From a remarkable new voice in suspenseful women’s fiction comes an emotionally searing drama about a woman who risks her life to discover the devastating truth about her family…

Humanitarian aid worker Gia Andrews chases disasters around the globe for a living. It’s the perfect lifestyle to keep her far away from her own personal ground zero. Sixteen years ago, Gia’s father was imprisoned for brutally killing her stepmother. Now he’s come home to die of cancer, and she’s responsible for his care—and coming to terms with his guilt.

Gia reluctantly resumes the role of daughter to the town’s most infamous murderer, a part complete with protesters on the lawn and death threats that are turning tragedy into front-page news. Returning to life in small-town Tennessee involves rebuilding relationships that distance and turmoil have strained, though finding an emotional anchor in the attractive hometown bartender is certainly helping Gia cope.

As the past unravels before her, Gia will find herself torn between the stories that her family, their friends and neighbors, and even her long-departed stepmother have believed to be real all these years. But in the end, the truth—and all the lies that came before—may have deadlier consequences than she could have ever anticipated….

The Last Breath

Kimberly Belle

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For the Dutchman, for allowing me roots while also giving me wings.

And for Evan and Isabella, living proof we did the two most important things right.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

Acknowledgments

Readers Guide

Questions for Discussion

A Conversation with Kimberly Belle

Copyright

Prologue

Ella Mae Andrews, April 1994

SOME GUY ON Oprah last week said there is no such thing as an accidental lapse of memory. That every phone call you forget to return, every errand you forget to run on the way home is a whisper of your subconscious.

Listen really hard, he said, and you’ll hear the reasons behind your resistance. Why do you keep putting off calling Marla Murphy back about the church bake sale? Why should your husband have to wear last week’s dirty slacks? Why did you allow your misery about Dean to distract you from the fact that the letter you wrote is still upstairs, lying forgotten on the bed? Ella Mae Andrews would especially like to know the answer to that last one.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t hear a thing her subconscious was trying to tell her over all Ray’s sobbing.

You’d think that when confronted with concrete evidence of your wife’s infidelity with the next-door neighbor, there’d at least be some screaming. Screaming and cussing and angry accusations and blame.

You’d think Ray would have tossed her out and changed the locks and shredded her clothes, that he would have marched next door to Dean’s house, fists slinging, or maybe even shoved her onto the bed for a heated round of revenge sex.

But there was none of this. There was only sobbing, which was so, so much worse.

Ella Mae may have not been able to hear the whispers of her subconscious, but her conscience was roaring, and it was telling her this was wrong. Wrong to have spent her afternoons in bed with a married man who was not her husband. Wrong to have let Dean talk about a future together, after divorces have been settled and families have been broken to pieces. Wrong to stay in a marriage with a man she no longer loved.

By now it was dark out, and Ray and Ella Mae spooned on top of the very same sheets that still smelled of Dean. The full spring moon outside the window acted like a night-light, bathing the room in a buttery glow. Ray’s tears had finally petered out but he was awake, his mouth pressed against her ear. She closed her eyes, and tried to process what he was asking.

“Let’s give it a month before either of us makes any decisions.” Ray buried his face in the damp hair at the side of her neck. “Please?”

“A month won’t change anything.”

“We’ll go to therapy. Cal will know the best person to talk to.” His voice was hoarse, his tone recklessly hopeful. “And we’ll get away, just the two of us. Drive to the coast. Fly to some island in the Caribbean. We’ll figure things out. We will. Till death do us part, remember?”

She twisted on the bed until she was facing him, not bothering to mask her answer. Ray’s eyes flickered, and it was a full five seconds before he said anything.

“Can we—” His voice broke, and he clutched her tighter. “Can we please just sleep on it?”

She didn’t respond. She couldn’t. Now that she had made her decision, the thought of another night in this house, in this bed, in this town, sent an army of insects skittering under her skin.

“One more night. That’s all I’m asking.”

She balled her hands into tight fists, buried her face in his wrinkled dress shirt and willed herself not to squirm. Ray Andrews had given her seven good years and three stepchildren she loved like her own. Surely she could give him a few more hours. At the very least, she owed him that much.

“Okay,” she whispered into his chest. “But just one more night.”

Ray’s arms relaxed with the realization he’d just bought himself some more time. Ella Mae knew he’d spend all of it trying to come up with a way to make her change her mind, and she wanted to tell him not to bother, that it was too late for magic words.

Instead, she closed her eyes and allowed them both this little respite.

Tomorrow would be here soon enough.

* * *

Ella Mae had just drifted off to sleep when Ray gave her arm a little jiggle, his voice barely a whisper. “Did you hear that?”

She cleared the sleep from her head and listened to a feverish wailing outside, from somewhere over the hill in the direction of Bill Almaroad’s farm.

“It’s just a barn cat in heat.” She allowed herself a little yawn, melted deeper into the mattress. “Go back to sleep.”

“Not that.” Ray lifted his head from the pillow. “It came from somewhere downstairs.”

Ella Mae stiffened, her senses stirring to high alert. “Could it be Gia?”

“Shh.” He sat up, swinging his feet onto the floor without a sound. “Gia’s in North Carolina with the McCallisters.”

Ray craned his neck, turning his ear to the door. That horny cat next door was still trying to summon every male feline in a fifty-mile radius, and Ella Mae struggled to hear around its wailing. And then Ray stabbed the air with a finger. “There! There it was again.”

Alarm prickled her skin. Had she heard someone moving around downstairs? She thought so, but she couldn’t be certain.

Ray, however, was. He rose, creeping on bare feet to the closet where Bo’s old baseball bat stood propped in a pair of steel-toed yard boots. He clutched it in a fist by his side and crossed the room. He stopped at the doorway to the hall, turned and pressed a finger to his lips. “Stay here,” he mouthed. And then he slipped into the darkness.

Ella Mae rose onto her elbows, straining to hear. The stairs creaked under someone’s weight, and then the noise faded into nothing. The only sound was the rhythmic pounding of her heart. She lay there for what seemed like an eternity, willing herself not to panic, her eyes wide and glued to the bedroom door.

From somewhere downstairs, there was a yelp followed by a muffled thump. Blood roared in her ears, and she scrambled across the sheets to Ray’s side of the bed, reaching for the phone with a shaky hand. It wasn’t there. The phone wasn’t there! For a brief moment, an irrational wave of anger replaced her fear. How many times had she told Ray to return the handset to the charger? A million, at least. And now, thanks to Ray, she’d landed in the middle of a Stephen King novel without a phone.

And then she heard heavy footsteps on the stairs, and her breath caught in her throat. Because if there was one thing she knew with an icy certainty, it was that if the person approaching the bedroom door were Ray, he would have called out to her by now.

She cast a panicked glance around the room, searching for a place to hide. The closet—no, not the closet, that’s the first place he would look. The footsteps grew closer, too close. Out of time and options, she slid noiselessly off the bed and crawled under it.

Two large feet stepped into the room, gleaming black Reebok runners under dark denim cuffs, and Ella Mae knew she was in danger. She knew it by the terror that rolled through every part of her, searing her chest and clawing at her throat and setting her skin on fire.

Ella Mae dug her nails into her palms hard enough to draw blood and willed herself to think. Think! But the only thing she could think of was please God let me get out of here. Please God don’t let him see me.

The shoes moved to the closet—thank God she hadn’t hidden in the closet!—and an arm swept aside the shirts and pants and dresses, arranged by type and color on matching plastic hangers. She shimmied across the carpet to her side of the bed, the side closest to the door.

And then she waited.

The shoes stepped around to Ray’s side of the bed, not bothering to tread lightly anymore, and she heard a swishing of hand against sheets, she assumed feeling for warmth. She pushed herself out from under the bed on the opposite side from him, keeping a careful watch on the shoes.

When the feet turned toward the wall, she snatched the chance, scurrying on hands and knees toward the hallway. At the door, she broke into a sprint, not turning and not pausing at the stairs, which she took by threes and fours.

Somewhere about halfway down, a hand made contact with her curls and tugged, snapping her head back hard enough for Ella Mae to see stars. Her bare feet caught air and she landed with a sickening thud on her back, aware of a sudden, piercing pain in her left temple, right before her world went black.

Moments later, Ella Mae’s world came flooding back at the bottom of the stairs, where she lay sprawled, her body steamrolled. Something warm and sticky—she knew viscerally that it was blood and that it was her own—pooled in the hair behind her left ear. She would have checked how much, but her wrists were bound and her arms had gone numb beneath her. She couldn’t scream around the cloth in her mouth, turning her tongue to sandpaper and gagging her with its sour smell. She tried to work it out with her tongue, but there was too much of it, and it was in too tight.

Ray! Where was Ray?

There was movement to her right, a dark shadow coming at her in a snow mask, a long object in a fist. A fist covered with surgical gloves. When she saw what he was holding, a box of saran wrap, her blood pressure spiked and her pulse jackhammered in her ears. She tried to wriggle away, but he stopped her with a palm to the ankle. He gave it a jerk, and her head hit the floor with a gargled moan.

Her captor pulled a long strip of plastic from the roll and pressed the end against her mouth. She shook her head, frantic and flailing, and he slipped a palm under her neck, plowing his fingers into her hair and holding her there with a thumb across her windpipe. He wrapped the plastic, once, twice, three times, around her head. She struggled and his grip on her neck tightened.

And then his eyes flashed across hers, and her entire body went still. Ella Mae’s captor was no stranger, and this was no random crime.

This was a crime of passion.

On the fourth or fifth time around her head, his work turned sloppy. A fat strip of plastic pressed across her nose. For one brief but electric moment, she thought this all must be a mistake. Surely he wasn’t trying to suffocate her on purpose. She writhed on the floor at his knees, unable to breathe through either her nose or her mouth, desperate to make him understand. If only she could catch his eye, she could make him understand.

Their eyes locked, and what she saw there stopped time. For however long he watched her, nothing mattered but their silent conversation. Not his children or hers. Not what had happened before or what would happen next. Not space or time or reason. He pushed to a stand, and something ignited in her chest—her heart or her lungs or both—an explosion of acid and fire. And then he walked away.

That was when Ella Mae knew that for her, tomorrow would never come.

1

FOR AID WORKERS, home can mean a lot of things. A two-bedroom ranch with a picket fence. A fourth-story walk-up in the city. A mud hut under a banana tree. A country listed on a passport. It can be big or small or anything in between.

One thing all these homes share, though, is that aid workers miss them. They long to go there. They are homesick.

Not me. I’ve spent the past sixteen years running from my home, and what happened there. Could have lived the rest of my life never returning to the place where I will always be known as the murderer’s daughter.

And yet here I sit in my old driveway, in a rental parked behind a shiny new Buick. More than thirty-six hours into this new disaster—my disaster—and I’ve accomplished exactly nothing more than a crusty coffee stain down the front of my jeans and a mean case of jet lag.

Embrace the chaos, Gia. Over the course of the past seven thousand miles, it has become my mantra.

Uncle Cal climbs out of his car, and he’s wearing his usual outfit: gleaming reptile skin stretched across pointy cowboy boots, Brooks Brothers suit of smoky pin-striped wool, black leather jacket worn soft and supple. Here in the hills of Appalachia, it’s a look perfectly suitable for church, a fancy restaurant or a courtroom. As one of the highest paid criminal lawyers in Tennessee, Cal’s worn it in all three.

I follow his lead and step out of the rental. It’s mid-February and Rogersville—a tiny blip on the Eastern Tennessee map—is in the death throes of winter. My ancient fleece is not equipped to handle the Appalachian Mountain cold, and I long for my winter coat, still in mothballs in a London suburb. Cal opens his arms and I step into their warmth, inhaling his familiar scent, a combination of leather, designer aftershave and Juicy Fruit gum.

“Welcome home, baby girl,” he says into my hair.

Home.

I twist my neck to face the house I’ve not seen for sixteen years, and a shudder of something unpleasant hits me between the shoulder blades. Once a place that instilled in me a sense of refuge and comfort, this house now provokes the exact opposite. Grief. Fear. Dread. This house isn’t home. Home shouldn’t give you the creeps.

Cal’s hands freeze on my protruding scapula and he steps back, his gaze traveling down my frame. Thanks to a particularly nasty bout of food poisoning last month, it’s a good ten pounds lighter than the last time he hugged me, back when I was already high-school skinny. “I thought you were putting an end to the famine, not succumbing to it.”

“If you’re ever on the Horn of Africa, you should probably stay away from the street stalls in Dadaab. Just because they claim their meat is fresh doesn’t mean it’s true. Or for that matter, that it’s even meat.”

“Good tip.” He pulls the toothpick from his molars and gives me his trademark squint, but there’s a smile in his tone. “I’ll try to remember that.”

A lucky break Cal had called it when he finally tracked me down in Kenya. There was more, something about a perjury scandal and a diagnosis that required full-time, in-home hospice care, but by then I wasn’t really listening. I was too busy wondering on what planet capping off sixteen years of high-security confinement by coming home to die would be considered lucky.

