The Doctor Next Door. Victoria Pade

I decided that’s what I want. Not because I hate it here or anything, though,” she was quick to add. Then she smiled slyly and said, “Or because I’m high and mighty or have my nose in the air.”

      Boone pretended outrage. “Who said that about you? Anybody I know? I’ll knock ’em flat for you.”

      Faith laughed, glad he’d played along. But she used the joke as a springboard anyway. “That stuff honestly isn’t—and never was—true,” she said because it bothered her to have just moments earlier seen that he was still leery of her and she wanted to explain herself once and for all.

      “What’s the truth, then?” he challenged.

      “It’s the reverend’s fault.”

      The reverend—her grandfather—had met the majority of Northbridge’s spiritual needs for decades before his retirement only a few years ago, so Faith knew there was no need to qualify who the reverend was to Boone.

      “It was the reverend’s fault?” Boone repeated as Faith paused to eat a bite of Mongolian beef.

      “It wasn’t that I hated Northbridge or anybody in it,” she said when she’d finished her taste of the spicy meat, reiterating what she’d told him the day before. “I was just dying for more than I could get here and while some of that craving was just me and wanting what I was naturally drawn to, I think some of it was a result of being deprived of those things because the reverend wouldn’t allow them.”

      Boone raised a forkful of crispy orange shrimp. “You wanted more than Chinese food and pizza delivered to your door?” he asked before taking a bite.

      “When I left Northbridge you couldn’t get anything delivered to your door. But that wasn’t what I was thinking about.”

      “What were you thinking about?” he asked as if he was genuinely interested and open to what she was revealing about herself.

      “The reverend was the high-and-mighty one in our family. He was the boss. My dad and my uncle Carl never stood up to him, so what the reverend said was law—”

      “I don’t think I’ve ever heard any one of you call him anything but the reverend—why is that?”

      Faith shrugged. “Even my father and uncle call him the reverend. I don’t know if it’s the way he wanted it or if it just happened. I only know that I’ve never heard anyone call him Dad