The kids reluctantly climbed back into the truck, but I assured them they’d be out at the farm for Thanksgiving and promised we could take a walk down the road next to the fields if it wasn’t raining.

“What about the woods, Aunt Rose?” my niece asked, her voice high-pitched with excitement. “Can we go out in the woods?”

“No. Not the woods.” It was going to take a while before I was ready to walk in the woods again.

I drove through the short patch of trees lining the driveway and stopped at the edge of the highway that led to Henryetta. A shiny black pickup with a long scratch along the side drove past us, but just as I was getting ready to pull out, it did a U-turn and headed back the other direction.

“That truck’s not bein’ safe, Aunt Rose,” Ashley said in her mini-grownup voice.

“No. It’s not,” I agreed as I pulled out behind it. We followed it for half a mile before it turned left onto a narrow private drive. As erratic as the driver was behaving, I wasn’t sorry to see it go, but I had to stop and wonder if there was some truth to Mason’s observation—trouble seemed to surround me like a whirling dervish.

Ashley talked about school and how one of the boys in her class had cut another little girl’s hair with scissors. I listened absently, my mind combing through all my current dilemmas. The most pressing problem was our money situation, so I racked my brain trying to come up with a way to raise nine thousand dollars in case the insurance company didn’t reimburse us. No obvious solution jumped out at me.

But thinking about it helped get my mind off my second biggest dilemma, which I found sitting on my old front porch in a rocking chair, holding a bottle of beer.

“Joe!” Ashley and Mikey squealed while Muffy barked with excitement.

Traitors.

My niece threw open her door, abandoning her brother as she bolted for my ex-boyfriend, Muffy fast on her heels. Joe set his bottle on the table and stood to greet her. Ashley leaped for him, and he scooped her up into a hug, spinning her around.

“How’s my little Asherella?”

She giggled. “It’s not Asherella, Joe. It’s Cinderella.”

“Ashes. Cinders. Same thing.” He walked down the steps to the front yard and set her down. His huge grin faded as he watched me free Mikey from his car seat and deposit him on the ground.

“Joe!” Mikey shouted and ran for him.

Joe knelt and hugged the little boy a moment longer than I would have expected, then stood and took a step toward me. “Hi, Rose,” he finally said.

He was wearing jeans and a tan jacket. The brown thermal shirt he wore underneath made the natural copper highlights in his dark brown hair stand out. When we were together, the sight of him had always stolen my breath away. Today was no exception, but the reasons were much different than they’d been before.

I’d last seen Joe almost two weeks ago, when he’d pulled into the driveway of this house to tell me that he was moving back to Henryetta and taking the sheriff’s job. I’d handled that just fine. And the last time I’d seen him before that was four weeks ago in the woods after he’d shown up to save Mason and me from Daniel Crocker. But seeing him with the kids was my undoing. A lump burned in my throat as memories of all our dreams rushed into my head. We’d talked about a future that had included children, but it had all come crashing down when the time came for Joe to pay the piper—his father, who had gotten him out of jam after jam. Joe’s parents demanded that he cut all ties with me unless I gave up all the important, but socially unacceptable, people in my life so Joe could run for the state senate. In the end, we both knew I couldn’t do it, no matter how much we loved each other. And Joe couldn’t have told his father he wouldn’t cooperate because J.R. Simmons had trumped up some false charges against me, Violet, and Mike, and had threatened to make them public unless Joe played his game.

So Joe left me behind broken-hearted and had run off on the campaign trail with his long-time ex-girlfriend Hilary at his side. And in his bed. I could understand why he’d agree to a pretend engagement—Joe had told me that a single man had little chance of getting elected in our neck of the woods—but I couldn’t accept that he’d let Hilary snare him into a real relationship. Again. He’d fallen back into his toxic entanglement with her time and time again over the past ten years. In fact, Mason’s sister had paid the price with her life.

No, Joe McAllister—the man with whom I’d fallen in love—was not the man in front of me right now. He never had been. It had just taken me a while to figure it out.

I swallowed the lump. “What are you doing on my front porch?”

His mouth twisted into an ornery grin, but it was obvious his heart wasn’t in it. “If I remember correctly, this is no longer your front porch. Did you move back in?”

“No.”

Ashley tugged on his jacket. “Joe, can we play hide-and-seek?”

He looked down at her, his face softening. “Not right now. I need to talk to Rose for a minute and your daddy is coming to get you. Why don’t you make sure you have Mr. Snuffles in your bag?”

“All right,” she muttered in disappointment.

“And could you take your brother and Muffy with you? The DVD Mikey likes is ready for him to watch. Just press play.”

“Okay, Joe,” she said, taking Mikey’s hand and leading him inside, Muffy following obediently behind as if she’d understood Joe’s words.