I swallow a sudden lump. “Is he in a lot of pain?”

Cal doesn’t have to ask who I mean, and at the reminder of the cancer squeezing his only brother’s pancreas, grief muddies his brow. “Not yet. But he will be very soon.”

The lump returns and puts down roots.

“For an innocent man to end his prison term like this...” He sighs, and his breath makes puffy wisps in the February air. “I’ve got lots of choice words to say about it, none of them fit for your ears.”

From the moment Cal arrived on the scene—before my father was a suspect, before he signed on as my father’s attorney, even before Ella Mae’s body had been photographed and bagged and carried away—his belief in my father’s innocence has been unwavering.

For me, the situation was never that clear. If I thought my father was capable of murder, that he premeditated and carried out a plan to suffocate Ella Mae Andrews, his wife and my stepmother, I’m not certain I could forgive either him or his behavior. In fact, I’m not certain I would even be here, that I would have traveled all this way for a last goodbye.

But I came all this way because I’m not certain. In my father’s case, the evidence is unclear, the testimony conflicted. The shadows of my doubt run in both directions.

I stuff my icy hands into my front jeans pockets and shiver, not merely from the cold.

Cal takes the gesture as his cue and reaches into his pocket, where a set of keys jingles. “Ready to get inside before you freeze to death?”

No. My heart races, and every tiny hair soldiers to attention on the back of my neck, commanding me to run. Never again. No.

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

I follow Cal up the five steps to the wraparound porch, summoning the detached efficiency that’s made me one of Earth Aid International’s top disaster relief experts. I can’t manage even an ounce of objectivity. This disaster is too close, its aftermath still too painful. I can’t detach from its reality.

A reality that, according to the doctors, could last anywhere from three weeks to three months.

“The renters moved out about six months ago,” Cal says without turning his head, searching through his key ring for the right one. The sisal mat under his feet mocks me with its cheery message: Welcome, Guests. As if anyone but me and Cal will be stepping on it, waiting to be invited in to pay their last respects. Not in a Million Years would be more like it.

“Good timing, I suppose.”

“I’ve had the house painted. And all the furniture is new. Appliances, too.”

“What happened to Dad’s old stuff?”

“I donated most of the furniture and clothes to Goodwill after the trial. The rest is in a storage facility in Morristown. I’ll get you the address and the access combination if you want to head over there.”

“I doubt I’ll have the time.” Or the inclination. Digging through old memories sounds like torture to me.

Uncle Cal twists the key in the handle and the door swings open with a groan, a sound I find eerily appropriate. He steps inside like he owns the place, which I suppose by now he probably does, but I don’t follow. I can’t. Somebody switched out my sneakers for boots of lead. My knees wobble, and I grip the doorjamb to keep from falling down.

A strange thing happens when a home turns into a crime scene. Its contents are labeled, cataloged and photographed. Walls become scene boundaries, doors and windows, the perpetrator’s entry and exit. Seemingly ordinary objects—dust bunnies behind the couch, scuff marks on the stairs, a tarnished nickel under the carpet—take on all sorts of new significance. And the people living there, in a place now roiling with bad memories and even worse juju, no longer think of it as home.

But what about that one spot where the victim took her last breath, where her heart gave its final, frantic beat? What do you do with that place? Build a shrine on top of it, wave a bouquet of smoking sage around it or pretend it’s not there?

At the foot of the stairs, Cal stops and turns, studiously ignoring my distress. My gaze plummets to the fake Persian under his feet, and a wave of sick rises from the pit of my belly. Just because I can’t see the spot doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten what happened there.

Or for that matter, that I’m ever stepping on it.

“Shut the door, please, Gia.”

I take a deep breath, square my shoulders and follow him into the house.

“My assistant Jennie did all the shopping,” he says, gesturing with his keys toward the living room. Except for the unmade hospital bed in the corner, the decor—oversize furniture, silk ferns in dark pots, framed paintings of exotic landscapes on the walls—looks plucked from the pages of a Rooms To Go catalog. “I hope it’ll do.”

I finger a plastic pinecone in a wooden bowl on the dresser and peer down the hallway toward the kitchen. There’s literally nothing here that I recognize. Probably better that way. “She did a great job.”

“The bedrooms are ready upstairs. Thought we’d let the nurse take the master. You don’t mind sharing the hall bath with me on the weekends, do you?”

I smile, hoping it doesn’t come across as forced as it feels. “I’ve gone months with nothing but a bucket, a bar of soap and a muddy stream. I think I can handle sharing a bathroom.”

One corner of Cal’s mouth rises in what looks almost like pride. “You’d make someone a fine huntin’ partner.”

He motions for me to follow him into the kitchen at the back of the house, where he points to a credit card and iPhone on the Formica counter. “Jennie stocked the kitchen with the basics, but there’s enough money on that account to buy anything else you need. You probably won’t need it for a couple of days, though.”

I peek into the refrigerator, check the cabinets above the coffee machine, peer around the corner into the open pantry. “There’s enough food here to feed half of Hawkins County for weeks.”

Cal smiles. “That’s the great thing about Jennie. She always goes above and beyond.” He plucks the iPhone from the counter and passes it to me. “She also programmed all the numbers you’ll need into the phone. The lead officer assigned to the case will be calling to set up a meeting first thing tomorrow morning. The hospice nurse arrives tomorrow morning at eight, and the motorcade and ambulance with your father, sometime before noon. And the local doctors, hospitals and the funeral home have been notified.”

“Sounds like everything’s been taken care of.”

He smiles, and his voice softens. “Just trying to make things as easy as possible for you, darlin’. I know you’d rather be anywhere but here.”

I think of some of the worst places I’ve been sent. Overpopulated Dhaka, where if the water doesn’t kill you, the air will. The slums of Abidjan after floods and mudslides have swept away too many of its children. The dusty streets of Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, where malnutrition and cholera compete for leading cause of death.

Uncle Cal has a point.

“And don’t think you’re completely out here on your own,” he says after a long stretch of silence. “I’m less than an hour down the road, and so are your brother and sister. Do me a favor and don’t let either of them off the hook, okay? This concerns their father, too.”

I half nod, half shrug. When it comes to our father, Bo would rather bury himself in his work than admit the situation affects him, while Lexi prefers to pretend he’s already dead. How can I let my siblings off the hook when neither of them are willing to acknowledge there is one? It seems as if the only person not getting off the hook around here is me.

Cal pulls me in for a hug, dropping a kiss on the top of my head. “Call me anytime, okay? Day or night. I’ll pick up, no matter where I am or what I’m doing.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.” His tone is reassuring, but he’s already backing away, already moving toward the door. “I’ll see you Saturday morning.”

He gives my shoulder one last squeeze and disappears into the hallway, and I’m slammed with a wave of panic. Disasters and destruction of global magnitude I can handle. Facing my father alone, not so much.

I rush down the hall in his wake. “Uncle Cal?”

The desperate note in my voice stops him at the door, and he turns to face me.

“Explain to me again why you can’t stay. Why you won’t be here tomorrow when Dad gets here.”

He scrubs a hand through his hair, now salt-and-pepper but still thick and shiny as ever. “Because I’m busy stalling the retrial. God willing and the creek don’t rise, your father won’t spend another second of his life in either a courtroom or a prison cell.”

A casket sure seems like the ultimate prison to me.

A few seconds later he’s gone, leaving me to wonder how I ended up here. In a town I vowed never to return to. In a house filled with ghosts and memories I’ll never outrun. In a life I have spent the past sixteen years trying to escape.

But most of all, I wonder how I ended up here alone.

2

BACK IN THE house, I put on a kettle and rummage through the cabinets for tea. Cal’s assistant must be either misinformed or seriously delusional about the number of mourners we will be expecting because she bought us a 312-count, industrial-sized box of Lipton tea bags. If we get through even one row of them, it will be a miracle. I rip open the cellophane wrapping with my teeth, pull out a bag and drop it into a yellow ceramic mug.

The sharp, bitter scent reminds me of some of my British colleagues, who are convinced a spot of tea is the cure to all emotional ails. My boss, Elsie, a hard-nosed type, drinks enough of the stuff to poison her liver...thanks to the generous splash of bourbon she adds when things in the field get really hairy. If only life were that easy.

Unlike the satellite phone I carry in the field, Cal’s iPhone has only a handful of contacts, most of them people I’ve never met and, after burying my father, will probably never think of again. It doesn’t take me long to find Bo.

His cell goes straight to voice mail, so I leave what must be my fifth message in as many days, careful to keep my voice level. Five years older and light years more serious, my brother has always preferred that people reserve their zeal for backyard fireworks and the Nature Channel, and he doesn’t respond well to gushing.

I have better success with Lexi, who picks up on the second ring. I abandon my tea and squeal, “Lexi!”

Unlike Bo, my sister welcomes enthusiasm. Demands it, even.

“Is it true? Is it really true?” Lexi’s familiar voice, the same gravelly one that used to give boys all over Hawkins County wet dreams. “Did my do-gooder little sister finally come home from Lord knows where?”

“It’s true that I’m here, yes. But nowadays, home is in Kenya.”

“Well, laa-tee-daa.” She stretches out her words, loads them up with an extra serving of Tennessee twang. “Don’t that sound fancy.”

I snort at what I know to be a joke. Lexi is no dummy. She has a master’s in finance from Stanford, runs a local chain of banks and could kick even Alex Trebek’s ass at Jeopardy. Not only is she aware of my latest whereabouts, she knows Dadaab is pretty much the polar opposite of fancy. My chest seizes with a wave of sudden affection for my sister, who I haven’t hugged in...six years? Has it really been that long?

“Where are you?” I say, switching gears. “Because I’m coming there right after I lock up the house.”

“I’m going to need a little more time than that.” Her tone takes a serious turn, matching mine, and her voice and vowels soften into the more generic timbre she perfected in college. Less country hick, more Southern belle. Unlike me, Lexi can turn her accent on and off like a faucet. “I’m about to head into a staff meeting, but I could meet you after for a late dinner. Say, seven-thirty?”

I check my watch. Three and a half hours I can fill with a nap and a shower, in that order. “Perfect. So where’s the place to be on a Wednesday night these days?”

“It’s Thursday, actually, not that it matters. And there’s only one place to be every night, and that’s the Roadkill Bar and Grill in town.”

Roadkill? I make a face. “Do I have to bring my own rodent, or do they run it down for me?”

She laughs, a throaty, musical sound that makes me wish I’d called more often. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your roots, young lady.”

“I haven’t forgotten. My palate has just evolved to more refined creatures, like stray animals. And last month in the Philippines I tried this thing called balut, a fertilized duck embryo that’s boiled alive and eaten shell and all.”

Lexi makes a retching sound. “I think I’d rather starve to death.”

Now it’s my turn to laugh. Though I’ve always been adventurous with food and my sister the pickiest eater in Appalachia, Lexi does have a point. Balut tastes just as bad the first time as it does the second, on its way back up.

“A girl’s got to eat. And besides, my rule wherever I travel is to eat or drink whatever is offered to me, even if it does end up turning my insides to gurgling water. Sharing a meal, no matter how vile, fosters trust between my team and the people we’re there to help.”

“Good Lord. Your job sucks worse than mine.”

“Mostly, my job is pretty awesome, especially for a wanderer like me. I’ve flown around the globe more times than anybody on my team, and been to more than a hundred and twenty-five countries. The consulate has had to add pages to my passport now, twice.”

“I thought your job was to make the world a better place.”

“Well, duh. That goes without saying.”

Lexi covers the receiver with a hand, muffling her voice when she tells a colleague she’s on the phone, but will be right there.

“You’ve got to go?” I ask.

“Sorry. We’ll catch up on all the rest tonight, okay?”

“Okay. And, Lex?” She pauses, but I hear papers shuffling around her desk, and even though I know I’ve probably already lost her, I say it anyway: “I’ve missed you.”

“Same here. See you at seven-thirty.” And then she’s gone.

I plunk the phone on the counter by my mug and head outside to retrieve my suitcase, still in the trunk of my rental. In the past hour, the temperature plummeted and the air turned metallic, thick with invisible frost and crystals. I cast a glance at the darkening sky. No clouds yet, but I know what that scent means. I inhale enough of it to give my lungs freezer burn. God, how I’ve missed the smell of promised snow.

Up at the street, a silver Escort slows, tires crunching in the dirt and gravel on the side of the road. Any other day, any other place, and I probably wouldn’t have paid the car a bit of attention. But I lived on Maple Street long enough to know strangers don’t typically happen down this way by accident. I keep it in my periphery as I make my way up the concrete drive.

The car pulls to a sudden stop with a piercing squeal of brakes, and I freeze, gaze glued to the passenger side window. It whirrs and lowers to reveal a dark-haired man about my age. He leans across the seat, ducking his head to get a clear view through the window.

