“Mom, Kyle says he won’t bring the grandkids over if you keep seeing Gene.”
That one broke me.
Emma is six. Jack is four.
I’d been the one who taught Emma to tie her shoes.
For days, I questioned myself.
Maybe loneliness had made me foolish.
Maybe a sixty-four-year-old woman with bad knees and a d*ad husband’s insurance money was exactly the kind of woman somebody would hide a house from.
But I couldn’t forget Gene’s tired eyes, his paint-stained fingers, the sawdust.
I’d spent thirty-four years reading people in the worst hour of their lives.
Gene didn’t read like a liar.
He read like a man carrying something heavy by himself.
Something didn’t add up.
Finally, I found the address he’d once written on a napkin.
Under the word “buttercup.”
That Thursday, I drove forty minutes through the Texas countryside.
Cedar Hollow Road.
A modest white house. Chain-link fence. A huge pecan tree shading the yard.
