Seven

I opened my mouth and closed it again. And looked at Rafe. Better if he took care of this one.

“We have a house, too,” he said. “In Nashville.”

“And a job offer here.” It was the sheriff who spoke up. “This would solve the problem of where to live.”

The corner of Rafe’s mouth pulled up. “Finding someplace to live was really the least of it.”

“Well, now it’s one thing you don’t have to worry about,” Mother said brightly. “Savannah has always loved the house. Much more so than Dix or Catherine.”

She glanced at them for corroboration. They both nodded. I have no idea whether it was true or not.

But maybe it was, since they’d both made it clear that they didn’t want to move from their cushy McMansions.

“It wouldn’t be yours,” Dix told me. Always the lawyer, I guess, making sure I knew the legal ramifications. “Unless she quit claims it, the house would belong to Mother until… um…”

Until she died. But of course he couldn’t really say that.

I nodded. “I know about quit claim deeds.”

He looked surprised, and I added, “Real estate school is really just Real Estate Law 101. We covered deeds and trusts in detail.”

“Then you understand,” Dix said.

“Of course.” The property was a shared inheritance from our father. It belonged to Mother at the moment, since she was his widow, but once she passed—hopefully a very long time from now—the four of us would have to figure out what to do with it. I didn’t see anyone really pushing for selling, so it would probably be up to whoever lived in the house to buy out the other siblings.

At the rate we were going, it looked like that might be me.

Which was ridiculous. Rafe and I, on my non-existent real estate commissions and his law-enforcement salary—not exactly munificent—couldn’t hope to buy out two lawyers and a paralegal.

But it was also a moot point at the moment.

“He hasn’t decided to take the job yet,” I said.

The others looked at me and nodded sagely. Rafe rolled his eyes. In thinking back on it, I guess I had sort of made it sound like it was just a matter of time.

“I hope you know that we would enjoy having you around more of the time, Rafael,” Mother said. She’s one of only two people in the world who call Rafe by his given name. Tim Briggs is the other one, but Tim rolls his tongue around it in a much more inappropriate way than Mother.

And then she ruined it by adding, with a sideways glance, “And of course Carrie.”

Of course.

It was my turn to roll my eyes. “I don’t suppose anyone would care one way or the other whether I came.”

Rafe smirked. Mother said primly, “We’re always happy to see you, Savannah.”

I snorted.

“Not at the table,” Mother said. “Excuse yourself, darling.”

I apologized for snorting while she turned back to Rafe. “I know you weren’t always happy here.”

Understatement of the year.

“But things are different now. You have us. And people have progressed beyond the old ways of thinking.”

After a barely perceptible pause, she added a pious, “Thank God.”

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. Mother had been one of the last holdouts when it came to the old way of thinking.

But since laughing would have earned me another verbal slap on the wrist, and crying probably wouldn’t have been much better, I contained myself. Even if my eyes were rolling wildly in my imagination.

Rafe was a big enough man not to call her on it. I would have to thank him for that later. He didn’t cave, either, though, or let her push him into anything. “We’ll think about it,” was as far as he’d go, in a tone that, while friendly, made it clear that further pushing wouldn’t do any good.

Mother nodded. “Keep it in mind.”

And that was the last that was said about it during dinner. But on the way home to Nashville later that night, with the two of us in the car and Carrie asleep in the backseat, I told Rafe, “You don’t have to move to Sweetwater if you don’t want to. And you don’t have to live in the mansion if we do. But you have to admit it would have a nice irony to it.”

He didn’t pretend not to know what I was talking about.

“I can’t believe Mother offered it to us,” I added. “I mean… It was nice of her, and I guess it makes sense. I just didn’t think she’d leave until we had to carry her cold, dead body out the door.”

“It isn’t her family home,” Rafe said. “And she’s old-fashioned.”

A nice way to say stuck in the past, wedded to the old ways of thinking.

Even if those ways were changing, slowly.

“She’s pretty dug in, though,” I said. “Even when I realized that she and Bob were getting married, I didn’t think she’d want to leave the mansion. That’s always been her identity, for as long as I’ve known her. Robert Martin’s widow. Lady of the manor.”

“Now she’s going to be Bob Satterfield’s wife,” Rafe said. “A Satterfield instead of a Martin. It’s the proper thing to do.”

I supposed it was. “Just in case you wondered, I’d be happy to take over the mansion.”

His mouth curved. “I figured you would be.”

“The spring market is coming. We could try to sell the house again. And maybe actually do it this time. A lot has changed in the past year.” More houses in the neighborhood had been renovated, more new construction had gone up. Mrs. Jenkins’s house would be more desirable now than it had been last spring.

Rafe didn’t say anything.

I added, “If you wanted to take the job, that is.”

A minute passed. Then another one. Outside the car, the scenery flew by. Inside the car, nothing changed.

Then—

“You think I should?” Rafe asked.

I hesitated. “I know that the proper answer to that is, ‘if you want to.’”

He nodded. “I’m asking what you think. If you think I should.”

“I think… I think it would be nice to have family around more. Both my family and yours. Your grandmother seems to be doing well, living with Audrey. The small-town atmosphere seems to be helping her. Or maybe it’s that she feels closer to Oneida. But either way, she looks like she’s thriving.”

Rafe nodded.

“I think it would be nice for Carrie to have cousins to grow up with. Dix’s and Catherine’s kids are a little older, and they’re probably done having kids,” unless Dix married Grimaldi at some point, and she wanted one, and that thought made my mind boggle, so I moved on quickly, “but Darcy and Patrick Nolan might have kids soon, I suppose. It seems like they’re serious about one another.”

He nodded.

“If they did, their kids would be closer to Carrie’s age. That would be nice. And we might have more.” Or not. We weren’t at a point where we were talking about that yet. At the moment, our hands were full just handling Carrie.

“So for our family,” I said, “I think it might be a good move. A quieter life. Probably a more regular schedule for you. No late nights. No crazy undercover assignments. Or maybe you’ll miss those?”

The corners of his mouth turned up, but after a second he shook his head. “They can be fun. And a real adrenaline rush sometimes. But with you and the baby, not sure that’s a risk I wanna keep taking.”

Thank you.

I didn’t say it, but I knew he knew I was thinking it. Watching him go off on an assignment where people might be shooting at him had always been difficult.

Then again, wearing a badge for the Columbia PD might make people shoot at him, too. But probably less of them. Maury County is a pretty small, sleepy place overall.

“You might be bored,” I said.

He smiled. “I doubt that. I always could find something to get into.”

I guess he had a point. “You’d know where to find all the troublemakers, anyway. You probably knew them all personally.”

It was hard to say whether that would make it easier or harder to arrest them.

“The ones that are still around,” Rafe said. “There’re probably some new ones since my time.”

“You could have fun finding them, then.”

He drove in silence for a minute before he gave me a look. “You wanna do this?”

Yes.

I hesitated. “If I say yes…”

He sighed. “I love you, Savannah, but sometimes you can be a real pain in the ass. Just tell me what you want. Not what you think I wanna hear, but what you wanna do.”

“I want to go home,” I said.

“And where’s that?”

“Wherever you are,” I said.

He nodded. And turned his attention to the road. And home.

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