And though he may be wearing a friendly smile, I’m not.

“Sorry to bother you.” His bangs flop over an eye, and he pushes them back with a palm. “But can you tell me where the closest gas station is?”

The breath I’d been holding makes a thick cloud before it dissipates into the air. I take two steps across the frozen grass to his car, keeping a careful distance, pointing him in the opposite direction. “You’ve got to go back toward town, but it’s not far. Only two miles or so.”

“Two miles?” He draws out the last word, stretching his mouth wide to fit the vowels. I get this a lot in the field, people trying to imitate my Tennessee drawl as if there’s something funny or quaint about an accent. But their teasing only comes across as condescension, or at the very best, surprise that I’m not as dumb as I sound.

Which is why I lay it on thick now. “Two miles, yeah. Take a left at the four-way stop, and then it’ll be on your right. You can’t miss it.”

“There wouldn’t happen to be a decent hotel near there, too, would there?”

I take in his longish hair and battered leather jacket. Scruffy chic or penny-pincher? I can’t tell. “There’s the Hale Springs Inn in town, but it’s pretty swanky. Take the highway either way, though, and you’ll find some more affordable places a little farther out.”

He gives me a smile of thanks, but I detect something more to it—there’s something more than just fuel and shelter he’s looking for. A chill that has nothing to do with the February air brushes my shoulders, and I think of my cell, lying useless inside on the kitchen counter. I glance behind me, eyeing the distance to the front door, my senses on high alert.

He points over my shoulder. “Nice place. You live here?”

“Only temporari—” I swallow the last syllable, realizing a second too late I shouldn’t have admitted to living in a semi-deserted house at the end of a semi-deserted street.

He stretches his neck to get a better look, and then his gaze returns to mine. He smiles again, and I back up a step. “You’re Gia Andrews, right?”

Something like relief that he’s not a rapist or armed robber washes over me, quickly replaced by fury. A journalist. A goddamn journalist. You’d think after all my interactions with them in the field, I would have recognized him as one immediately.

I turn and stalk to my car. “I don’t talk to journalists.”

“Fine by me, because I’m not a journalist.” I don’t slow, and he bolts out of the Escort, his voice booming over its hood. “I’m a writer. I’m writing a book about America’s most shocking wrongful convictions.”

His words are electric, shooting a paralyzing current from my crown to the tips of my toes and melding my sneakers to the icy pavement. Wrongful conviction? I pivot my head to meet his gaze. “Excuse me?”

He bites off a mitten and digs around in a coat pocket, then crosses the driveway and hands me a card. “I’m Jeffrey Levine, by the way.”

I blink at the paper between my fingers, thick white linen with raised letters and a crest embossed in blue. “It says here you’re a professor of law.”

He slides his bare hand back into his mitten and nods. “For Emory. I’m taking a semester sabbatical to work on my book. It’s called True Crimes, False Convictions: Criminal Injustice in America.” When I don’t respond, he shrugs. “Yeah, it’s a working title.”

“And you think my father’s case is one of them?”

His head bobs in a decisive nod, and those ridiculous bangs flop over one eye. “Let me put it this way—your father’s case is a textbook on what not to do. How to ignore leads. How to sweep conflict of interest under the rug. How to miscarry justice and send an innocent man to prison.”

“But there was a witness.” I pivot now to face him, purposefully playing devil’s advocate. It’s one thing to say my father’s conviction was wrongful, another thing entirely to believe it. There was too much evidence to the contrary.

“One who thought he saw him breaking and entering his own house two hours after the time of death, not standing over the body with a smoking gun.”

“Ella Mae was suffocated.”

He gives me a look. “It was a figure of speech. And between you and me and everybody else who’s going to read my book, I think Dean Sullivan’s testimony was coerced. Did you know the police held him for six and a half hours? That screams gross misconduct to me.”

Six and a half hours? Is that even allowed? But still. “The judge and jury believed him.”

“Of course they did. Mr. Sullivan was an upstanding, God-fearing citizen.” He points past me to the ramshackle ranch where the Sullivans once lived. “Just look at him now.”

I gape at the neighboring property, so neglected I’d assumed it was abandoned. Front steps, rickety and rotting, lead to a front porch littered with trash and a ripped brown leather sofa. The yard, a foul-looking patch of dirt and rock, has seen neither fertilizer nor lawn mower since sometime last century. Even Dean’s prized rosebushes have hardened into brown and scraggly branches jutting up from the frozen earth, a tangle of sticks and thorns.

“People actually still live there?” I say.

“Dean Sullivan lives there. Alone. His family won’t have anything to do with him. His only friend is Jack Daniel’s. His house, his yard, his entire life is a mess.”

A mess might just be the biggest understatement on the planet. Dean’s house makes some of the shanties in Dadaab look like palaces.

“What do you think he’s hiding from?” Jeffrey asks.

I don’t know what to say to that. I’d never considered the possibility Dean was still living there, much less hiding from something.

I think for a moment. If everything Jeffrey said is true, then why not tell me this right away, when he stopped to ask for directions? Or better yet, why not tell Uncle Cal? I was barely eighteen when Ella Mae was murdered, and I’ve had practically nothing to do with the case since.

“What do you want from me? You should be talking to my uncle Cal. He’s the one who handled everything.”

“I’d love to talk to him, but unfortunately, he wants nothing to do with me.” He gives me a wry smile. “It might have something to do with me telling him I’m devoting an entire chapter to his shoddy defense of your father.”

His words echo in my ears, bounce around my brain, feel foreign on my tongue. I don’t get it. Uncle Cal is known as the Tennessee Tiger, as tenacious and tireless in the courtroom as he is with his girlfriends, an endless string of gold diggers and social climbers. There’s no way his defense of my father—his own brother, for Christ’s sake—was shoddy. What is this guy talking about?

Jeffrey arches a brow, seeming almost amused at my reaction. “This surprises you?”

“Yes, this surprises me, and it also infuriates me. Cal is a brilliant lawyer, and he worked his ass off to put together Dad’s defense. He barely ate, he didn’t sleep and nobody—nobody—was more upset than Cal when his brother, the one he defended, went to prison.”

He lifts his shoulders in a don’t-blame-the-messenger gesture. “Then why didn’t he try to appeal?”

And here, I think, I have him. Lawyer, my ass. He doesn’t even have all the information. “You should check your sources, because I know for sure he did appeal.”

“Once.” Jeffrey points a mitten to the sky. “Just one time, to the Court of Appeals.”

“And it was declined.”

“Denied.”

“Same thing.”

“But why did he stop there? Why didn’t he keep going?”

“I don’t...” I take two steps to my trunk, pause and turn back. “He could have done that?”

“Of course he could have. He definitely should have, but he didn’t.”

My heart misses about five beats. Cal slacked on my father’s case? I still don’t believe it. Dad is his only brother. There’s no way.

Jeffrey points to his card, still clutched between my fingers, and turns to go. “Think about it, and give me a call when you’re ready to hear more. And I hope you’ll be ready sometime soon, because in the spirit of full disclosure, you should know I’m writing this book with or without your family’s input. You can help me write it, or you can sit back and wait for your copy.”

He waves one last time, and I watch him climb into his car and drive away, my mind swirling, humming, tripping over his message. About Cal’s shoddy defense, about Dean Sullivan’s coerced testimony, but mostly about Jeffrey Levine’s steadfast belief in my father’s innocence. How is it possible to have that much blind faith in a person he’s never met? How can a complete stranger be so unequivocally certain Ray Andrews did not murder his wife, while I—his own daughter—can’t?

Turning back to the rental, I slip his card into the front pocket of my jeans and push it with two fingers until it’s as deep as it can go, flush against the bottom seam.

Maybe sometime soon I’ll work up the nerve to call Jeffrey and ask.

3

Ella Mae Andrews, September 1993

ELLA MAE THUNKED her empty mug onto the wooden floor planks and gave her porch swing another shove with the heel of a foot. The metal chains squawked in time to her movement. Back. Forth. Back...

Somewhere in the distance a lawn mower whined, and Ella Mae envied both its gusto and its purpose. With two stepchildren in college and the third headed that way next fall, she found herself with more and more time to fill in her already spotless house, in her increasingly aimless day. She checked her watch. Ten o’clock, and already she was bored as hell.

A green truck crested the hill, heading in her direction, and the sight of it made her feel like dancing. Even if the driver was merely turned around, maybe she could strike up a conversation. By the time she’d given him precise, detailed directions, she would have killed a good fifteen minutes, maybe more. Would it be completely pathetic if she offered him a cup of coffee?

Good Lord. When had life become so dreary? She should probably think about getting a hobby.

Ella Mae stood and walked to the edge of the porch, watching and waiting until the truck was close enough to read the letters above the cab: Golan’s Moving & Storage. The new neighbors, and about damn time, too. The old Bennett house had been empty for over a month now, a month in which Ray had done nothing but complain about how the property was going to pot. Two hornets’ nests under the gable, a milky film on the windows and a patch of crabgrass crawling dangerously close to Ray’s prized fescue. As if Ella Mae gave a shit about grass.

But now. Now she sure could give a shit, and her heart dealt an extra, hopeful beat at the idea of new neighbors, a new girlfriend, new anything.

A black sedan with Illinois plates pulled to a stop at the curb, and a family of four clambered out. Two blonde kids—both lanky girls in their early teens—tore across the front yard, screaming and giggling with the sort of giddiness that can only come at the tail end of a long drive.

Their mother was considerably less merry. She unfolded herself from the car, smoothed her rumpled dress and squinted into the sun at her new home.

“It’s pretty,” she said. Her tone implied she didn’t really care how it looked.

The husband, a tall man with his daughters’ flaxen hair and the build of a former athlete, popped the trunk. “I know it’s a little smaller than we’re used to, but just take a look at that view.” His accent was northern and nasal, but in Ella Mae’s ears it sounded electric, exciting, exotic. “That’s not something we would’ve ever found back in Chicago.”

Chicaaago.

The woman didn’t seem to notice the rolling fields of grass and wildflowers beneath smoky mountaintops, a view that, the first time Ella Mae saw it, stilled her soul and nipped at her heart with its beauty. Instead, the woman sighed, her expression unchanged, her tone as mousy as her appearance. “Pretty.”

“Come on,” her husband said. He stepped around the car and swung an arm around his wife’s hunched shoulders. “Can you at least try to want to live here?”

“I just told you it was pretty.”

Ella Mae knew she was eavesdropping. She knew they would notice her soon, gripping the rails on the edge of her porch, and see she was hanging shamelessly on their every word, but she didn’t go inside. She wanted to move even closer and hear everything, lean in and get a better view.

She didn’t care if they saw her. This was the most excitement she’d had since last month, when she’d chased Bill Almaroad’s cows out of her begonias with a broomstick.

The man looked down at his wife. “We agreed this move would be a good thing, remember? A new job, a fresh start.” He deposited a chaste kiss on her cheek, and she shrunk even further into herself. He released her, sweeping a long arm toward the house. “Welcome to our new adventure.”

And that’s when he noticed Ella Mae. A jolt of something she hadn’t felt in a good while shot clear to her toes and crackled and popped on her skin like a Fourth of July sparkler. Later, she would think back to this very second, and think it was appropriate their eyes met right as that last word rolled off his tongue. Adventure. But for now, she simply smiled and waved.

“Hi, y’all.” Ella Mae started down the steps toward her new neighbors. “I’m Ella Mae Andrews. Welcome to Rogersville.”

* * *

Later that evening, Ella Mae noticed that Ray barely smiled when he pulled up to find two strangers on his front porch, grinning and sipping wine from the good glasses, the ones they hardly ever used except for birthday dinners and at Christmas. He barely smiled when Ella Mae handed him a martini, extra cold and extra dirty, and told him she’d made his favorite supper—peppered beef Stroganoff with garlic bread. He barely smiled when Dean complained about the sad state of his lawn, and said he had a lot of work to do before it could measure up to the one he’d kept back in Naperville, which had won Cedar Glen’s finest front yard five years in a row.

Oh, Ray was friendly enough. His manners were too refined to have been rude. He chatted about the town’s history and the fine school system, and he asked after their girls. But he barely ever smiled, and that wasn’t her husband’s way with company at all.

After the main course, when Ray and Ella Mae were serving up dessert in the kitchen while their guests waited at the dining room table, his good graces went down the drain, along with the remnants of his second martini.

“It’s a school night,” he pointed out, a bit too loud for Ella Mae’s taste.

Ella Mae was fully aware it was Wednesday and that the company was messing up his Wednesday night routine—supper, a mindless blur of sitcoms, bed. She was also aware that Wednesday night was like every other night in this house.

“Shh, keep it down, will you? I left a message for you at the pharmacy.”

“I just wish you would’ve warned me ahead of time,” he said.

