Copyright © 2018 by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Designed by Marci Senders
Cover illustration © 2018 by Jon Shireman
Hand lettering by Molly Jacques
Cover design by Marci Senders
All rights reserved. Published by Freeform, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Freeform, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.
ISBN 978-1-368-02866-0
Visit www.freeform.com/books
For my mom, who saved the invitations from every Deb event. Who’s the best mama? You are.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
April 15, 4:59 P.M.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
April 15, 5:13 P.M.
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
April 15, 5:16 P.M.
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
April 15, 5:19 P.M.
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
April 15, 5:23 P.M.
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
April 15, 5:24 P.M.
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
April 15, 5:31 P.M.
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
April 15, 5:48 P.M.
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
April 15, 5:49 P.M.
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
April 15, 5:50 P.M.
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
April 15, 5:55 P.M.
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
April 15, 5:56 P.M.
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
April 15, 5:57 P.M.
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
April 15, 5:58 P.M.
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
April 15, 6:01 P.M.
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
April 15, 6:02 P.M.
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
April 15, 6:07 P.M.
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
April 15, 6:08 P.M.
Chapter 62
April 15, 6:09 P.M.
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
April 15, 6:10 P.M.
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
April 15, 6:11 P.M.
Chapter 67
April 15, 6:12 P.M.
Chapter 68
April 15, 6:13 P.M.
Chapter 69
April 15, 6:17 P.M.
Chapter 70
April 15, 6:34 P.M.
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Acknowledgments
About the Author
his one’s all you, Rodriguez.”
“No way. I took the drunk tank after the Bison Day parade.”
“Bison Day? Try Oktoberfest at the senior citizen center.”
“And who got stuck with the biter the next day?”
Officer Macalister Dodd—Mackie to his friends—had the general sense that it would not be prudent to interrupt the back-and-forth between the two more senior Magnolia County police officers arguing in the bull pen. Rodriguez and O’Connell had both clocked five years on the force.
This was Mackie’s second week.
“I’ve got three letters and one word for you, Rodriguez: PTA brawl.”
Mackie shifted his weight slightly from his right leg to his left. Big mistake. In unison, Rodriguez and O’Connell turned to look at him.
“Rookie!”
Never had two police officers been so delighted to see a third. Mackie set his mouth into a grim line and squared his shoulders.
“What have we got?” he said gruffly. “Drunk and disorderly? Domestic disturbance?”
In answer, O’Connell clapped him on the shoulder and steered him toward the holding cell. “Godspeed, rookie.”
As they rounded the corner, Mackie expected to see a perp: belligerent, possibly on the burly side. Instead, he saw four teenage girls wearing elbow-length gloves and what appeared to be ball gowns.
White ball gowns.
“What the hell is this?” Mackie asked.
Rodriguez lowered his voice. “This is what we call a BYH.”
“BYH?” Mackie glanced back at the girls. One of them was standing primly, her gloved hands folded in front of her body. The girl next to her was crying daintily and wheezing something that sounded suspiciously like the Lord’s Prayer. The third stared straight at Mackie, the edges of her pink-glossed lips quirking slowly upward as she raked her gaze over his body.
And the fourth girl?
She was picking the lock.
The other officers turned to leave.
“Rodriguez?” Mackie called after them. “O’Connell?”
No response.
“What’s a BYH?”
The girl who’d been assessing him took a step forward. She batted her eyelashes at Mackie and offered him a sweet-tea smile.
“Why, Officer,” she said. “Bless your heart.”
atcalling me was a mistake that most of the customers and mechanics at Big Jim’s Garage only made once. Unfortunately, the owner of this particular Dodge Ram was the type of person who put his paycheck into souping up a Dodge Ram. That—and the urinating stick figure on his back window—was pretty much the only forewarning I needed about the way this was about to go down.
People were fundamentally predictable. If you stopped expecting them to surprise you, they couldn’t disappoint.
And speaking of disappointment… I turned my attention from the Ram’s engine to the Ram’s owner, who apparently considered whistling at a girl to be a compliment and commenting on the shape of her ass to be the absolute height of courtship.
“It’s times like this,” I told him, “that you have to ask yourself: Is it wise to sexually harass someone who has both wire cutters and access to your brake lines?”
The man blinked. Once. Twice. Three times. And then he leaned forward. “Honey, you can access my brake lines anytime you want.”
If you know what I mean, I added silently. In three… two…
“If you know what I mean.”
“It’s times like this,” I said meditatively, “that you have to ask yourself: Is it wise to offer to bare your man-parts for someone who is both patently uninterested and holding wire cutters?”
