Edge (Gentry Boys #7) by Cora Brent Page A

carefully folded piece of paper.  I held the compact square in my hand and closed my fingers around it.  I didn’t need to read it because I remembered everything it said.  I didn’t even know why I’d kept it so carefully preserved, other than the fact that it was the most honest letter I’d ever received.  No one had to confirm its truth for me.  The writer had known things he couldn’t possibly have known unless Erin had told him.  And if some of it was true, then I trusted that all of it was.  He had no reason to lie, not to me anyway.  I suppose I kept the letter because Erin would have wanted me to know that he’d been her friend, that for all the terrible things that were said about the Gentrys then and now, things weren’t what they seemed. 
    Maybe few things in this world were ever what they seemed.   
    Erin’s two little sisters had kept in touch via email and social media.  Penny was going to college in Texas and Katie, sweet little Katie, would be in high school next year.  Whenever I looked at her Facebook profile I was always struck by her resemblance to her older sister.  Same cloud of dark hair, same innocent smile. 
    Whenever I came home from college I would find the time to make the sad drive down to Emblem to visit the grave of my best friend, never empty handed, always carrying some trinket or treasure that I’d come across in a store and bought because I knew she would have loved it.  Yet it was only today that I realized since I’d moved back I’d only visited once.  I wasn’t sure what I believed about death, if some part of the soul lingered in this physical realm, but whenever I knelt in the grass at Erin’s stone monument and listened to the wind I felt comforted. 
    The last time I’d driven down to Emblem, right after Thanksgiving, I’d left a piece of rose quartz, tying it up in a velvet pouch before setting it gently on her stone.   There was never anyone around who could tell me what happened to all the things I’d placed over the years.  Crosses, crystals, an angel figurine.  They were always gone the next time I returned.  I didn’t believe they’d been spirited away to some kind of ethereal, otherworldly place where Erin was but I hoped they hadn’t just been thrown away.  I hoped they somehow found their way into the life of someone who might smile over them. 
    Last autumn as I’d walked out of the cemetery gates I was struck anew by the unfairness of it all.  I used to think that we’d been left behind, all of us who loved her.  But she was still there in a way, still in Emblem.  She’d never had the opportunity to leave.  Meanwhile those of us she’d loved had moved on. 
    Erin’s family.
    Me.
    Conway Gentry and his brother, Stone. 
    We’d fled, we’d scattered, one way or another and for our own reasons.  We’d left that dusty town to its ghosts and run when we could. 
    As I closed the wooden box I again remembered the look in Conway’s eyes, the haunted defiance that flashed and disappeared. 
    And I wondered. 
    In a way, maybe some of us were still running. 
     
     

CHAPTER FIVE
    CONWAY
     
    This last name of mine comes with a history. 
    It’s possible every small town American enclave has its own myths and legends to choke on but ‘Gentry’ always had its own definition. 
    I forget the specifics of the story but some time in the grim Depression era a gaggle of my forefathers staggered out of the prairie dustbowl and plopped down in Emblem, a little Arizona desert town with a small Main Street, a large prison, and not much else. 
    Small towns have long memories and even if you’ve never been guilty of a crime, sharing a name with those who have can be enough of a condemnation. 
    For example, if your great grandfather once shot a local shopkeeper during a drunken rage spree, people remember. 
    If you have a distant uncle who bludgeoned a young farm worker to death over a poker game, people remember. 
    If there’s