“I tried.” She began carving her famous rhubarb and strawberry pie into generous triangles with a butcher knife. “I had to make an executive decision, so stop fussing. It’s not like you had anything important planned for tonight.”

“The game’s on.”

This from a man who thought fumble meant sticking his hands down her pants. Ella Mae squinted and planted a fist on her hip. “Who’s playing?”

Ray shrugged, his hesitation a beat too long. “Doesn’t matter, now that I’m missing it.”

Ella Mae returned to her pie. “I didn’t think so.”

“Besides, we don’t know anything about those people. They could be sociopaths or serial murderers for all we know.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. He’s the new vice principal at the high school, and she’s a stay-at-home mother of two adorable girls. They’re perfectly normal, everyday members of society. They’re neighbors. We’re being neighborly.”

“Whatever. I don’t like him.”

Ella Mae wasn’t surprised. She’d only known Dean a few hours, but already she could see he wasn’t a man’s man. Too groomed, his clothes too stylish, his looks entirely too playboy handsome. Oh, yes. Cherokee High’s newest vice principal would certainly be a popular man about town, but not with the husbands.

“Let’s get back to our guests, shall we?” Ella Mae slid the last piece onto a plate and pointed Ray to the forks. “And be nice. I’m looking to make a new friend.”

Over the course of the next hour, Ella Mae tried. She honest-to-God tried. She asked Allison about her kids and if the girls played any sports. She asked about her favorite books and if Allison would be interested in joining the book club. She even offered to take Allison on a tour of the town and show her the best places to shop. Allison was painfully shy, said all of ten words over the course of the entire meal. By the time they moved outside for coffee and brandy on the porch, Ella Mae regretted her offer, and she dreaded those hours alone in a car with Allison.

Her gaze landed on Dean, sipping on a glass of Ray’s best brandy and looking more comfortable in his skin than an out-of-town semistranger should. Talk about opposites attracting. Dean was gorgeous and funny and charming, and for the life of her Ella Mae couldn’t figure out what a man like him saw in quiet, mousy Allison.

Three hours alone in a car with him, on the other hand...

Dangerous. Just thinking about Dean in that way was dangerous. Ella Mae flushed to the tips of her ears, and she gave herself a good scolding. Married women should not be thinking naughty thoughts about their equally married new neighbor, no matter how sexy he might be.

And then Dean laughed, a low and raspy sound that resonated somewhere deep in Ella Mae’s belly.

Oh, God. She was thinking naughty thoughts about Dean Sullivan again.

“Thank you again for dinner,” Dean said, his gaze lingering on Ella Mae a smidge longer than necessary. “I can’t imagine a more perfect greeting on our first night in town.”

“You’re welcome anytime.” Goose bumps tightened her skin, and Ella Mae looked away, out over her backyard, blinking into the inky blackness. There. Much better.

“And thanks for asking Gia to hang out with the girls tonight. I keep telling Allison they’re old enough to—” Dean broke off at his wife’s sharp look. “Well, we just worry.”

“Our younger daughter was diagnosed with Type I diabetes last June.” Allison’s voice was quiet as ever, but for the first time, Ella Mae heard footprints of fire in her tone. “Gave us quite a scare.”

Ella Mae felt a familiar tug, like some sort of phantom limb in her uterus, at the mother’s worry she saw in Allison’s expression. She loved Ray’s three kids fiercely, honestly she did, but it wasn’t the same kind of love she had for her own flesh-and-blood child.

“That must have been terrifying,” Ella Mae said.

“It still is,” Dean said. “Every time we think we have things under control, Caroline gets the flu or has a growth spurt, and we have to adjust her diet and insulin.” Dean turned to Ray, gave him a wry smile. “I have a feeling we’re about to become the pharmacy’s new best customers.”

Finally, a subject that got Ray to smile, really smile, and he puffed out his chest. “Glad to hear it. Though lucky for you, the money won’t be coming from your pocket. The school system recently overhauled their employee insurance plan, as I’m sure you know. I was an advisor to the task force.”

“Then I should thank you, since their plan is one of the reasons we moved here. There aren’t many plans out there robust enough to cover anything more than the bare minimum of insulin.” Dean shook his head, made a sour face. “No matter what you think of her husband’s politics, Hillary Clinton is right. The health care system in this country is flat-out broken.”

Ella Mae winced. Uh-oh. Dean had said the C-word.

Ray grew about four inches in the wicker chair, and his tone took a turn for the nasty. “Now I know politics in Chicago are a whole lot bluer than down here in the South, but let me assure you in no uncertain terms. Hillary’s plan is a disaster. Too top-heavy, far too regulated. Anybody who thinks it would work in the real world, isn’t living in the real world.”

Unlike his neighbor, Dean didn’t seem to get the least bit riled up. He lifted his lips in a friendly smile, crossed his legs casually at the ankle. “I’m living in the real world, Ray. And my world has gotten a lot more expensive since our plan back home dropped the coverage for dependents. Do you know how expensive it is to find insurance for a kid with diabetes? I’m not saying she’s not worth every penny. Just that her care is expensive and that clinics and hospitals seem to be in the business of making sure she stays sick, instead of caring about her health.”

Ella Mae popped out of her chair. “Ray, honey, would you like some more Scotch?”

Ray raised his glass in the air, jiggled it around. Dangit. Still a good two fingers left.

She whipped her head around to Allison. “More ice water?”

But Ray wasn’t to be distracted, and he turned back to Dean, his tone and stance on edge. “I’m not saying the insurance system isn’t broken, Dean. Just that the healthcare system is fine as it is, and the Clintons should concentrate on what’s really ailing this country—the economy.”

“Then what do you suggest for families like mine?” Dean’s voice was as amiable as ever. “One whose employers drop the dependents from their insurance plan when one of their employee’s family members is diagnosed with a chronic or life-threatening illness.”

Before Ray could respond, Ella Mae stepped in front of him, blocking his view of Dean and reaching for his still full glass, and giving him a look that left no doubt as to how quickly he needed to stop picking a fight with the neighbor. “How about I refresh y’all’s glasses?”

“That’s all right, darlin’.” Ray clenched his jaw and stood, snatching back his glass. “I’ll go in and do it myself.”

And then he went inside without another word, without catching the screen door so it didn’t slam shut behind him.

Ella Mae sank back into her chair, and the three fell into an awkward silence punctuated by the angry cry of a cicada.

Allison broke it first, standing, smoothing her skirt. “I better get back to Caroline. Thank you for a lovely night, Ella Mae. Will you thank Ray for me, as well?”

Ella Mae cleared her throat. “Of course. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

At the bottom step to the side yard, Allison paused. “You coming, Dean?”

Dean pushed off the railing to go and then thought better of it. “I’ll be over in just a minute. I want to wait for Ray, apologize for getting him so riled up.”

“Oh. Okay, then.” Allison glanced at Ella Mae, smiled stiffly and then disappeared, swallowed up into the shadows. “Don’t be long,” came her voice from across the yard.

“I won’t.” Dean’s answer was distracted. His attention was elsewhere. On Ella Mae elsewhere.

Ella Mae went as still as an opossum on a country road. Across the lawn, a door squeaked, fell shut with a click. Inside Ella Mae’s house, the low notes of a TV hummed. Ella Mae was breathless. Her heart might have even stopped beating. She was alone with Dean Sullivan on the porch, and something about the way he looked at her made her think he’d been waiting all night for this moment.

“Seems we chased everybody away,” Dean said.

“Not that far away.” Ella Mae’s tone held a note of reckless warning, her eyes a flash of daring. Daring him, and maybe also herself.

A breeze kicked up on the front lawn, chilling Ella Mae’s skin and tickling her nose with the scent of honeysuckle. This was the tipping point, Ella Mae knew. Dean could get up now and walk away, go home to his new house and boring wife and sleeping daughters, or he could send them both into a frenzy.

He turned and leaned his elbows onto the railing, staring off into the black night. “I love it here already. And that view is sure something else.” He glanced at Ella Mae over his shoulder. “Too bad we can’t see it now because it’s pretty spectacular, don’t you think? Especially now the leaves are about to change.”

Ella Mae said nothing.

He straightened and whirled back around, and his dark gaze found hers immediately. “Principal Whitehead told me I’ve not lived until I’ve seen Great Smoky Mountains Park. Are the trees there as pretty as he says?”

Trees? He was really talking about trees? Disappointment spread across her skin like a bruise, and she reprimanded herself for it. “He’s right. They are pretty.”

“What’s that, about a forty-five-minute drive?”

She bit her lip, nodded again.

And then his mouth rode up into a wicked smile. “Do you think that’d be far enough?”

Ella Mae’s heart took off in a wild gallop.

Frenzy. Definitely frenzy.

4

IN MANY RESPECTS, returning to Rogersville after all these years feels a lot like my life in the field. Families torn apart by tragedy. A disaster that’s at best chaotic and unpredictable and far, far out of my control. And at the end of the day, an almost desperate quest for distraction from the doom brewing all around me, even if only for a few hours.

I squeeze my rental between an ancient Chevy and a mud-encrusted truck, wriggle myself out and peer over its roof at my destination. Square and stout, the building’s restored bricks and a fresh coat of paint gleam under old-fashioned gas lamps and the fading evening light. My gaze travels to the thick white letters painted across the picture window to the right of the door. Roadkill Bar and Grill.

Distraction in the form of cold beer and flattened rodents.

The door swings open with a blast of country music and the scent of something delicious. Truffles, maybe. Truffles? A couple steps out onto the sidewalk, their jackets hanging open as if it were fifty degrees out instead of hovering somewhere just above twenty. At the edge of the sidewalk, the man stops to dig around in his pockets for his keys.

“But hasn’t he already been punished enough?” his date says, picking up their conversation with a toss of her drugstore dye-job hair. “I mean, he is dying of cancer.”

“Good,” the man says. “He murdered that woman, and now he deserves to die. An eye for an eye and all that.”

A high-pitched giggle. “This is America, not Afghanistan.”

I don’t want to hear this conversation. I don’t want to hear it, and yet I can’t seem to stop listening. It’s as if I’m rendered powerless by the spectacle unfolding in front of me, like staring into a black hole or accidentally discovering the hotel TV offers free porn. Curiosity takes over, and I have to stay until the very end. I duck my head and pretend to search through my bag, my ears practically flapping off my head.

I hear what can only be the sound of male spit hitting pavement. “Damn straight, this is America. And this here’s American justice at its finest. That old man is getting exactly what he has coming to him.”

“I don’t think you can credit the justice system for giving an old man cancer. Jesus Christ, maybe, but not the justice system.”

“Freeing a convicted murderer ain’t justice, that’s for damn sure.” Keys jingle, and their footsteps take off in my direction. “In my book, life in prison means dying in prison.”

Another giggle followed by a playful slap. “Tommy Aldean, since when did you write a book?”

“I’m the next Dan Brown, sweetheart. Guaran-damn-teed to be a bestseller.”

By now they’re coming up alongside me, and I bend and retie my tennis shoe even though the lace is still snug. None of my sneaky surveillance moves are necessary. They’re not paying me the least bit of attention.

He loops an arm around her neck and pulls her close. “And if you lift that pretty little shirt of yours, I’ll pull out my Sharpie and sign your chest.”

She swats his arm and acts offended, but ten thousand Kenyan shillings say Tommy Aldean’s Sharpie will be making an appearance later on tonight. They stop to make out on the sidewalk and I stumble off, their words ringing in my ears.

Small town. Big goddamn scandal.

Sixteen years is a long time to be away from anywhere, with the possible exception of Rogersville, Tennessee. The land that time forgot.

If only I could forget that time.

Murderer. Convicted felon. The taunts and accusations rattle through my brain and stir up old muck, suddenly as real to me as the sidewalk under my sneakers. Innocent until proven guilty sounds nice in theory, but it’s a fairy tale. For the citizens of Rogersville, my father was a murderer long before the police put him in handcuffs. As far as they were concerned, the verdict was merely a technicality.

And now, Tommy Aldean and his bleached blonde just confirmed what I already knew. The Andrews family gossip rating is still at an all-time high. Our drama is still a favorite topic, our tragedy still local folklore.

I tell myself this time around will be different, that I’m older now. Older and wiser and toughened up by a job that has required me to grow a giant pair of testicles—not literally, of course, though I’m known to employ tactics in the field that make my colleagues wonder aloud at the contents of my pants. Regardless, I’m determined to handle things better. More maturely. Or at least, with not quite as much vomiting and public weeping.

I square my shoulders, pull open Roadkill’s heavy oak door and step into my past.

* * *

The music doesn’t screech to a halt when I walk through the door. Mouths don’t hang open; eyeballs don’t bug out; forks don’t pause in midair. No one really notices me at all, an occurrence I find relieving and strangely anticlimactic at the same time.