“Sawyer!” Big Jim intervened before I could so much as give a snip of the wire cutters in a southward direction. “I’ve got this one.”
I’d started badgering Big Jim to let me get my hands greasy when I was twelve. He almost certainly knew that I’d already fixed the Ram, an
d that if he left me to my own devices, this wouldn’t end well.
For the customer.
“Aw hell, Big Jim,” the man complained. “We were just having fun.”
I’d spent most of my childhood going from one obsessive interest to another. Car engines had been one of them. Before that, it had been telenovelas, and afterward, I’d spent a year reading everything I could find about medieval weapons.
“You don’t mind a little fun, do you, sweetheart?” Mr. Souped-Up Dodge Ram clapped a hand onto my shoulder and compounded his sins by squeezing my neck.
Big Jim groaned as I turned my full attention to the real charmer beside me.
“Allow me to quote for you,” I said in an absolute deadpan, “from Sayforth’s Encyclopedia of Archaic Torture.”
One of the finer points of chivalry in my particular corner of the South was that men like Big Jim Thompson didn’t fire girls like me no matter how explicitly we described alligator shears to customers in want of castration.
Fairly certain I’d ensured the Ram’s owner wouldn’t make the same mistake a third time, I stopped by The Holler on the way home to pick up my mom’s tips from the night before.
“How’s trouble?” My mom’s boss was named Trick. He had five children, eighteen grandchildren, and three visible scars from breaking up bar fights—possibly more under his ratty white T-shirt. He’d greeted me the exact same way every time he’d seen me since I was four.
“I’m fine, thanks for asking,” I said.
“Here for your mom’s tips?” That question came from Trick’s oldest grandson, who was restocking the liquor behind the bar. This was a family business in a family town. The entire population was just over eight thousand. You couldn’t throw a rock without it bouncing off three people who were related to each other.
And then there was my mom—and me.
“Here for tips,” I confirmed. My mom wasn’t exactly known for her financial acumen or the steadfastness with which she made it home after a late shift. I’d been balancing our household budget since I was nine—around the same time that I’d developed sequential interests in lock picking, the Westminster Dog Show, and fixing the perfect martini.
“Here you go, sweetheart.” Trick handed me an envelope that was thicker than I’d expected. “Don’t blow it all in one place.”
I snorted. The money would go to rent and food. I wasn’t exactly the type to party. I might, in fact, have had a bit of a reputation for being antisocial.
See also: my willingness to threaten castration.
Before Trick could issue an invitation for me to join the whole family at his daughter-in-law’s house for dinner, I made my excuses and ducked out of the bar. Home sweet home was only two blocks over and one block up. Technically, our house was a one-bedroom, but we’d walled off two-thirds of the living room with dollar-store shower curtains when I was nine.
“Mom?” I called out as I stepped over the threshold. There was an element of ritual to calling her name, even when she wasn’t home. Even if she was on a bender—or if she’d fallen for a new man, experienced another religious conversion, or developed a deep-seated need to commune with her better angels under the watchful eyes of a roadside psychic.
I’d come by my habit of hopping from one interest to the next honestly, even if her restlessness was less focused and a little more self-destructive than my own.
Almost on cue, my cell phone rang. I answered.
“Baby, you will not believe what happened last night.” My mom never bothered with salutations.
“Are you still in the continental United States, are you in need of bail money, and do I have a new daddy?”
My mom laughed. “You’re my everything. You know that, right?”
“I know that we’re almost out of milk,” I replied, removing the carton from the fridge and taking a swig. “And I know that someone was an excellent tipper last night.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I’d guessed correctly this time. It was a guy, and she’d met him at The Holler the night before.
“You’ll be okay, won’t you?” she asked softly. “Just for a few days?”
I was a big believer in absolute honesty: Say what you mean, mean what you say, and don’t ask a question if you don’t want to know the answer.
But it was different with my mom.
“I reserve the right to assess the symmetry of his features and the cheesiness of his pickup lines when you get back.”
“Sawyer.” My mom was serious—or at least as serious as she got.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I always am.”
She was quiet for several seconds. Ellie Taft was many things, but above all, she was someone who’d tried as hard as she could for as long as she could—for me.
“Sawyer,” she said quietly. “I love you.”
I knew my line, had known it since my brief obsession with the most quotable movie lines of all time when I was five. “I know.”
I hung up the phone before she could. I was halfway to finishing off the milk when the front door—in desperate need of both WD-40 and a new lock—creaked open. I turned toward the sound, running the algorithm to determine who might be dropping by unannounced.
