I was a man who’d loved this girl from the moment she’d come back to life and saw no one but me. Now she was closer than she’d ever been, right when I was on the verge of losing everything I’d spent years building and becoming. It was the cruelest switch life had ever thrown at me.

• • • • • • • • • •

Just after the delivery truck showed up, I got a call from Barney Amos, who didn’t beat around the bush this time. “Boyce, I traced your mama to Amarillo, where she’s been living for the past twelve years. I got ahold of her an hour ago. She asserts that she and your dad never divorced. Will or no will, disputing her claim wouldn’t be something I’d advise, though you’re welcome to seek other legal counsel.” He sighed heavily. “You’d best start setting up a plan B.”

I pointed the delivery guys to the bedroom and waited until they carried the mattress set inside and out of earshot. “Did she already know about Dad? And Brent?”

“She knew about your brother’s passing, but not Bud.”

I walked out onto the stoop, lit a cigarette, and took a long drag. The sky was too bright and blue for my world to crash and burn today. “Did she ask about me?”

“I told her what a fine young man you’ve become. That you’d been running Wynn’s ever since your dad got sick.” He hadn’t answered the question—not directly, at any rate.

“When’ll she be here?”

“I’m not sure what her circumstances are, and it’s near seven hundred miles there to here. At the soonest, it’ll be a couple days. More’n likely three or four.”

My life was set to blow to hell in somewhere between forty-eight and ninety-six hours. I could almost hear the tick tick tick counting down. This whole shitty scenario hadn’t been real before. Now it was.

By the time I lost Brent, I hadn’t expected to ever see her again. I hadn’t presumed her dead. I’d just presumed her gone, as if she’d vanished into thin air the night she left. I’d spent a year or two pining for her to come back, crying myself to sleep face-first in my pillow so Brent wouldn’t hear. When he left for boot camp, I couldn’t handle the double loss. To survive his absence, I let her go.

Then Brent died, and I knew neither of them was ever coming back. No one came back. Not for me.

Pearl was off tonight, so we’d planned to fry up the drum I’d caught Sunday along with a bagful of fresh okra Sam brought me from her dad’s garden yesterday. Sam wasn’t fond of okra, so she was happy to get rid of it and Pearl was happy to take it. I was less sure. It was free okra, not free beer.

“I straight-up dropped a hundred-dollar beaker in the lab today,” Pearl said, plopping a pat of butter and a pinch of salt into the rice. “I was so mortified—I must’ve turned ten shades of red. Everybody froze, including me, until Dr. Kent said, ‘Well it ain’t gonna sweep itself up. Broom’s in the broom closet.’”

I chuckled at her vocal imitation. “He sounds like a good ol’ boy.”

“Yeah, but he’s such an actual genius I think regular people exasperate the hell out of him. He’s usually cantankerous. I thought for sure he’d make some sort of example out of me for being clumsy with the lab equipment. I’d have deserved it.”

I watched her soak okra slices in buttermilk and coat them with cornmeal and spice. I’d grown adept at cooking fish a hundred ways, but vegetables were always raw or microwaved. I had no patience with anything that required a recipe. She’d made fresh iced tea too, in a pitcher I didn’t know I had.

“Maybe he thinks you’re hot,” I said, turning the fish in the frying pan.

Her laughter tumbled out like a song I wanted to replay over and over. “Boyce, jeez! He’s old enough to be my grandpa.” Her dark eyes glinted as she slid the okra into the pan alongside the fish.

“Baby, if he ain’t dead yet, you’re hot enough to wake him right up.” I winked, nudging her from prim and proper to hot and bothered. She wouldn’t look at me, and her cheeks shaded pink. When she added salt and butter to the rice like that task demanded her full concentration, I didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d just done that two minutes ago. I’d always loved getting her flustered and unbalanced with a bit of flirting and then catching her and setting her upright before she knew what was what.

That thought brought to mind the thing that would unbalance her in a way I didn’t want. Once we sat down to eat, I said, “I need to tell you something.”

“Okay.” She waited, wide-eyed. I wasn’t sure what she thought I was about to tell her, but whatever it was, she was off the mark.

“My mother is coming back to town in the next few days. Seems she and my dad never got divorced. They did make wills—leaving everything to each other. But that doesn’t matter as much as the fact that he died still married to her.”

Her lips fell apart. “So she’ll get everything. Including the garage?”

I nodded, unsurprised that she’d caught on faster than I had.

“That rotten bastard. How dare he have you running his damned business and taking care of his sorry ass and never tell you this?”

Pearl rarely cussed. She had to get pretty pissed to let loose like that. I bit back a grin at how cute she was when she was spitting mad.

“After the first year or so he never brought her up, drunk or sober.” I shrugged. “I’d always assumed they’d divorced somewhere along the way. I assumed I was his sole heir. Mr. Amos says I could fight it, but this is a community property state and they were still legally married. I’d lose. And I need my savings to do whatever the hell I’m doing next.”