I weave a path through the sleek wooden tables to a stool at the far end of the bar, picking out a few familiar faces along the way, trawling through my memory banks for matching names. I’ve kept in touch with no one here beyond my own siblings, and without old yearbooks (trashed) or high school reunions (avoided) to keep the synapses connected, the endeavor is hopeless. I shrug off my coat, hang it on a hook under the bar and turn my attention to the drink specials on a chalkboard menu above the bar instead.

A loud thunk punctuates the music and I shift on my stool, twisting my torso to face the man pushing through the swinging door from the kitchen. Dark hair, three-day beard, ruggedly handsome enough to prompt an appreciative murmur from a gaggle of women behind me, but diplomatic enough to pretend not to notice. He sees me, and surprise flashes across his expression. I blink and it’s gone.

“Sorry.” He sets a crate of steaming wineglasses onto the bar and swipes his hands over his black apron. “Hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

“Nope, just got here.”

He cocks his head and inspects me, and an icy shiver skates down my spine. It’s this breathless moment I hate the most, that moment of waiting for recognition to hit, waiting on the verdict for a crime I didn’t commit. His gaze travels over my curls and across my face, dipping even farther down to my vintage Rolling Stones T-shirt under an ancient wool cardigan. When his expression settles into one of resolute opinion, I reach for my coat.

“Beer,” he says, “but only when there’s nothing else better. An occasional cocktail, but not sweet. Vodka with soda and a lime or straight up. But first choice would be wine, preferably red and preferably imported.”

Relief hits me like a Valium at both his innocuous message and his speech, deep and clipped with a generic accent. No nasal twang, no elongated vowels to tell me where he’s from, except that he’s not from around here. I drop my coat back onto the hook, settle back onto my stool.

But as far as drinks go, the man has me pegged.

“Well?” An undertone of mock uncertainty slips into his voice, playing bass to his lighthearted teasing. “How’d I do?”

“Pretty decent. Extra credit if you can actually produce the imported red.”

The bartender grins like he just pulled the winning numbers for the Tennessee Mega Millions, and I feel myself relax the slightest bit. Flirting with handsome strangers in crowded bars? Now I’m back in familiar territory.

He slides a bottle of Bordeaux from the wine refrigerator behind him and sets to work uncorking it. “Did you know in Tennessee it’s legal to take roadkill home and eat it, whether you’re the one who creamed it or not?”

“I hope that doesn’t mean you’re planning to serve me skunk stew. Because I’ve tried it, and just between you and me, yuck. Ditto for opossum pie.”

He perches on an elbow and glances over both shoulders in an exaggerated fashion, sending the tips of his hair brushing along the collar of his V-neck T-shirt. “Don’t let the chef hear you. He’s a little sensitive about his food. He once tossed a customer out for complaining his raccoon ragù was too salty.”

“Which is, of course, ridiculous because everyone knows the only way to cook raccoon is by boiling it in salt water.”

The bartender leans back, and a brow creeps upward. “And here I thought you were a Roadkill virgin.”

“Virgin!” A familiar, throaty laugh tickles my ears, and I whirl around on my stool to face my grinning sister. “Not since Andrew Hopkins’s parents let him borrow their brand-new station wagon sophomore year.”

“Better than the bathroom at Burger King, where you lost yours.”

“That was a vicious rumor.” Lexi leans in, giggling, her breath hot on my neck. “And it was Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

A laugh pushes up my throat followed by a hot sob, and I launch myself at my sister. I wrap my arms around her and bury my face in her hair, inhaling her familiar floral scent, blinking back the tears heating the corners of my eyes. I don’t remember much of our mother—I was only five when she crashed her car into a tree—except for this feeling of love. Love so large I think my heart might explode. Love so fierce it hurts to breathe.

“Let go, Gi. You’re suffocating me.” Lexi wriggles her hands in between us and pushes me to arm’s length. The skin around her eyes crinkles in a smile. “And besides, I want to get a good look at you.” She surveys me up and down, her gaze settling on the denim hanging loose from my hips. “Good Lord, you’re a walking advertisement for anorexia.”

“And you are as gorgeous as ever.” Honey hair that falls perfectly straight down her back, bowed lips curved into a flirtatious smirk, sinuous limbs begging to be draped over the hood of a Corvette. My sister may be a little older now, her designer denim a little tighter, but Sexy Lexi Andrews is still every inch Miss Cherokee High three years in a row.

She turns and smacks a palm on the bar, demanding the bartender’s attention. “Jake, you handsome devil, have you met my sister Gia yet?”

If Jake is surprised this is a family reunion, he doesn’t show it. He flicks the towel over a shoulder and extends a long arm over the bar. “Jake Foster. Nice to meet you, Gia.”

His grip is firm, his hand warm and smooth in mine. “Nice to meet you, too.”

“Fire up your fry-daddy,” Lexi tells Jake. “We’ve got to get some meat on my sister’s bones, pronto.” She winks at me. “There’s not a soul within fifty miles who’s not put on at least ten pounds since Jake opened this place five years ago. Wait’ll you taste his food. You’ll know why he’s got girls all over town flinging their panties at his front door.”

Jake gives her an appreciative grin and pours two generous glasses of wine. When he tells us about the special—seared duck breast and oven-roasted kale and sweet potato hash smothered in jus—my mouth waters and I smack my lips. Jake notices, and he gives me a cocky grin.

“Don’t laugh,” I say. “My last real meal was a watery stew with questionable chunks of what the cook swore was goat. The stray dog population took a hit that day, though, so I don’t think he was being entirely honest.”

“I don’t know whether to be offended or relieved,” Jake says.

Lexi snorts. “Try disgusted.”

He throws back his head and laughs, a deep rumble that vibrates through my bones, and then disappears into the kitchen with a twirl of his towel and our orders.

As soon as he’s gone, I whirl on my stool to face Lexi, and the words tumble out of my mouth like stock cars at the Bristol Motor Speedway, racing to the finish line. “Did you know that vice principal Sullivan still lives next door—his house is a dump by the way—and is a raging alcoholic?”

“That’s not exactly a 411, you know. By now that man’s liver is so pickled, you could batter it, fry it and serve it on a platter.”

“And his family? What happened to them?”

Lexi sips her wine. “Gone. Hightailed it out of here after what must have been his fourth or fifth DUI.”

The professor’s words—What do you think he’s hiding from?—skitter through my mind, but I switch gears. Dean Sullivan’s fall from grace, though intriguing, is the least of my worries.

I move on. “This law professor from Atlanta came by the house earlier, and you wouldn’t believe what he said about Dad.”

Lexi scowls and plunks down her wineglass, her gaze fishing over my right shoulder. “Why is it that every time somebody gets saved at Light of Deliverance church, they turn into a dowdy old frump? Surely that outfit can’t be what Jesus intended for his fans.”

I don’t bother checking. My sister is the Carrie Bradshaw of Appalachia, and not many people can live up to her fashion standards. And besides, I know this tactic. By interrupting me with some ridiculous nonsense, Lexi is hoping to distract me from a subject she hasn’t spoken more than a few words about in almost sixteen years: our father.

“I think they’re called followers,” I say, not backing down, “and we were talking about Dad’s case.”

“Whatever. That woman is a What Not to Wear episode waiting to happen. Oh, Lord. Now she’s passing out flyers.” She snorts and rolls her eyes. “Probably for their next snake handling.”

“Could you focus, please? This professor is writing a book about wrongful convictions. He thinks Dad’s is one of them.”

And now, I think, I’ve got my sister’s attention. Her gaze whips to mine, her good-humored expression fades and her brows slide into the ghost of a medically frozen V. She reaches for the wineglass and drains it, knuckles tightening ever so slightly around the stem. And then she dabs her glossy lips with a napkin and the storm on her face vanishes as quickly as it came, like a twister sucked up into a dissolving cloud.

“You’d think people would’ve heard by now that snake bites everybody.” Her voice is a little too loud, and a lot too vehement. “Even holier-than-thou Bobby Humphrey. By the time they got him the antivenom, he was foaming at the mouth. Besides, I thought the whole point was prayer, not antivenom. Isn’t that kind of cheating?”

“Lexi! We have to talk about Dad.”

She leans across the bar, snatches the bottle of wine and fills her glass to within an inch of the rim. “The hell we do.”

A familiar frustration ties a string of knots across my shoulders. My sister has always been a great believer in the power of denial. How else can I explain her staying in the one place where she will always be the murderer’s daughter?

But what if what Jeffrey Levine said is true? What if all this time, I’ve been running from something my father didn’t do?

“Did you hear me? This professor thinks Dad might be innocent. What if he’s right?”

She shakes her head definitively, almost violently. “He’s not.”

“But what if he is?”

“He’s not!” she shrieks, shrill enough that I jump. Everyone jumps, in fact. A young couple at a table to our left, three friends sharing a plate of fried calamari at our backs, two pot-bellied men in trucker hats three stools down. Even Jake looks up from the beer he’s pulling at the opposite end of the bar, and hell’s bells, I catch pity in his expression.

But Lexi has always preferred the part of sexy bombshell over damsel in distress, and really, who can blame her? Our life has been distressing enough. She tosses him a beauty-queen smile and reaches for her wineglass with a shaking hand, and all around us, conversations pick back up one by one.

I lean close, lower my voice. “Why do you refuse to discuss the possibility he may not be guilty?”

She glances over, and I see a flash of my sister. The real Lexi. The unguarded and devastated Lexi. “Because it’s a whole hell of a lot easier than praying he’s innocent.”

And then she flicks her perfect hair over a perfect shoulder and real Lexi’s gone.

5

WHEN THE KITCHEN door swings wide a few minutes later revealing Jake coming at us with two plates piled high with tonight’s special, I realize I’m ravenous. Outta-my-way-and-let-me-at-it ravenous. He slides our dinners onto the bar, and I scoop up a bite and shove it in my mouth before he’s pulled back his hand.

“Omigod,” I mumble around the food, slicing off an even bigger bite of duck, stuffing it in with the half-chewed hash. I say more, but judging by the confused look on Jake’s face, none of it very intelligibly.

He blinks at Lexi. “What did your sister just say?”

She watches me take another monster bite, and her pretty nose wrinkles. “I don’t know, but you better back up.”

When you live in an area mired in chronic famine, it’s easy to forget how food is supposed to taste. Meals are freeze-dried and carried down dusty roads to distribution sites where nobody cares if they please the palate, as long as they nourish the body. After a while, you stop missing the tangy sweetness of a juicy plum, the prick of sea salt just before it explodes on your tongue, the way one bite of something delicious can be as satisfying as a sweaty romp between the sheets. Jake’s food makes me remember all those things now.

I swallow, swipe a napkin across my lips. “I said, this is an orgasm on a plate.”

A smile slides up Jake’s face and settles in. It’s a magnetic, no-holds-barred smile, a smile that’s fierce and undeniably sexy, a smile that tugs and tingles somewhere deep and low in my belly.

Jake Foster would make a mighty fine distraction.

He refills our glasses and points to the far end of the bar. “I’ll be down there if you need me.”

After he leaves, Lexi and I don’t return to our discussion of Dad. Not of the Emory professor, either. Skirting around the reason for our reunion is only a temporary respite, I know, but neither of us seems willing to risk another outburst. We scarf down our Thursday-night specials and tiptoe around each other, chatting and catching up on jobs and boys and Bo, who is about to put his name on yet another patent for Eastman Chemical Company, this time for a new and revolutionary mascara.

It takes a couple beats for her message to muddle through my jet-lagged brain. “Hold up. Bo hasn’t called me back because he’s working on a stupid mascara?”

“Excuse me, but just because you got all the dark lashes in the family—” she leans in, giving me a pointed look “—mascara is not stupid. Especially Bo’s. His is about to change the way women put on makeup in the mornings.”

“Again, we’re talking about a cosmetic.” My level tone abandons me now, as does my inside voice. “Not a cure for cancer. Not the key to world peace. A freaking cosmetic.”

Lexi sniffs. “One that women all over the world are going to pay a lot of money for. Good thing Bo promised me a lifetime supply.”

I resist rolling my eyes, but just barely. “But not one that’s more important than calling back his sister, who he hasn’t talked to in forever. And I know I don’t have to remind you what’s happening tomorrow. I swear to God, if he ditches Dad’s homecoming for a tube of face paint—”

She stops me with a manicured hand in the air. “Calm down. He’s going to call you back.”

“How do you know? When did you last talk to him?”

A frown tries to push up her forehead—a frown aimed at me, and not our errant brother. “Not for a few days, but Cal has. He told me Bo knows about tomorrow.”

“Good.” Though I may have been willing to back off—temporarily, at least—on the subject of Jeffrey Levine and his allegations, I bite down now. Dad’s homecoming is a party I don’t plan to host all by myself. “Because Dad’s supposed to arrive at noon.”

Her next words come at the tail end of a sigh. “So I hear.”

“Lexi.” My tone is weighed down with enough warning to sink a ship. “Don’t even think about bailing.”

