“You just need to drop her off and come back home.” “Oh, God, you don’t have to stay.” April sounded slightly horrified by the prospect. My cell phone rang from inside my purse when I was halfway across the parking lot.

I grabbed my coffee mug from the cup holder and started after her. No way was I leaving a fourteen-year-old by herself in a strange situation, even if it was her high school. This morning, Adult In Charge was kicking in. My relationship with the kid had settled into more of a friendship with overtures of Adult In Charge. When I’d first come to stay with my older sister and her daughter, April had tried to get Cait to call me “Aunt Emily,” but that was only a short hop away from Auntie Em and Kansas jokes so we’d abandoned it quickly. At barely ten years older, I was more a big sister than an aunt. I didn’t have that kind of authority over her. “They’ll let you sign up.” But of course she was out before I’d even unbuckled my seat belt. “What if they don’t let me sign up? All my friends are doing this, and if I can’t, I’ll-” “Em, we’re late!” She managed to stretch both my name and that last word out into at least three syllables. We were five minutes late, so it was going great so far.Ĭaitlin huffed from the back seat as I threw my little white Jeep in park. The only thing I needed to do was get my niece to the sign-ups for the Renaissance faire. No doctor’s appointments for my big sister, no school obligations to shuttle my niece to. When I pulled into the parking lot of Willow Creek High School on that late-spring morning, I had very little on my agenda.

Well met novel