ily hung back and let me approach on my own. My mom’s hair was shorter than it had been when she’d left, her eyes brighter. The moment she saw me, she lit up the room.

“Baby, you will not believe the couple months I’ve had.”

No greeting, no surprise that I was here—just a smile wide enough to nearly break her face.

“Right back at you,” I said, thinking about the couple months that I’d had.

“Of that, we will not speak.” My mom paused, then rendered that statement null and void. “Tell me everything. Did you manage to have any fun? I hope you at least staged a protest in the middle of one of Lillian’s formal dinners. Burned a few bras?”

“The 1960s called, Mom. They want their signature feminist protest back.”

“Smart-ass.” My mom threw her arms around me. “I didn’t think you’d come back,” she whispered, breathing in the smell of my hair.

For once in my life, I had no words. I wasn’t back. Not for good. “I’m…”

“Too good for them,” my mom finished, finally letting loose of me. “You—”

I knew the exact moment she spotted Lily, because she stopped midsentence.

“I didn’t come alone.” I recovered my voice and glanced back at Lily. My cousin took that as her cue to come closer.

“Olivia.” The name escaped my mom’s lips.

“Mom,” I stated, well aware that there was more or less an entire herd of elephants in the room now. “This is Lily.”

It only took my mom a second or two to recover. “Named after Lillian, I assume?”

“Yes, ma’am. It’s nice to meet you.” Lily was nothing if not polite.

My mom didn’t do polite. “Your mama know you’re slumming?”

Lily Taft Easterling had probably never even heard the word slumming, but to her credit, she didn’t bat an eye. “What my mama doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

My mom stared a second longer, then broke into a wide, unbridled smile. “It’s nice to meet you, Lily.”

“Sawyer’s been showing us the town.” Lily couldn’t have refrained from making chitchat if she’d tried. “It’s lovely.”

“It’s something,” my mom countered. “But it’s ours. Between you and me, it’s a good place to live a little.” She eyed Lily for a moment and then leaned forward and expertly mussed her hair. “Or a lot.”

Lily clearly didn’t know how to respond to that, and all I could think was that this shouldn’t have been her first visit. I’d grown up less than an hour away from my mother’s family. It would have been so easy for them to come see us.

A crash on the other side of the room snapped me out of that line of thinking. Boone. He was standing with his mouth open, two darts in his left hand, and his right hand frozen in a position that suggested he’d just thrown a third.

A few feet away, a man in a ball cap was staring at a broken beer bottle on the table in front of him, sopping wet.

“It is possible,” Boone said gamely, “that my aim leaves something to be desired.”

The man in the ball cap put his hands flat on the table.

“I should take care of this,” I told my mom. I managed to extract Boone from the situation at approximately the same time that Thad Anderson brought the man’s table another round of beers on the house.

Crisis averted. Then, from behind me, I heard: “I don’t think that’s legal.” Sadie-Grace sounded disturbingly contemplative. “But I am very flexible.”

“Time to go,” I told Lily.

She pulled Sadie-Grace away from the men she’d been talking to. I grabbed Boone by the back of the neck, and once I’d deposited all three of them safely outside, I ducked back into The Holler.

“Friends of yours?” my mom asked dryly.

“More or less.” My reply surprised both of us. I wasn’t exactly known for my habit of making bosom buddies everywhere I went.

“These friends of yours have names?” my mom asked.

“Boone,” I said. “And Sadie-Grace.”

“They have last names?”

My gut said that question was significantly less casual than it sounded. “Boone Mason. Sadie-Grace Waters.”

My mom recognized the names. I’d known she would. If she hadn’t already noticed that the picture she kept taped to the back of her dresser drawer was gone, she’d almost certainly be checking when she got home.

“Sawyer, what are you doing?”

I didn’t answer, because I didn’t have to.

“You’re not back, are you?” my mom said quietly. “You’re not planning on staying. Here. With me.” She paused, then searched my hazel eyes for the answer she desperately wanted to hear. “If I told you to let this go, would you?”

No. Even now, she wasn’t answering the questions I’d had my whole life. She wasn’t going to—ever.

“I’ve never been very good at letting things go,” I said.

“Sawyer?” Lily stuck her head back into the bar. My mom and I both turned to look at her, and Lily cleared her throat. “The limo’s here.”

My mom took the words like a slap. “It’s just as well,” she said, her mouth tightening. “My break’s over.”

I could see how this was going to pan out. I wasn’t here to stay. I couldn’t let this go, and she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—understand that.

“Mom,” I said as she started to make her way to the bar.

She pressed a fleeting kiss to the top of my head. “When you come to your senses, I’ll be here. Until then…” Her voice hardened. “Your limo and Lillian await.”