She shoves away her empty plate with an elbow, opening her mouth for a response when she’s distracted by Jake charging by, a sheet of paper half crumpled in a fist. Something about the way he comes around the bar, mouth set, shoulders determined, eyes not so much as glancing our way, silences her before the first syllable. She clamps her mouth shut and follows him across the room with her gaze.

I, however, have had enough of my sister’s distraction maneuvers. “Just so we’re clear, Lex, tomorrow is nonnegotiable.”

But I’m talking to her back. Lexi is twisted around on her stool, watching Jake approach a woman with a droopy stack of flyers fanning over her arm like an accordion. The Light of Deliverance frump, judging from her outfit: a turtleneck sweater and pleated skirt that would give even Heidi Klum a fat ass.

The woman doesn’t resist when he clamps a palm around her biceps and pulls her aside, parking her next to the cigarette machine by the bathroom hallway. She doesn’t speak, either, mostly because Jake doesn’t give her a chance. Not with his expression, which practically dares her to try. Not with his body language, which puffs his chest and makes him stand a few inches taller in his boots. And not with his scolding—for Jake is surely giving her a scolding—which continues unbroken for a good sixty seconds.

“Who’s he talking to?” I say. “I feel like I should know her.”

“You should. That’s Tanya Crawford, formerly McNeal.”

It takes me a minute to connect the long-forgotten dots. “The same Tanya McNeal who got suspended for selling hand jobs in the school parking lot?”

“That’s her. Married one of those loony Pentecostals a few years ago, so I suppose it was inevitable she’d follow him over the hot coals.”

Whatever Jake’s message, Tanya doesn’t like it. She scrunches her mouth and pushes past him without a word, barely pausing to snatch her coat from a hook on her way out the door.

Lexi returns to her wine, draining her glass and then reaching for mine.

“What do you think that was all about?” I say.

“Not about snake handling, that’s for damn sure.”

The back of my neck tingles at her ominous words, at whatever’s written on Tanya’s paper, now stuffed into the back pocket of Jake’s jeans. And the undeniable hunch the episode has something to do with our father.

I steal another glance at Jake, but now he’s swapping greetings with a man in head-to-toe Harley-Davidson gear, and I’d be hard-pressed to find any indication of his former aggravation without a blood pressure cuff. He slaps the biker on the back, sweeps up two empty plates from the table to his right and heads back to the bar as if nothing happened, as if he didn’t just tell Tanya McNeal she was no longer welcome.

“Jakey.” Lexi’s voice is high and honey sweet, stopping him before he can slip into the kitchen. “Did you or did you not just toss that woman out of your restaurant?”

“Absolutely not.” He shifts the plates onto a forearm, not quite meeting Lexi’s eyes. Mine, either. “The choice to leave was hers entirely.”

Lexi and I share a look, and then she reaches a hand, palm to the sky, across the bar. “All right. Hand it over.”

He pauses a beat too long. “Hand what over?”

“Jake Foster, don’t you play coy with me. Either give me that paper in your back pocket or I’ll go over there and get a copy from Andy Jamison. Your call.”

A faint furrow dips between his brows, but Jake slides the paper from his pocket with his free hand. He goes to pass it to her, then reconsiders. He pulls back his hand, and the wadded-up paper, just out of her reach. “Maybe you should wait till you get home to read it.”

Lexi molds her lips into one of her beauty-pageant smiles. “Sweetheart, I wasn’t born yesterday. By the way your eyes get all pointy just looking at me, I already have a good idea what this is about. But don’t you worry. If that paper has something to do with that man, then it has nothing to do with me.” She holds up her palm. “Now give it.”

“What man?” I ask Lexi. “You have nothing to do with what man?”

Lexi doesn’t answer, doesn’t take her eyes off Jake, and he drops the wad into her hand. She uncrumples the paper, flattening it onto the bar with both palms. Her red-dipped fingertips swipe along the first three words: Guilty as Sin.

She thrusts the paper away like it’s garbage.

“That hardly seems very Christian,” I say.

“That’s exactly what I told Tanya.” Jake slides the dishes with a loud clatter onto the bar, his gaze hardwired to my sister.

Lexi ignores both of us. She reaches into her purse for a tube and a silver compact and sets about applying a fresh coat of pink gloss.

I slide the page closer with the tip of a finger and read further. My stomach twists at the image of my father, looking almost dashing in his trial suit, like he’s on his way to the Barter Theatre rather than playing center stage in his own nightmare. But I can see why Tanya chose to feature this shot of him. His mouth is set in a crooked grin, his expression confident and cocky, as if daring the jury to find him guilty, which of course they did.

And now, according to the flyer, Tanya McNeal and her Pentecostal cronies plan to gather tomorrow morning at ten o’clock sharp on the street in front of the house. They will be armed with posters and banners and righteous indignation. And I predict they will be louder than a monster truck jam.

“Awesome.” I throw up my hands. “Just awesome.”

Jake tucks the flyer out of sight under a stack of menus, picks up the dirty plates and disappears into the kitchen. Later, I will thank him for not tolerating Tanya’s propaganda in his restaurant, but for now, I’m too busy making plans. My training has kicked in, and I’m making plans.

Because if ever there was a disaster, then surely this is it.

I twist on my bar stool to face Lexi. “Okay, so here’s what we’re going to do. First thing tomorrow morning, I’ll call Cal. I don’t think we can stop them from protesting, but maybe we can come up with a technicality. A noise ordinance or loitering violation or something like that. And as soon as I get home, I’ll look up the name for our contact at the police department. Maybe you can work some of your magic on him, get him to help us out somehow.”

Lexi snaps the compact shut and glances over at me. “Why me?”

“Because he’s a man, and you’re Sexy Lexi.”

“So?”

“So this is crisis mode. We are in crisis mode. A bunch of angry Bible beaters are about to take up residence on our driveway.”

Her gaze fishes over my shoulder to the dining room behind me, and I know what she’s doing: damage control. Mentally counting the number of tables Tanya managed to reach with her call to arms, checking expressions for pity or displeasure or hostility, taking a moral temperature of the room. And I can tell by the way she’s folding her napkin, smoothing it over and over until it’s a fat but small square, that the damage has already been done.

“That Cal has somehow guilted you into helping is your business,” she says, her gaze returning to mine, her eyes narrower, sharper, “but I don’t want any part of it. I never gave either of you any indication I’d help. In fact, I think I’ve made it pretty clear to everyone involved I washed my hands of that man long ago. I don’t plan on getting them dirty again.”

“Our father is coming home to die. To die, Lexi, and from what I understand, a pretty painful death.”

“Oh, stop acting like such a goddamn martyr. Because I can assure you nobody in this town is going to feel a lick of sympathy for the murderer’s daughter.”

“Which is exactly what you are.”

Lexi bristles like a cornered porcupine. “Not anymore, I’m not. The very second that man wrapped saran wrap around Ella Mae’s mouth and nose until she suffocated, I stopped being his daughter, and he gave up any rights to call himself my father. And if there’s any justice in the world, they’ll call me when it comes time to pull the plug.”

Her words zap me like a Taser, temporarily paralyzing my heart, my lungs, my conviction Lexi would do the right thing. No matter what Ray Andrews did or didn’t do, he’ll always be her father.

“You can’t possibly mean that,” I say.

Lexi holds my gaze with unperturbed eyes.

But bravado can be a real bitch. In order for it to work, you have to be able to sustain it long enough to make your audience swallow it. Lexi’s wavers. She snatches her bag and bolts for the door, and I don’t follow. I don’t even turn my head to watch her go. Better to let Lexi wind herself down and try again later, in a less public venue.

I slump against the bar, staring with undisguised longing at the bottles lining the back wall. So this is my first night back. Cal deserted me, Bo ignored me, Lexi ditched me. My evening ends alone, in a bar filled with people I don’t know or don’t care to remember. I shrug off a surge of self-pity that threatens to knock me off my bar stool. My life is such a fucking fairy tale.

A figure steps up across from me with a slice of cake the size of a double-wide. Jake, of course. He wags two forks in the air. “Chocolate always helps.”

My stomach lurches at the thought of more food, and I wave his offer away. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

He slides the dessert three seats down, offering it to a bearded man in flannel and denim. “Knock yourself out, Wade. On the house.” And then he turns back to me, leaning across the bar on both forearms. “Bartenders are notoriously good listeners, you know.”

I know he means well, but right now talking about my problems is the last thing on my mind. The very last thing. Not when a mighty fine distraction is standing right here.

“How about drinkers? Are y’all good drinkers, too?”

“I can’t speak for all bartenders,” he says, “but I’ve been known to tie one on when necessary.”

One corner of his mouth lifts, and I watch for the other to catch up. Here it comes.

“Oh, it’s necessary. Because I hate to drink alone, and I’m sure as hell not going back to that house sober.”

And there it is. I free fall into Jake’s extraordinary smile.

6

I WAKE UP the next morning in my bed, my tongue superglued to the roof of my mouth and my head clanging.

No. Not my head. Cal’s iPhone, on the pillow next to me.

I crack open an eye and squint at the screen. Both eyes fly open at the image of me and Jake, his arm swung over my shoulder, my head thrown back in laughter. I have no idea how it got on my phone. Hell, I have no idea how I got in my bed. On the fourth ring, I pick up.

“Good morning, sunshine.” Jake’s booming voice sets off a string of explosions in my head.

“Jesus.” I jerk the phone away from my ear. “What time is it?”

“Seven-thirty. You made me promise to give you a wake-up call at seven-thirty and not a millisecond later, remember?”

I trawl through my memories of last night, but things start to get fuzzy after the second cocktail. “Not really.”

“That bad, huh?”

I put a finger to my temple and groan. “A responsible bartender would’ve cut me off.”

He laughs. “I tried. Honestly, I tried. Has anyone ever told you you’re more stubborn than Curtis Cooper’s old mule? But I drew the line when you reached for your car keys.”

I would wince, but my face hurts. “Probably a good thing.”

“I thought so, especially after you challenged Sheriff Briggs to a game of quarters. But just for the record, you took off your jeans all by yourself. I had nothing to do with undressing you. And I didn’t peek, I swear.”

Now, if I was any kind of good girl, I’d be embarrassed and horrified by what Jake just told me. I’d be worried about the wanton impression the drunken me made. But the truth is, I’m not exactly a good girl, and last night wouldn’t be the first time I’ve tossed back one too many cocktails and shucked my jeans for a cute guy. At the risk of sounding like an oversexed trollop, I’ve kind of lost count.

Still. I really would’ve preferred remembering the experience. A quick check under the covers doesn’t solve the mystery. I’m dressed, but just barely, in last night’s panties and a white tank top. I chew my lip and wonder whether I should be relieved or disappointed I’m not naked.

Jake’s voice drops an octave. “You just looked under the covers, didn’t you?”

“Of course not.”

“Uh-huh.” I feel his smile clear through the line. “Nice tattoo, by the way.”

His words scorch a trail of heat from my cheeks down to my tattoo, tucked away under the lace of my panties on my right butt cheek. A spot Jake wouldn’t have seen, unless he’d been peeking.

“It looked like some kind of flowery tribal symbol,” he continues. “What is it?”

“A flowery tribal symbol.”

“No. I meant, what does it mean?”

“It means you were lying when you said you didn’t peek.”

He laughs, but he doesn’t deny it. “Your keys are under the welcome mat,” he says, right before he disconnects.

I throw back the covers, and the cool air in my bedroom practically hisses when it hits my skin. Jake neglected to mention where, exactly, he spent last night, and contemplating that answer makes me hot enough to fry an egg on my bare belly. Downstairs on the couch? Next to me in my bed? Almost certainly somewhere in this house. Town is exactly a two-point-seven-mile hike, mostly uphill, and Jake would be crazy to have walked back in the freezing dark.

I slither across the bed to the window and spot my car parked neatly in the driveway, its windows buried under a light dusting of snow, as is the driveway. No tire tracks either, which means my car has been there a good while. By the looks of things, most of the night.

At the end of the driveway, a red Jeep Cherokee slows to a crawl. The driver, a middle-aged woman with hair the color of traffic cones, stops to check the number on the mailbox against a piece of paper in her hand. She does a sloppy three-point turn and careens into the driveway, thrusting the gearshift into Park right before her bumper slams into mine.

I hop out of bed, scrounge around in my open suitcase for a pair of sweats and last night’s sweater and pull them on. By the time I make it to the front door, she’s standing on the welcome mat with a crate of medical supplies and a hurry-up-and-let-me-in grin.

“Lordy me,” she says, “it’s colder than a witch’s tit in a brass bra out here.”

“You must be the hospice nurse.”

She doesn’t wait for an invitation, just barrels past. “In the flesh.”

And there’s plenty of it. Her curves have been stuffed into clothes that almost fit her, and her permed and pigmented hair has been teased to unnatural heights and sprayed into submission. Add to that shiny blue eye shadow, watermelon lips and eyebrows that look as though they’ve been drawn on with a brown magic marker. The woman is pure Appalachia in yellow-and-lilac nurse’s scrubs.

