Erica Spindler
inner-city neighborhood remained as well maintained and safe as when originally built.
    Despite the fact that most of Louisiana was flat, West Feliciana Parish was home to gently rolling hills. Cypress Springs nestled amongst those hills—the historic river town of St. Francisville, with its beautiful antebellum homes, lay twenty minutes southwest, Baton Rouge, forty-five minutes south and the New Orleans’s French Quarter a mere two hours forty-five minutes southeast.
    Besides being a good place to raise a family, Cypress Springs had no claim to fame. A small Southern town that relied on agriculture, mostly cattle and light industry, it was too far from the beaten path to ever grow into more.
    The city fathers liked it that way, Avery knew. She had grown up listening to her dad, Buddy and their friends talk about keeping industry and all her ills out. About keeping Cypress Springs clean. She remembered the furor caused when Charlie Weiner had sold his farm to the Old Dixie Foods corporation and then the company’s decision to build a canning factory on the site.
    Avery made her way down the deserted streets. Although not even ten o’clock, the town had already rolled up its sidewalks for the night. She shook her head. Nothing could be more different from the places she had called home for the past twelve years—places where a traffic jam could occur almost anytime during a twenty-four-hour period; where walking alone at night was to take your lifein your hands; places where people lived on top of each other but never acknowledged the other’s existence.
    As beautiful and green a city as Washington, D.C., was, it couldn’t compare to the lush beauty of West Feliciana Parish. The heat and humidity provided the perfect environment for all manner of vegetation. Azaleas. Gardenias. Sweet olive. Camellias. Palmettos. Live oaks, their massive gnarled branches so heavy they dipped to the ground, hundred-year-old magnolia trees that in May would hold so many of the large white blossoms the air would be redolent of their sweet, lemony scent.
    Once upon a time she had thought this place ugly. No, that wasn’t quite fair, she admitted. Shabby and painfully small town.
    Why hadn’t she seen it then as she did now?
    Avery turned onto her street, then a moment later into her parents’ driveway. She parked at the edge of the walk and climbed out, locking the vehicle out of habit not necessity. Her thoughts drifted to the events of the evening, particularly to those final moments with Matt.
    What did she want now? she wondered. Where did she belong?
    The porch swing creaked. A figure separated from the silhouette of the overgrown sweet olive at the end of the porch. Her steps faltered.
    â€œHello, Avery.”
    Hunter, she realized, bringing a hand to her chest. She let out a shaky breath. “I’ve lived in the city too long. You scared the hell out of me.”
    â€œI have that effect on people.”
    Although she smiled, she could see why that might be true. Half his face lay in shadow, the other half in the light from the porch fixture. His features looked hard in the weak light, his face craggy, the lines around his mouth and eyes deeply etched. A few days’ accumulation of beard darkened his jaw.
    She would have crossed the street to avoid him in D.C.
    How could the two brothers have grown so physically dissimilar? she wondered. Growing up, though fraternal not identical twins, the resemblance between them had been uncanny. She would never have thought they could be other than near mirror images of one another.
    â€œI’d heard you were back,” he said. “Obviously.”
    â€œNews travels fast around here.”
    â€œThis is a small town. They’ve got to have something to talk about.”
    He had changed in a way that had less to do with the passage of years than with the accumulated events of those years. The school of hard knocks, she thought. The great
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