shaking and sweating, feeling like something horrible was crawling up my throat and roll over and hug Aoife so tight she’d wake up groaning. But she never yelled at me. She would simply hug me, sweep my damp hair from my forehead, and tell me it was only a dream until I relaxed enough to go back to sleep.
    Once upon a time, Aoife was my rock. I loved her like a mother, a sister, and a best friend all wrapped up together, but that was a long time ago.
    Right now, watching her settle into a pew at the front of the church next to Veronica, Veronica’s two daughters, and all the Cooney cousins and second cousins, all I feel is angry and afraid. I wish she’d stayed in Florida.