She thunks the crate onto the floor by the living room and takes a good look around. Her gaze lands on me, and she grins. “You must have had one wild night.”

“Oh! Um, no, I...I mean, we...”

Her laugh is more like a cackle. “Honey, it may have been a good spell ago, but I remember that look. Wild hair, even wilder eyes. Plus, your tank top’s on backward.”

Yeesh. I wrap the sweater tight across my chest and thrust out a hand. “Gia Andrews.”

“Fannie Miles.” She waddles off as if the house is her own. “Sweet holy Jesus, I need a cup of coffee.”

In the kitchen, Fannie gets the pot going with practiced efficiency. She digs around in the cabinets until she finds two mugs, then motions for me to follow her back into the living room.

“I’m gonna have to do some rearranging in here,” she says, taking in the hospital bed pushed to the corner. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Not at all.” This is clearly the Fannie Miles show, and I’m happy to let her lead.

“Great.” She settles her ample behind onto the couch, casting an expectant glance around the room. “So where is everybody?”

“You’re looking at them.” I try not to feel sorry for myself as I say the words, or think about the knife of resentment I feel jutting out of my back, somewhere in the vicinity of right between my shoulder blades.

Fannie lifts a crayon brow. “I thought Cal said there would be three of you.”

I nod. “There goddamn better be. But for now I guess it’s just me.”

She wraps a warm palm over my arm and gives me a kind smile. “Then right now, sugar pie, you’re the only one who matters.” Fannie pulls back her hand, sits up a little straighter. “Okeydokey, then. How much did Cal tell you?”

“He filled me in on the basics. That you’re responsible for my father’s care and comfort, that you’ll manage his pain without prolonging his life, that you’ll stay until the end.”

The end. A growing ball of nausea takes root in my belly, one that has nothing to do with last night’s liquor.

“But more important,” I continue, “how much did Cal tell you?”

“I assume you’re talking about your father’s legal issues?”

I shake my head. “You’d have to be dead to not know about those. I’m wondering more what he could have possibly said to make you agree to take this job.”

Fannie shrugs. “That’s easy. He’s paying me two dollars more an hour plus a whopper of a bonus if I stay until the funeral.”

I don’t respond. In my job, I’ve met plenty of people for whom money is a legitimate reason to do just about anything—dig a community well, disappear without a trace, murder a business partner. Tending to a dying man is as good a job as any, I suppose. And depending on the size of the bonus and how long Dad lasts, the amount could be substantial. Fannie doesn’t look particularly hard up for cash, but who am I to judge?

“You’re worried that money ain’t proper motivation, aren’t you?”

“I just want to make sure you know what you’re getting into. We aren’t the most stable of families, as I’m sure you can imagine. Quite honestly, though, our dysfunctionality is the least of your problems.”

Fannie catches my meaning instantly, making me think she’s already considered the consequences of taking this job. “You mean my being here isn’t going to get me elected the next Miss Rogersville.”

I nod.

She barks out a laugh, slaps a palm to a meaty thigh. “I hate to tell you, honey, but that train left the station ’bout twenty years ago.” When she sees I’m not ready to join in her hilarity, her expression sobers to half-serious. “You must be the one living way off in Australia.”

“Africa.”

“Africa. I coulda sworn it was Australia...anyway, my point is you weren’t here, so you couldn’t have known folks are already blabbering about me on account of my rat bastard ex-husband. I swear, how I stayed married to Lester Miles for fifteen years without catching a venereal disease is one of God’s great mysteries.”

I can’t help but smile, but there’s a warning buried in the gesture. “This job is going to take gossip to a whole new level.”

“Sugar, if I’da cared what people thought of me, I never woulda married that no-good snake back in ’95, and I sure as hell never woulda told everybody he spent our retirement fund on cocaine and hookers after I left his sorry ass.” She lifts her entire upper body in a shrug. “Not only do I need this paycheck, I also don’t give a flying pile of pig shit what people think about my being here.”

I sit for a long moment, trying to process what Fannie just told me. A lying, cheating, thieving spouse would certainly feed the Rogersville gossip mill. Not on the scale of a father who may or may not be a murderer, but still. She must be well-acquainted with how it feels to walk into a room and be greeted with silence, even though every person in there has plenty to say about you behind your back.

The bigger question is, how can she stand it?

“How do you do it?” I ask. “How do you not care?”

Fannie looks at me with kind eyes. “You just don’t, sugar, that’s all.”

She pats my arm again and hoists herself off the couch, following the scent of freshly brewed coffee into the kitchen. Halfway there she turns back with a soft cackle. “Otherwise give ’em the line about the flying pile of pig shit. That one always works.”

* * *

After a second cup of coffee, Fannie refuses my offer to help her rearrange the room or cart in her busload of medical supplies. She shoos me off, ordering me into a hot shower and something more proper than a backward tank top. Once upstairs, it’s not the shower knob I reach for but my phone. Cal, Bo and Lexi, in that order.

Cal picks up on the first ring. “Good mornin’, baby girl. How you holding up?”

“I’m okay. Fannie’s here.” I sink onto the foot of my bed and wait while Cal takes in my meaning behind those four words, which he does pretty much immediately.

“Where are Bo and Lexi?”

Nothing slips by the Tennessee Tiger.

The hurt comes flooding back, this time with the tears I managed to fend off last night with alcohol and Jake. Alone in my old room now, I don’t bother to check them. “Lexi ditched me last night, and Bo still hasn’t called me back.”

Cal curses under his breath. “I’ll call them on my way into court, and I’ll use my lawyer voice. Don’t you worry, darlin’. I’ll make sure they get their asses over there pronto.”

Part of me, and not a small part, wants to believe him—Cal’s lawyer voice is certainly something to be feared—but the realistic side of me knows better.

“I’m afraid it’s going to take a lot more than a stern talking-to to get Lexi over here, and same goes for Bo. But that’s not why I’m calling. When I was in town last night, I heard about some protesters. A local group of Bible-beaters, and it sounds like it’s going to be a shit storm.”

Cal half groans, half sighs. “I’m not particularly surprised. People in that town sure loved Ella Mae, and sixteen years isn’t nearly long enough to heal their wounds. Especially with that damn garden to remind them every time they drive through town.”

My uncle is right. If the Ella Mae Andrews Memorial Garden on all four corners of Depot and Main doesn’t prompt folks to remember Ella Mae, the women of her former garden club, who make sure the plot thrives all year round, will. Even in February, when the trees are bare like they are now, it’s kind of hard to miss.

“Is there any way we can stop them?”

“Folks have a constitutionally protected right to engage in protests, assuming they’re peaceful. As long as they stick to the street and don’t disrupt traffic, we have to let them.”

What traffic? I look out my bedroom window over the front yard and the empty asphalt that dead ends into our driveway. With only a handful of homes on a stretch of almost a mile, Maple Street isn’t exactly a major throughway.

“What about noise ordinances? I heard they’ll have bullhorns.”

“Noise amplifying instruments are a different story. They’re not allowed without a permit. I’ll have my assistant check if any noise ordinance waivers have been issued, but without those, they can sit out there all the livelong day if they want.”

Cal’s answer heaves and swirls in my stomach.

“Have you talked to the officer in charge yet?” he asks. “He should be able to tell you how much preparation the protesters have made, if any.”

“Not yet. He’s coming an hour ahead of Dad, so I’ll ask him then.”

“I knew I could count on you to keep things under control.”

The absurdity bubbles in the base of my throat, and I want to laugh and cry and scream. Control? What control? Maybe Cal somehow got me confused with Fannie or his power-shopping assistant, because I have nothing—nothing!—under control.

“I should have this case wrapped up in a few weeks,” he says, but the distracted quality in his voice tells me the only thing he’s eager to wrap up is this conversation. “Once I do, I can move into the house with you. I sure hate that I can’t be there today.”

I don’t respond. Seems to me if Cal had wanted to be here for my father’s homecoming, he would’ve damn well been here. Surely he’s not the only lawyer in the entire freaking state of Tennessee.

“But I’ll be there first thing tomorrow morning, okay?”

I make a humming sound.

Cal takes it as his cue to go. “Keep me in the loop, okay? I’ll do the same with you.” He hangs up before I can agree.

My calls to Bo and Lexi are even less successful. Both their phones go straight to voice mail without ringing, not even once. The idea they’ve turned their phones off today of all days shoots a firestorm of fury through my veins. Instead of leaving yet another voice mail, I settle on a rather snarky group text.

No worries, I’m not alone. The protesters will be here soon to keep me company. You better not fucking be one of them.

I hit Send and fling my phone onto the pile of clothes erupting from my open suitcase, flop backward onto the bed and try—and fail—not to feel sorry for myself. In just a few hours, my dying father will walk through that door for the first time in sixteen years, and my siblings aren’t here. Cal isn’t here. My only buffer is a woman wearing too much makeup and scrubs smothered by tiny yellow ducks.

Something bangs and shakes the walls downstairs, and I picture Fannie heaving the couch onto her shoulders and hauling it clear across the room. The racket reminds me of all the things I should be doing. Helping Fannie rearrange the living room. Showering and unpacking. Hunting down my deadbeat siblings and dragging them back to help. Every single one of those options exhausts me.

I yank on my comforter, pull it across my shoulders and wrap it around me like a cocoon. A gust of wind whistles at my windowpane, and I burrow deeper into the down. Somewhere outside, a car door slams. By the time I reach the far side of a sigh, I’ve found temporary peace.

7

A CLOWN.

That’s my first thought when I open an eye. Why is there a clown standing above me, poking me in the shoulder?

“Go away.” I pull the comforter tighter and roll toward a window I vaguely recognize as mine, but from a lifetime or two ago.

The clown gives me a two-handed shove in my back. “Wake up, ’fore I fetch me a bucket of ice water.”

For a second or two, I get caught up on the way she said that last word—warter. And then it hits me. The thick accent, that frizzy orange hair can only belong to one person. I turn my head, blink up at Fannie. “Oh, sorry. I must’ve drifted off.”

“Good Lord, child, I’ve been trying to wake you for the past five minutes. It ain’t normal the way you sleep like the dead.”

I push to a sit, swipe the heel of a hand across each eye. “In my line of work, sleeping is considered a job skill.”

“What are you, a vampire?”

I would laugh, but I’m midyawn.

“Stick your head under a faucet or something, ’cause I just parked one fine hunk of police officer on the couch downstairs. He says you were expecting him at eleven.”

Her words are like a shot of caffeine to the jugular, and I spring out of bed so fast I see a rain of sparkles around the edges of my vision. “Shit. What time is it?”

“Sometime after eleven, I reckon.”

I fall to my knees on the floor and rifle through my suitcase, flinging sweaters and T-shirts and underwear aside until I find my phone, lodged in one of my sneakers. “It’s 11:19. Shit, shit, shit.”

“How ’bout I fix him a cup of coffee while you get ready, lickety-split like.” She heads for the door, but not before tossing a glance to the contents of my suitcase, now exploded all over the floor. “And, sweetie, if you don’t mind me saying so, you may want to spend a little extra time searching through all that slop for a hairbrush.”

By the time I make it downstairs seven and a half minutes later, my teeth brushed and my hair gathered into a messy ponytail high on my head, Fannie is holding court on the couch. She’s brewed a fresh pot of coffee and scrounged up a plate of cookies from the stockpile in the kitchen. And she’s seated suspiciously close to the police officer, giggling like a schoolgirl.

He stands when I come into the room, and with one last bat of her lashes, Fannie heads into the kitchen. Her definition of hunk is light-years away from mine. The policeman looks like an older version of Opie, that kid from The Andy Griffith Show, skinny and ruddy-complexioned. His receding hairline scoops two matching Cs high on his forehead. He waits while I take in the patches and pins on his uniform, the heavy weapons at his belt, the stiff hat tucked under a biceps.

“For a Halloween costume,” I tell him, “it looks pretty decent. How much did you pay for it?”

One corner of his mustache twitches. “I see you’re still as much a smart-ass as ever.”

“I’m sorry.” I push two fingers at each temple and shake my head. “I’m just having trouble processing the fact that the boy who taught me how to funnel beer when I was fifteen has since sworn to uphold the law.”

“Strangely enough, you’re not the first person to tell me that.”

I believe it. For the students at Cherokee High School, Jimmy Gardiner was a legend. Mastermind behind every school prank and organizer of every party. He was a straight-D student, an unapologetic pothead and a proven reckless driver who totaled cars faster than his broken bones could set. If it had been a category, he would have been elected Student Least Likely to Become a Police Officer.

“Holy crap, Jimmy!”

“I go by James these days.” He grins, lifts a shoulder. “Had to pass on the name to the next generation.”

“You have children?” I don’t bother disguising my surprise, but I hope I manage to conceal my horror. Jimmy as a father, now there’s a frightening image.

