Wisconsin Wedding. Carla Neggers

distance, Byron hadn’t rushed her. She needed to regain her balance. Rational and not prone to jealousy, she nonetheless had had a difficult time facing the fact that Cliff had allowed another woman to at least try to help him, where he’d only run from her. Even if Alyssa Baron was on the periphery of Cliff’s life, she was at least in a small way part of it. His mother wasn’t. But that, Byron knew, was precisely the point: far away, Cliff couldn’t cause his mother—or his brother—further pain and suffering. Or so he thought.

      “Maybe there’s hope yet,” she said finally, in a near whisper. “Oh, Byron, if he’s happy…if he’s trying…”

      “I know, Mother.”

      “I can’t get out of here until at least the first part of next week. What’s your schedule like? I’m not sure we should both barrel in on Cliff for the wedding if we’re not entirely certain he wants us there.” She was thinking out loud, Byron realized, and he didn’t interrupt or argue. “Unless there is no wedding and this is Cliff’s way…well, that would be ridiculous. Not like him at all. He’d never play a trick like that on us, would he?”

      “No,” Byron had said with certainty.

      “Would this Liza Baron?”

      “I wouldn’t think so.”

      “It’s just all so…sudden. What if someone’s using the wedding as a ploy to get us out there? You know, upset the applecart and see what happens?”

      “It’s a possibility,” Byron had allowed, “but not a serious one, I would think.”

      Anne Forrester sighed heavily. “Then he is getting married.”

      In the end, Byron had agreed to go to Tyler ahead of time and play scout, find out what he and his mother would be walking into in ten days’ time. None of the myriad excuses Byron could think of to keep him in Providence would have worked, so he didn’t even bother to try. The truth was he’d do anything to see his brother again, even go up against Nora Gates. Hell, they were both adults. She’d just have to endure his presence in Tyler and trust him to keep quiet about their “tawdry affair” three years before.

      She’d only, he recalled, talked like a defiled Victorian virgin when she was truly pissed off.

      He’d half hoped she’d forgotten all about him.

      Of course, she hadn’t. Eleanora Gates wouldn’t forget anything, least of all the man who’d “robbed” her of her virginity. She’d conveniently forgotten that she’d been a more than willing participant. And he hadn’t told her he’d thought he loved her.

      He exhaled slowly, trying to look on the positive. The shattered man his brother had been for so long—too long—seemed mostly a bad memory. For that, Byron was thankful. But Nora…

      Before he could change his mind, he popped open his seat belt and jumped out of the car. She’d already gone back inside. Except for the masses of yellow mums, the front porch was unchanged from his last visit, when Aunt Ellie had still reigned over Gates Department Store. She’d been a powerful force in Nora’s life. Maybe too powerful. Ellie had sensed that, articulating her fears to Byron.

      “The store will be Nora’s,” she’d told him. “It’s all I have to give her. But I don’t want it to become a burden to her—it never was to me. If it had, I’d have done something. I never let my life be ruled by that store. Nora knows, I hope, that I won’t roll over in my grave if she decides to sell. The only thing that’ll make me come back to haunt her is if she tries to be anyone but herself. Including me.”

      A perceptive woman, the elder Eleanora Gates. Byron remembered feeling distinctly uncomfortable, even sad, although he’d only known the eccentric Aunt Ellie little more than a week. “What’s all this talk about what will happen after you’re gone?”

      Gripping his hand, she’d laughed her distinctive, almost cackling laugh. “Byron, my good friend, you and I both know I’m on Sunset Road.”

      It was her self-awareness, her self-acceptance, that had drawn Byron to the proprietor of Gates Department Store—what he’d tried to capture in his photograph series on her. Aunt Ellie had been a rare woman. Her grandniece was like her—and yet she wasn’t.

      The front door was open.

      Byron’s heart pounded like a teenager’s. Three years ago, Ellie Gates had greeted him with ice cold, fresh-squeezed lemonade and a slice of sour-cherry pie. What could he expect from her grandniece?

      A pitcher of lemonade over his head? A pie in his face? Nora Gates didn’t forget, and she didn’t forgive.

      Hard to imagine, he thought, reaching for the screen door, that she hated him as much as she did. She didn’t even know who he was.

      “Well, my man,” he said to himself, “here’s mud in your eye.”

      And he pulled open the screen door, stuck in his head and called her name.