Now She's Back. Anna Adams

let go of a good piece of scandal in this town. Hadn’t he spent his whole life here trying to clean his own family name?

      “If there is ever a national spitting competition, Peter’s taking gold,” he said.

      “To think I was hateful to Jeff for teaching him,” DeeAnn said.

      “We should get this little guy taken care of. See you later, Emma.” Noah started toward his office door, and DeeAnn followed, while Emma trudged toward the library.

      A little while later, Noah was seated in a pancake restaurant with DeeAnn and Peter. “Are you sure I can’t have a cast?” Peter poked Noah in the chest with a tiny finger and then peered around his shoulder. “I think a big cast would make me feel so much better. And some ice cream, Mom.”

      “No ice cream. Pancakes,” DeeAnn said. “Noah, how is Emma? I heard she’d come back to renovate her grandmother’s house.”

      “That’s what I hear, too.”

      “She left after you all broke up, didn’t she? You were engaged.”

      “That’s all in the past,” he said over Peter’s head.

      “You worry about her, though. I see that on your face.”

      “DeeAnn—”

      “It’s none of my business. I know that.” She slid her hand through Peter’s curls. “But sometimes, when Ted’s home, I push him away because having him near makes me think how bad I’d feel if I lost him.”

      “That’s not what I’m feeling.”

      “I wasn’t just talking about you.”

      He glanced back. Pamela Candler was reading a book over a drink and sandwiches in the shop’s screened porch. It wasn’t that big a coincidence. Pamela ate alone in a lot of the best restaurants in town.

      But seeing Pamela, his thoughts went naturally to her daughter. Even if Emma and he wondered about what might have been, they both knew there was no going back. He’d made himself part of Bliss’s everyday life. He provided care, and he was learning to give without fearing he’d be slapped back because of his name. Emma was on her guard coming back, expecting the worst from everyone. She had no happiness here. She wouldn’t be staying.

      * * *

      “MOTHER.” EMMA TWISTED her hands in one of Nan’s hand-embroidered dish towels. Her mother waited behind the screen door, the darkness like a frame around her. “What do you want?”

      “To see you. What do you think?”

      “Do you need something from the house?” After the Thanksgiving debacle, Nan had changed her will. She’d passed over her own child to leave her home to Emma.

      “If you’d read my emails, you might have known the house was looking run-down, but no, I didn’t come because I want my childhood back from you.” Pamela, in a beautiful red shift that set off her pale blond hair and bright red lips, looked at least ten years younger than her nearly fifty years.