I stopped. With the back of my hand, I touched Ripley’s loosely hanging fingers and whispered, “I want to go say bye. If you just want to wait back here, I won’t be long.”

His whispered response wasn’t hesitant at all. “I’ll go.”

I raised my hand and rubbed at my brow bone with it, not because he wanted to go with me—that wasn’t it at all—but just because… that casket and the backs of those heads made me feel hesitant and bad at the same time.

I still nodded at Rip, not able to even muster up any kind of facial expression that told him I was okay. Because I wasn’t really feeling that okay. I wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t okay.

Ripley tipped his chin down at me, and it was that, that made me keep moving. We headed down the center aisle, where Rip walked to the side as I took a step up onto the raised area.

It was surreal, looking inside it, and it was more surreal—and honestly sad—to take it all in.

Thankfully, it was easy enough to ignore the gazes on the back of my head. Maybe I was imagining it, but I doubted it, and even then, I just couldn’t find it in me to care as I looked at a face that looked familiar but didn’t at the same time. It had been a long time.

A dozen thoughts went through my head, and I told my grandmother a few different things.

Thank you.

I hope you were okay.

Things worked out for me.

The girls are all doing great.

Lily is graduating at the top of her class.

They’re all going to be in college.

Leaving was the best thing I could have done.

I’m sorry I didn’t reach out to you more.

It was only the sound of the doors being closed behind me that made me realize how long I had stood there gazing down at the woman with her eyes closed. The familiar but not familiar face. The first person who had taught me that doing the right thing wasn’t easy and would more than likely never be.

It was only then that I took a step back and gave my grandmother’s face a bittersweet smile before I eventually turned around and immediately spotted Ripley maybe four feet away, standing with his back to the wall…

With his gaze on the pews.

I knew what I was doing as I glanced in the direction of what he was focused on. Some part of me knew that chances were I might not like what I saw. But I did it anyway.

It was my luck that the first face I landed on was the last face I would have ever wanted to see sitting there. Staring straight ahead. Face blank. Pretending like I wasn’t even there.

My dad looked twenty years older than he had the last time I had seen him. Like my grandmother, he looked familiar but didn’t. He looked like hell.

A lot could happen in a decade, I guessed.

The main one being that I didn’t feel any kind of terror going through me as I took in his face. My knees didn’t shake. Bile didn’t rise up in my throat.

If anything, this coolness flooded over my skin and through my veins as I took him in.

When my eyes flicked to the woman sitting beside him, I wasn’t sure what to think when I barely recognized her too. Her face was blank and dotted with sores. She was thinner than she had been before. A lot thinner. But if he looked twenty years older, she looked thirty years older. The years hadn’t been kind to her. Not that they ever had.

On the other side of her was a man I had grown up with but barely knew.

My cousin.

Of course they were here. All of them—minus my older brother and my uncle, who was still in jail—but that wasn’t shocking at all. These were the people who were at the top of my list for those human beings I didn’t want to have anything to do with.

I didn’t let myself think as I pivoted where I was standing and went to Rip just as a man in a suit walked down the center aisle. I was looking at Rip as his attention went from the people in the pews that I didn’t want to look at for another second to me, then back to them. They finally went back to me just as I stopped a foot away, his jaw doing that tensing thing again.

Okay.

I nodded, and he blinked slowly enough to agree with me. We moved together down the aisle along the wall. My heart beat, beat, beat just faster than normal as we passed one aisle after another until I stopped at one only a couple of rows before the exit. Sliding all the way in, I took a seat as the man in the suit stopped behind a pulpit set up just to the right of my grandmother’s casket. Ripley took a seat directly beside me, the material of the jacket he’d put on as we walked toward the building brushing against my bare elbow. I had rolled up the sleeves of the black button-down shirt I had tucked into my skirt.

The body contact did nothing for me.

I could see the backs of their heads in the second row, but I made myself focus on the man who started talking about my grandmother in vague, vague words that I wouldn’t remember and that I had a feeling he had to have used generically for others all the time. My face went warm and stayed warm as I sat there, listening but only barely. This hum started buzzing around in my ears, but I did my best to ignore it and the way my heart seemed like it wanted to beat its way out of my chest.

Rip’s arm moved, brushing against my elbow even more.

But I kept my gaze straight forward.

In less time than I ever would have expected, the man stopped talking and explained the instructions for the motorcade that would head to the cemetery where Grandmother Genie would be buried.

And still, my ears buzzed.

I didn’t mean to get up so fast, but I did, and luckily so did Rip. We were the first people out and the first ones walking toward the lot. The tension in Rip’s body was something I could have easily tasted. I felt it everywhere, even if I didn’t understand it and wasn’t in the mindset to as we walked out.

I knew something was wrong the second we got into his truck and he slammed the door shut, my name slithering out of his mouth, ending on a hard vowel. “Luna?”

I was looking out the window at the side mirror. My cousin was out of the door, his head swinging around the parking lot. Probably looking for me. “Yes?”

His breathing had gotten loud, but it was steady; I had no problem hearing it. “Is your last name really Allen?”

Shit.

This throbbing sensation instantly pierced right through my right eye socket and had me rubbing my lips together. My fingertips even went numb before I winced—on the inside and the outside.

That was just about the last thing I would have ever, ever, expected him to ask.

Somehow, somehow, I managed to get the truth out, because there was no way I could lie. This wasn’t the kind of thing I could try and hide when there were a handful of people who knew the truth. “Legally, yes.” The pain from my head got stronger before I admitted slowly, “But it hasn’t always been.”

Had he recognized my grandmother’s last name? The one I’d had for the first eighteen years of my life?

This was exactly why I had changed it. This was what I’d been trying to avoid. Only a handful of people—including Mr. Cooper—knew that I hadn’t always been an Allen. No one else at the shop, not even the other guys who had worked there nearly as long as I had, knew about it. They had no reason to know that my siblings had a different one. I was the only one so far who hated it enough to not want to keep it. Lily had mentioned before that she wanted to change it too, but she was still too young.

Rip had closed his eyes at some point. His forehead became lined as he frowned. I could see that great, big chest inhale and exhale, and his voice was incredibly calm as he breathed out. “Okay.”

Okay?

Did he… know?

Had he read the paper and recognized the name and seen what my family looked like and pieced it all together?

It hadn’t been a huge bust. Dad had only gone to jail for three years. His brother was a different story. But while I’d been growing up, everyone knew the Miller last name hadn’t been the greatest. Maybe they hadn’t known specifically about the meth, but they had known there was something, and no one ever did anything.

Until I did.

I couldn’t even find it in me to be ashamed if Rip knew that part of the truth I had tried so hard to get away from.

“It used to be Miller.” I tried to keep from making it seem like it was something I had tried to hide. Even though I had. “According to my birth certificate, my mom’s last name had been Ramirez, but when I changed my name, I didn’t want to choose anything that any of them might think of. You know Mr. Cooper’s first name is Allen, and I thought Luna Allen sounded like a nice name.”