Doris from next door lost her cat an average of 1.2 times per week.
Big Jim and Trick had matching habits of checking up on me, like they couldn’t remember I was eighteen, not eight.
The guy with the Dodge Ram. He could have followed me. That wasn’t a thought so much as instinct. My hand hovered over the knife drawer as a figure stepped into the house.
“I do hope your mother buys Wüsthof,” the intruder commented, observing the position of my hand. “Wüsthof knives are just so much sharper than generic.”
I blinked, but when my eyes opened again, the woman was still standing there, coiffed within an inch of her life and besuited in a blue silk jacket and matching skirt that made me wonder if she’d mistaken our decades-old house for a charitable luncheon. The stranger said nothing to indicate why she’d let herself in or how she could justify sounding more dismayed at the idea of my mom having purchased off-brand knives than the prospect that I might be preparing to draw one.
“You favor your mother,” she commented.
I wasn’t sure how she expected me to reply to that statement, so I went with my gut. “You look like a bichon frise.”
“Pardon me?”
It’s a breed of dog that looks like a very small, very sturdy powder puff. Since absolute honesty didn’t require that I say every thought that crossed my mind, I opted for a modified truth. “You look like your haircut cost more than my car.”
The woman—I put her age in her early sixties—tilted her head slightly to one side. “Is that a compliment or an insult?”
She had a Southern accent—less twang and more drawl than my own. Com-pluh-mehnt or an in-suhlt?
“That depends on your perspective more than mine.”
She smiled slightly, like I’d said something just darling, but not actually amusing. “Your name is Sawyer.” After informing me of that fact, she paused. “You don’t know who I am, do you?” Clearly, that was a rhetorical question, because she didn’t wait for a reply. “Why don’t I spare us the dramatics?”
Her smile broadened, warm in the way that a shower is warm, right before someone flushes the toilet.
“My name,” she continued in a tone to match the smile, “is Lillian Taft. I’m your maternal grandmother.”
My grandmother, I thought, trying to process the situation, looks like a bichon frise.
“Your mother and I had a bit of a falling-out before you were born.” Lillian was apparently the kind of person who would have referred to a Category 5 hurricane as a bit of a drizzle. “I think it’s high time to put that bit of history to rest, don’t you?”
I was one rhetorical question away from going for the knife drawer again, so I attempted to cut to the chase. “You didn’t come here looking for my mother.�
��
“You don’t miss much, Miss Sawyer.” Lillian’s voice was soft and feminine. I got the feeling she didn’t miss much, either. “I’d like to make you an offer.”
An offer? I was suddenly reminded of who I was dealing with here. Lillian Taft wasn’t a powder puff. She was the merciless, dictatorial matriarch who’d kicked my pregnant mother out of her house at the ripe old age of seventeen.
I stalked to the front door and retrieved the Post-it I’d placed next to the doorbell when our house had been hit with door-to-door evangelists two weeks in a row. I turned and offered the handwritten notice to the woman who’d raised my mother. Her perfectly manicured fingertips plucked the Post-it from my grasp.
“ ‘No soliciting,’ ” my grandmother read.
“Except for Girl Scout cookies,” I added helpfully. I’d gotten kicked out of the local Scout troop during my morbid true-crime and facts-about-autopsies phase, but I still had a weakness for Thin Mints.
Lillian pursed her lips and amended her previous statement. “ ‘No soliciting except for Girl Scout cookies.’ ”
I saw the precise moment that she registered what I was saying: I wasn’t interested in her offer. Whatever she was selling, I wasn’t buying.
An instant later, it was like I’d said nothing at all. “I’ll be frank, Sawyer,” she said, showing a kind of candy-coated steel I’d never seen in my mom. “Your mother chose this path. You didn’t.” She pressed her lips together, just for a moment. “I happen to think you deserve more.”
“More than off-brand knives and drinking straight from the carton?” I shot back. Two could play the rhetorical-question game.
Unfortunately, the great Lillian Taft had apparently never met a rhetorical question she was not fully capable of answering. “More than a GED, a career path with no hope of advancement, and a mother who’s less responsible now than she was at seventeen.”
Were she not an aging Southern belle with a reputation to uphold, my grandmother might have followed that statement by throwing her hands into touchdown position and declaring, “Burn!”
Instead, she laid a hand over her heart. “You deserve opportunities you’ll never have here.”
The people in this town were good people. This was a good place. But it wasn’t my place. Even in the best of times, part of me had always felt like I was just passing through.
A muscle in my throat tightened. “You don’t know me.”