Starcrossed (Starcrossed 1) - Page 30

pieces. He asked her questions about her day while he tried to

sneak a little more salt onto his food. Helen blocked his attempts

like she always did, but she didn?t have the energy to give him

more than monosyllabic answers.

Even though she went to bed at nine, leaving her dad watching

the Red Sox on TV, she was still lying awake at midnight when she

heard the game finally end and her father come upstairs. She was

tired enough to sleep, but every time she started to drift off she

would hear whispering.

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At first she thought that it had to be real, that someone was outside

playing a trick on her. She went up to the widow?s walk on the

roof above her bedroom and tried to see as far as she could into the

dark. Everything was still?not even a puff of air to stir the rosebushes

around the house. She sat down for a spell, staring out at

the fat, black slick of the ocean beyond the neighbor?s lights.

She hadn?t been up there in a while, but it still gave her a romantic

thrill to think about how women in the olden days would

pine away on their widow?s walks as they searched for the masts of

their husbands? ships. When she was really young, Helen used to

pretend that her mother would be on one of those ships, coming

back to her after being taken captive by pirates or Captain Ahab or

something just as all-powerful. Helen had spent hours on the widow?s

walk, scanning the horizon for a ship she later realized would

never sail into Nantucket Harbor.

Helen shifted uncomfortably on the wooden floor and then remembered

that she still had her stash up there. For years, her dad

had insisted she was going to fall to her death and forbidden her

from going up to the widow?s walk alone, but no matter how many

times he punished her, she would eventually sneak back up there

Tags: Josephine Angelini Starcrossed Fantasy
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