Mac took a shortcut through the hedge of maple trees that separated the sliver of land her father owned from the Channings’ sprawling lakefront property.

Like Coach, the handful of people who lived on Jewel Lake had crafted their houses out of logs and fieldstone in an effort to blend in, rather than compete, with the natural beauty of their surroundings.

Not Monroe and Lilah Channing. They’d built their home like the third little pig in the nursery rhyme. Out of brick. It rose from the shoreline like a miniature fortress, complete with twin turrets and a wall of windows that faced the lake.

Ethan’s mother had waged a campaign against the native flora, gradually bending it to her will until the yard resembled a golf course. A large patio—also brick—fanned out toward the water, and an adorable wooden gazebo with gingerbread trim had been built on the hill overlooking the rose garden. Since no one in the family ventured that far from the house, Mac decided the gazebo was more like an expensive yard ornament, its sole purpose to fill a bare spot on the property.

Well, not its sole purpose. Shaded by a hundred-year-old oak tree whose branches stretched over the property line, the gazebo had become Mac’s favorite hideaway when she was growing up. How many times had she sneaked inside and stretched out on one of the built-in benches, listening to Hollis and her friends’ laughter as they sunbathed by the lake?

She and Hollis might have been next-door neighbors, but contrary to her boss’s assumption, they’d never been friends.

Mac traced it back to an unfortunate incident at Hollis’s seventh birthday party, when Mac had declared she’d rather eat a minnow than have Betty Sadowski from the Clip and Curl Salon paint her fingernails pink. It was the truth, but in retrospect Mac realized she could have stated her preference a little more . . . tactfully.

That was the trouble with having been raised by a man who’d lost his wife to leukemia a week before their only daughter’s third birthday.

Coach spent more time on the field or at the gym than he did at home, and he never dissembled when it came to his players. He was fair but blunt, traits he’d passed on to his only child. It wasn’t until Mac was in junior high that she realized she didn’t fit in with Hollis and her friends, whose primary method of communication seemed to be giggling and shaking their . . . pom-poms.

Coach had done his best, but by the time Mac was a freshman in high school, she’d attended more sporting events than dances.

Nope. Not going there.

What was it about Red Leaf that resurrected every painful moment from her past? She was no longer an awkward teenage girl, harboring a major crush on the most popular boy in school.

You’re a reporter. This is a story. You have to separate feelings from facts.

But that didn’t stop Mac from wincing when she swept aside a curtain of wild grapevine and saw the gazebo. Harsh winters, the relentless scrape of the wind, and the summer sun had bleached the color from the cedar posts, leaving them as dry and brittle as bones. A thick crust of moss and decaying leaves coated the shingles on the roof.

Mac felt the strangest urge to apologize for the neglect. Whoever the Channings had hired to tend the grounds had obviously stopped caring at some point. The yard had shrunk to a small patch of green that stopped a few yards short of Lilah’s prizewinning rose garden.

Mac took a tentative step inside the gazebo and heard an ominous snap as one of the boards shifted beneath her feet.

Sunlight streamed through the lattice walls, creating an intricate stencil on the floor.

Focus.

Mac raised her camera and the gazebo shrank to one small frame.

And there it was. The tiny heart etched in the corner of the built-in bench. Most girls wanted lip gloss or nail polish for their thirteenth birthday, but Mac had asked for a Swiss Army knife.

The gift had come in handy the night she’d impulsively carved Ethan’s initials in the wood, all the while imagining the story she would tell their adorable green-eyed children.

This is the place where your dad and I fell in love. I was a freshman. He was a senior. He was the star quarterback of the football team. I was the coach’s daughter. He was gorgeous, smart, and popular. I was . . .

Totally delusional—Mac ruthlessly shut down the memory—that’s what you were.

The step creaked again—a sound that immediately caught Mac’s attention because she wasn’t the one standing on it this time.

She whirled around and her eyes locked on the man standing less than three feet away in the doorway of the gazebo.

Ethan Channing had just stepped out of her dreams and into her life.