He nods and reaches for his wallet, flipping to a photo of four scrappy boys in front of a Christmas tree. “Jimmy Junior is six, Ronnie’s four and the twins are two.”

“Cute.”

“They’re the devil’s spawn. Last night I caught the two older ones peeing on the living room ficus. Jimmy told me they were watering it.”

I laugh. “Sounds like karma to me.”

“Not the first person to tell me that, either.”

The walkie-talkie on his shoulder hisses, jerking us out of our reunion with a harsh squawk. A man’s voice fills the room. “Approaching Mooresburg, sir. ETA twenty-five minutes.”

Jimmy slides his wallet back into his pocket, hits a button on the walkie-talkie and tilts his head toward the device. “Roger that.”

My heart lodges in my throat. Twenty-five minutes.

At the reminder of why he’s here, Jimmy’s expression sobers. He offers me a neutral smile, his posture assuming that of police officer rather than old school friend. “As much as I’d like this to be a social visit...”

He doesn’t have to finish for me to get his sentiment. I nod, pointing him to the couch. “Please. Have a seat.”

He drops his hat with a soft thunk on the coffee table and sinks onto the couch. Fannie appears with a fresh coat of coral lipstick and two mugs of coffee, plunking them with an admiring grin at Jimmy onto the table. He thanks her, waiting until she’s slipped back into the kitchen before continuing. And then he ignores his coffee, turning on the couch to face me.

“I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page here since the paperwork lists you as the defendant’s sponsor.”

Silence settles over the room. That I am sponsoring my father is news to me, and a brief flare of resentment for Cal and my siblings bursts in my chest. I don’t recall being asked, and I certainly don’t recall volunteering to be anybody’s sponsor.

“What does that mean, exactly, that I’m Dad’s sponsor? I thought he was being released.”

Jimmy blinks at me in obvious surprise. “Your uncle didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“That your father is not a free man. This arrangement is a home arrest, not a release, and the prisoner is not to leave these premises under any circumstances. As your father’s designated sponsor, you agree to this, as well as to take care of all his business and personal needs until the time of his new trial.”

I give Jimmy a get-real look. “We both know my father won’t make it that long.”

He hands me a stack of papers. “These are the conditions and terms of your father’s home arrest confinement. He will arrive here in less than a half hour. He’s not constrained, but as soon as he enters the house, I’m to secure a monitoring device onto his ankle. Once that’s on, his movements will be monitored 24/7 by satellite through a chip in the electronic bracelet.”

Jimmy’s voice doesn’t carry even the slightest trace of farce, and his hardened brow sets off more than a few of my internal alarm system bells.

“If I see your father has left these premises without explicit written permission from the Hawkins County Criminal Court, I will assume he is violating the terms of the home arrest. This place will be swarming with officers before he can make it to the corner. And they will be armed and instructed to shoot to kill.”

“Shoot to kill.” I nod, not quite able to meet Jimmy’s eyes. “Got it.”

He takes offense at my casual tone. “I’m not playing around here, Gia. Every department within a ninety-mile radius is on high alert. If your father tampers with the ankle bracelet or leaves this house without permission, he will be arrested and returned to prison, or worse. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

I nod again, letting my gaze sweep over the paper in my hands. “It says here you make exceptions for life-threatening emergencies. What if Dad needs medical care?”

“I know what hospice care means, and so do you. It means if you’re going to play the life-threatening-emergency card, I’ll expect to come out here and find the house on fire.”

I bristle at his thinly veiled threat. “My father is almost completely bedridden, so I hardly think he’ll be making a run for it. And besides, why would he bother? The doctors give him a few months at most.”

I don’t add that Cal intends to make sure those few months are spent here at home, and not sitting trial in the county courthouse.

“Still.” Jimmy hesitates, as if to choose his next words carefully. “You should be aware there are more than a few cops who don’t agree with the judge’s ruling. If given the chance, some of them wouldn’t hesitate to put one of their bullets in your father’s body.”

More than a flicker of irritation seeps into my voice. “Then maybe they should speak with Cal or the judge, because releasing him wasn’t my idea. I had nothing to do with this.”

He sighs. “Look, Gi, I’m not trying to get you riled up, but I want you to be aware of what you’re in for here. The law’s the law. People don’t agree with the judge’s ruling that one of the witness’s testimonies was perjured. They don’t like watching a convicted killer, even if he is an old friend’s father, walk away on a technicality.”

“Do you include yourself in that statement?”

“Are you askin’ me as an old friend or a police officer?”

“Whichever one gets me the answer I want to hear.”

Jimmy scrubs a palm over his face, and the set of his mouth softens. “Your dad was my little league coach until I was twelve. He taught me how to make a stink bomb, and he didn’t go blabbin’ to my mama whenever I bought condoms at the pharmacy. I hate every goddamn thing about this case.”

“That’s not technically an answer.”

“The hell it ain’t.” He gives me a sheepish grin that reminds me of the younger Jimmy, the same one who was suspended for switching out all the school’s videotapes for porn. “And I’d appreciate it if you don’t ever ask me that question in public.”

I smile to let him know we have a deal. “Oh, and one more thing. I hear there will be protesters. Do you know if anyone’s applied for a permit for noise amplifiers?”

Jimmy shakes his head. “Don’t think so. But Americans have the right to peaceful protest, and until they step over your property line, I can’t do one doggone thing to make them stop. And I hate to tell you, but they’re already here.”

“They are?” I crane my neck and sure enough, a swarm of people is gathered at the far end of the driveway. Judging by their homemade signs and high-tech cameras, it’s a mix of media and protesters.

“Your father’s not going to be the only one who feels like he’s under house arrest.”

It takes me exactly one millisecond to realize Jimmy’s right. A chill slithers up my spine at the same time my internal thermometer shoots into the danger zone. Every time I step outside the front door, every time I so much as pass by a window, someone will be watching.

Jimmy pulls a card out of his breast pocket, scribbles a number and passes it to me. “My cell. I don’t care what time it is. You call me the minute something happens, okay?”

“Thanks, Jimmy.”

He points to the papers in my lap. “I’ll give you a few moments to read and sign those. I need to make sure the house is secure and the landline is working, so take your time.” He stands, checks his watch. “ETA, ten minutes.”

Ten minutes.

But as Jimmy sets off to patrol the house and I return my attention to the papers in my hand, it occurs to me he didn’t say if something happens.

8

Ella Mae Andrews, October 1993

ELLA MAE CURLED her legs underneath her on the porch chair and began reading the Kingsport Times News article for a third time. Something about Representative Quillen and East Tennessee State University’s medical school, but she couldn’t seem to concentrate on the words. She was too focused on watching the house next door, watching for signs of Dean.

As new neighbors, Dean and her husband tolerated each other, but just barely. The men waved from behind lawn mowers and swapped small talk in the driveway, but their civil smiles deteriorated into scowls as soon as the other’s head was turned, and their attempts to hide their mutual dislike from the rest of the neighborhood were halfhearted at best.

Dean and Ella Mae, however... They tolerated each other just fine.

From the moment the moving truck backed out of the driveway, Dean had been circling Ella Mae with the single-minded determination of a mountain cat. The more he pursued her, the more she welcomed the attention, and lately even encouraged it, sending smoldering looks across flower beds and timing trips to the mailbox to coincide with his.

There was definitely something wrong with her. Something that made her brain-dead where Dean was concerned. Something that allowed her to consider casting aside everything she thought she believed about marriage and loyalty.

But Dean made Ella Mae’s heart beat a little faster and her head feel a little lighter when he gave her so much as a casual wave, and when he smiled at her, a crooked close-lipped grin that promised all sorts of naughtiness, she had to remember to breathe.

Like now, for example.

Now she forced air into her lungs, a swift series of whispered gasps, and pretended to concentrate on the stupid article. The letters do-si-doed on the page in time to her heart, because on the other side of her Times News, Dean was coming up the porch steps.

And he was smiling that smile again.

“Pretty enough to be an ad,” he said.

Ella Mae looked up with feigned surprise, and the newspaper fluttered to the porch floor. In his tight gray T-shirt, white linen pants and suede slip-ons, Dean was sexy and citified in a way folks around these parts found uppity. Ella Mae found him positively delectable.

“Oh, hi, Dean. I didn’t hear you come up. What did you just say?”

“That you looked so pretty just now.” He pointed to the rumpled paper on the ground. “I wish I’d taken a picture. The Kingsport Times News could plaster it on every billboard within a hundred miles. Would make themselves a fortune.”

Ella Mae’s blood fizzed in her veins.

He leaned a hip against the porch railing, his eyes intent on hers. “Allison and the kids are in Knoxville, shopping. They won’t be back until tonight after dinner.”

“Oh.” One word, said on an exhaled breath, was about all she could handle. His family was ninety miles away, Gia at cheer practice, Ray at the pharmacy. Ella Mae and Dean were alone.

Alone. The thought flipped and kicked in her belly.

A corner of Dean’s mouth rode upward. “It seemed like perfect timing.”

“Perfect timing for what?” Ella Mae fought to keep her voice level around her heart pounding in her throat.

“To ask your thoughts.” He moved closer, stepping over the crumpled paper and pointing to the wicker chair next to hers. “May I?”

She nodded and he sank into it, his knee brushing against hers.

“I was thinking of getting the girls a dog. They really miss their friends back home, and well, I was hoping a puppy would help, or at the very least distract them enough to make new friends. What do you think?”

Ella Mae pictured it, a tiny tornado of fur and floppy feet, barking and bounding around the yard, digging up flowers and turning the lawn into a virtual minefield. Ray would detest both the noise and the mess. But Ella Mae was thrilled. She’d always wanted a dog.

“I think a puppy is a marvelous idea.”

“Really?” His face lit like the rising sun, a smile so unselfconscious she couldn’t help but return it. “You don’t have pets so I was worried...well, I’m glad you like my idea.”

“I do.”

“Excellent.” He leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees, and the chair creaked under his weight. “I was also hoping you could give me some advice on where to get one.”

Ella Mae thought for a moment. “You could go to a pet store, but it’ll be expensive. Otherwise, I have a friend over in Mount Carmel who breeds Maltipoos.”

“What the heck’s a Maltipoo?”

“A mix between a Maltese and a poodle. They’re precious. Your girls will adore them.” Ella Mae tried not to think of Dean’s wife when she said the word girls, but Allison popped into her mind anyway. She quickly returned the conversation to the puppies. “So what do you think?”

Dean cocked his head and gave her a look that tingled all the way down to her toes, a look so suggestive it might as well have been adulterous. “Are we still talking about puppies?”

Puppies?

Dean laughed at whatever he saw on Ella Mae’s expression. “I think a Maltipoo sounds perfect.”

Ella Mae stood and motioned for Dean to follow her into the house. She didn’t speak, but she held her back a little straighter, her shoulders a little squarer, her head a little higher, all the way through the living room and down the wallpapered hallway into the kitchen. Only her hips swayed loose and free, putting on a show, she knew, underneath the ruffles of her white tennis skirt.

A show she knew he was watching. His gaze was as good as leaving a trail of blisters down her entire backside, as if she was being chased through the house by a bonfire.

In the kitchen, Ella Mae reached for the phone on the wall and dialed Shelley’s number, leaning against the counter and twisting the cord around a finger while Dean watched from the doorway. It was an all-consuming, toe-curling scrutiny that made something deep inside her belly buzz and hum.

When Shelley answered on the third ring, Ella Mae gave her friend a brief rundown of Dean’s request.

“Shelley says she has two female puppies available,” Ella Mae told Dean, dropping the mouthpiece to her shoulder, “one black and one cream colored. Both are weaned and ready to go.”

Dean’s smile was white-hot, and her knees caved a little. He took three long strides across the checkered linoleum. “Tell her we’re on our way.”

“We?”

He gestured to her tennis outfit. “Unless you have something else you need to do.”

Other than a tennis lesson she could just as well skip, Ella Mae didn’t have anything else she needed to do. She didn’t even have anything else she wanted to do, other than spend the rest of her day playing with Dean Sullivan’s fire.

She should say no. Say no and show him the door and avoid any more contact with Dean. Did they make blinders for wives with wandering eyes and handsome neighbors? Then again, blinders only help if you were willing to turn your head, and Ella Mae was not.

Nor was she willing to turn him down.

Ella Mae pressed the phone back to her ear. “We’ll be there in about thirty minutes.”

If Shelley answered, Ella Mae didn’t hear. By now Dean was close, so close. Close enough for her to feel his heat. Close enough for him to touch her. He slid a palm to her waist, and she let him. He pulled her up against his body, hard and lean and ready, and she practically fainted with relief.

Finally.

He lowered his mouth to hers, and at the very last second, she somehow came to her senses.

“Shell, it may take us a teeny bit longer.” The words tripped and tumbled in a hurry off her tongue, right before Dean took the phone from her hand and dropped it onto the cradle.

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