Lost (Shifter Island Book 1) by Carol Davis

was dressed like Aaron’s father in loose pants, a blousy shirt, and simple shoes.
    She looked, Abby thought, like a woman who could easily kick the butt of anyone who crossed her.
    Most of the women Abby had seen here had looked like that, come to think of it.
    Aaron’s mother took a long look at her, then moved to the kitchen area, opened a cupboard and brought out some cups and a pitcher. After she’d placed those things on the table, she took out a loaf of bread and a knife.
    “Come,” she said. “We’ll have something to eat, and talk.”
    She sliced the bread as they all sat down around the table. The loaf had berries in it, Abby noticed, and it looked sweet, something like the honey cakes Aaron had given her at the cabin. The pitcher contained only water, but that was fine; as Aaron’s mother poured it into the cups, Abby realized how thirsty she was.
    “My son likes to balk,” his mother said suddenly.
    Aaron frowned at that, then dropped his gaze to the table. It was clear that he was waiting for his parents to begin eating before he did so much as touch his cup. That didn’t seem balky to Abby, and she wondered if stern discipline was the general rule in this house.
    “Rachel,” Jeremiah said to his wife. “The girl doesn’t need to know–”
    “She needs to know what she’s stepped into,” Rachel said firmly, but not at all angrily.
    Something changed in Aaron’s expression. He tried to mask it, but it had been plain on his face for a moment, and Abby suddenly understood a lot about the relationship between mother and son. He’d said Luca was his older brother, so Aaron was her younger child, her baby. As first-born, Abby guessed, Luca had probably gotten the lion’s share of his father’s attention, and had probably been groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps.
    Aaron, on the other hand, was the “spare”—free to soak up his mother’s affection. A little more free to make up his own mind.
    So if Abby was going to stay here, she needed to win over Rachel, not Jeremiah.
    “The bread looks delicious,” she said softly.
    Rachel cut her an extra-thick slice, then went back to the kitchen to fetch a little bowl of honey. The bowl looked handmade, and had been painted with blue stripes by someone whose grip on the brush had been a little wobbly.
    Aaron, Abby guessed. When he was a little boy.
    She wondered what he’d been like. Loud, or quiet? Helpful around the house? Or had he preferred to play outside, running around with the other children, playing ball, stomping in puddles?
    She remembered him dancing around in the rain, and splashing her in the stream, remembered how playful he’d been. No, she thought, he hadn’t been a quiet child. She thought that might have been Luca: silent, focused, wary of the rules.
    She’d picked the right brother, she decided, and smiled across the table at him.
    “Luca isn’t going to eat with us?” she ventured.
    Neither man said anything. After a moment, Rachel said softly, “Luca will join us later.”
    He was off sulking somewhere, then, Abby thought.
    She ate two slices of bread and drank three cups of water, doing her best not to seem greedy. No one raised an eyebrow. She was their guest, she decided, and maybe they were accustomed to feeding their guests well. Besides that, no one she had seen looked particularly underfed. She’d thought they might be, living in a place like this—but maybe food was plentiful here, particularly during the summer. Maybe these people knew how to gather all they needed from the land, even though Aaron had said the island wasn’t very big.
    How long had they been here? she wondered. Years? Decades?
    That question was still in Abby’s head when Rachel said something to Aaron with a look. He got up from the table silently and left the house, which worried Abby considerably until he returned with a heaping plateful of fragrant cooked meat that he placed in front of his father. Rachel quickly brought several