Chapter One
Iwas not good at picking men.
It was true.
Was it grandly ironic that, at the same time, I worked as a therapist and helped other people know themselves and create beautiful boundaries, internal safe spaces so clean my clients could see their own reflections? Yes.
But when it came to the men I gave my heart to, the blinders came on. I had romantic cataracts.
As I sat in the Sugar Creek Chapel next to my fiancé, Ned, I knew something was off. I mean, the whole day was awful as we were gathered for the funeral of police officer Chase Allen, hometown hero and the man my sister Rosie had been engaged to marry.
The day before, Ned and I had driven the eight-and-a-half hours from Nashville, where we both lived and worked. Our journey back to the town that had raised us served a dual purpose: the funeral of Chase and the happier celebration of a bridal shower for Ned’s sister. The trip had been light on conversation and heavy on a vague, nameless tension that had me on guard. We’d arrived in Arkansas tired, stuffed with convenience store snacks, and regarding each other with a curious politeness that worried my soul.
“I remember the first time I met Chase,” the pastor said kindly from the pulpit. “He had climbed up a tree to retrieve a wee kitten for a child…”
I’d reached for Ned’s hand during the service, and he’d drawn it back as if I were contagious. Ten minutes later, I tried again, and while he didn’t recoil, I sensed a definite lack of reciprocated affection.
What was going on?
I heard a familiar sob from the front of the church, and my breath hitched. My poor sister. All of this still seemed so surreal.
Surrounded by Chase’s heartbroken family, Rosie sat on an oak pew on the front row of the chapel. The news of his death had devastated us all, and the town was reeling. A cop for only five years, Chase had lost his life unexpectedly in the line of duty. The tragedy had shaken all of Sugar Creek, but it had broken my sister.
My family practically needed its own wing in the chapel. We packed out at least half the sanctuary, with my parents and sister Olivia to my right, my grandmother and aunt to our left, and the many cousins who now resided in Sugar Creek filling the seats behind us. The children and grandchildren of our matriarch, Sylvie Sutton, were pillars of this town, and when one hurt, we all did.
I stole a look at Ned’s face, not liking what I saw there. Tension pulled his lips taut, and his frown was the same one he’d worn when he told me his mother hoped I’d wear her old wedding dress when we said “I do.” Ned had barely known Chase, so this seemed a little strong of a reaction for him. Plus, he’d been doing that little cough he did when he had something uncomfortable to say, as if the dreaded words were stuck in his throat and jabbing his lungs with tiny elbows of resistance.
“Are you okay?” I whispered as a small choir began their second song.
Ned spared me a brief meeting of the eyes before giving a curt nod.
“Do you feel ill?”
He trained his gaze on the soloist who was reaching high C, a summit the poor woman should not have climbed.
“Ned—”
“Later, Hattie,” he mouthed, then snatched back his reluctant hand.
Following the feeling of being observed, I turned to find my grandmother Sylvie regarding me with her eyebrows of judgment arched high. But then she gave my fingers a little squeeze. “You can hold my hand anytime.”
A chasm had been building between Ned and me for weeks.
Lately I’d caught him on shushed phone calls, texting someone at dinner, and not-so discreetly shielding his screen so I couldn’t see, and looking at me as if…well, as if I was a problem he no longer wanted to solve.
I’d seen that look before.
I thought this time it would be different. I thought thismanwas different.
Just like I’d thought the last time.
* * *
In the South, a life isn’t truly over until the church ladies bring out the casseroles. A body might be in the ground, but the dearly departed are not released to the Pearly Gates until the living have partaken in some hot dish that includes rice, Velveeta, and cream-of-something soup brought in a Pyrex etched with someone’s initials to ensure a safe return home.
“Don’t touch that one.” My grandmother pointed toward the fifth oblong dish next to the pineapple-glazed ham and cornbread salad. “That’s Sissy McGillicuddy’s,” she said, as if that explained it all. “She just left her husband of fifty years for a traveling Elvis impersonator, and I will neither support her unholy attraction to a pair of swiveling hipsnorher Mexican chicken.”
“I’d hate for her work to go to waste,” I said, appreciating that Sissy had not held back on the melted cheese.
