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“Of course it is.”

Arguing with Helena was slightly less satisfying than arguing with a brick wall. She knew that Helena meant well, but . . . “If you ever want coffee again, you have to swear to stop meddling. Across the board,” she added as Helena tried to interrupt.

Helena’s lips pressed into a thin line.

Molly raised an eyebrow.

With a long-suffering sigh, Helena finally conceded. “Fine.”

Victorious, yet magnanimous in that victory, Molly patted Helena’s arm. “Good. Now you can have your coffee.”

“Thank God.” Helena threaded her arm through Molly’s as they walked toward the counter. “I’d have agreed to pretty much anything you asked with the threat of a coffee embargo hanging over my head. But—” She paused before they got within Sam’s earshot. “When you are ready to talk about it, I’m willing to listen.”

The sweet sentiment should have warmed her.
Instead, it felt like an icy rock in her chest. She merely nodded. “Sam? Do you want to get Helena’s coffee?”

Sam jumped up immediately, grinning at Helena. “Sure. Give me something complicated. Challenge me.”

“I’ll be back in a second,” Molly called over her shoulder as she went to the back, leaving Helena and Sam in an intense discussion. In her tiny, messy office, she closed the door and leaned against it.

She hated being secretive, but how could she explain it all to Helena? Her marriage, her divorce, her family . . . it was all one big disaster area, and she couldn’t explain any one of the situations without getting into
all
of them, and even just considering it made her head hurt and her stomach churn. Helena wouldn’t judge her or anything—Molly knew that—but it was just embarrassing more than anything else. And she didn’t want the pity—not even from Helena.

It was also frustrating, and a real beating on her ego, to relive the past—two more things she didn’t need more of.

But she also wasn’t going to let all that crap steal what pleasures she did have out of her life, either.

She just needed to get through this, and everything would go back to the way it was.

She hoped.

•   •   •

Tate knew that if he were a better person, he wouldn’t mind so much. After all, his mother did carry him for nine months, suffer through twenty-six hours of back labor—he’d finally looked that up online to see what she’d been talking about, and yeah, it did sound like it sucked, but it wasn’t like he’d done it intentionally—and feed, clothe, and house him for eighteen years. But he wasn’t a better person, so spending his Saturday afternoon basically repaying his mother for that made him grumpy. Still, he wasn’t a
bad
person, and he never
could manage to flat-out hate his mother, either, so he’d do it and keep his bitching about it to himself.

It wasn’t the physical labor he minded—some of this was his junk, too—and if there had been a way to do this without his mother’s involvement, there wouldn’t have been a problem. It was the emotional game playing, the intentional blindness, and the dishonesty of the whole thing that grated on him.

He tried to be understanding. Mom had been cowed by his father, and where would she have gone if she had left him? At least she and her kids weren’t homeless and starving. Maybe if she’d at least admitted that much out loud, he’d be
more
understanding, but Mom’s denial was absolute. He could fight the battle and be frustrated or he could accept things for what they were.

Acceptance seemed the better choice.

But his mother had been toying with the idea again that she might move to Waycross to live with her sister, and she’d been leaning on Sam to start cleaning out sheds and garages in preparation for that possibility. And while it was more than likely
not
to happen, Sam was tired of the nagging.

And while Tate really didn’t want to be here on a beautiful spring day cleaning out his father’s man cave, here he was. His mother had refused to set foot in that shed since she’d found Frank Harris’s body in it eight years ago. So the only alternative would be to leave Sam to deal with it all herself, and he certainly couldn’t do that. Not again.

Intellectually, he knew he’d done the right thing by taking the opportunity and going to school, just as he knew he couldn’t have taken Sam and Ellie with him, no matter how much he wanted to. But he couldn’t forget the looks on their faces the day he actually left. While Sam and Ellie both claimed to understand and support that decision, there was simply no way to forget
it. He’d been Sam’s hero until that day, but now she wouldn’t take a shred of help from him. He’d betrayed her, and he didn’t know if she’d ever really forgive him for it.

“Any idea what this is?” Sam held up a triangular piece of metal that might have once been blue before left to rust.

He forced himself back to the task at hand. “Trash.”

“I know, but what is it really?”

“Trash,” he insisted.

Sam laughed and added it to the growing pile. “At least this is easy.”

“I told you to throw a lit match in there.
That
would have been easy.”

“There might be something of value in here. You never know.”

He snorted. His family had never had much money—just enough to keep them respectable. There were no priceless heirlooms hiding out here. He pulled out a box marked “Old Clothes” and opened the lid. “Do you think this stuff is even worth donating?”

“Just set it aside. Terri might want the fabric for one of her crafts if the clothes are too dated to donate.”

He moved it to the trash pile. He was not going to shuffle this crap around.

Sam caught him. “Hey, now.”

“Trash, keep, recycle, donate.” He pointed to each pile as he named them. “Pick a pile. There are only four choices and ‘Cousin Terri might want it’ isn’t one of them.”

“Fine. Just let me go through it first.” She pulled a few things out. “Hello, 1987.”

“I told you,” he said when Sam closed it back up and shoved it over to the trash pile.

“It was worth a look, at least.”

“Why?” He really just wanted to get this done as
quickly as possible. Being out here was just picking at old wounds to see if they still hurt.

“Like I said. There might be something valuable in here. People have found original copies of the Declaration of Independence cleaning out old storage sheds and attics.”

“I’m going to go on record now saying we aren’t going to find something like that.” Sam tossed a look at him over her shoulder as she disappeared back into the darkness. “Your best hope is that the junk man doesn’t charge us a fortune to haul off all this crap,” he called after her.

“Too bad we can’t trade the bottles and cans in for cash.” She appeared carrying another box that clinked as she walked, adding it to the recyclables pile. “We’d be rich.”

Tate just shook his head. How the old man had managed to not die of alcohol poisoning long before his heart gave out had to have been some sort of medical miracle. In a way, he wondered whether this was why his mother “couldn’t bear” to help with this project. Would she not be able to keep up her denial in the presence of solid proof? Or did she just really not want to have to face that truth?

“It’s such a waste.” Sam sighed.

Tate looked at her sharply, unsure what exactly she was referring to. The possibilities were endless, it seemed.

“Nothing quite like tossing out the remains of what could have been your college tuition, you know?”

Since Tate had enough student loan debt to send most people into heart palpitations—and only the string pulling of Doc Masters with the scholarship committee had kept that amount from becoming enough to give
him
palpitations—he knew exactly what she was talking about. “If you want to go to school, Sam—”

She waved him off. “One step at a time, bro. Believe it or not, I do have a plan.”

“And that plan is . . . ?”

“Excellent and well thought out. Trust me.”

He would have to. For now, at least.

God, just being here was messing with his head. He tried to shake it off.

Instead of pressing for the details of that excellent and supposedly well-thought-out plan, he wiped the sweat off his neck and pulled out the sawhorses that had supported the optimistically named “workbench” and tossed them into the trash pile.

It wasn’t exactly a hot day, but they were both sweating from the work and grimy from the years of dust. Sam had a long black smudge across her forehead and Tate’s T-shirt was sticking to his skin. Looking at what they’d accomplished in just a few hours was impressive, but knowing how much was still left to do was disheartening.

Two boxes marked “Ellie” were set over to the side. Neither Tate nor Sam had opened them to even see what might be inside. The boxes caught his mother’s eye as she came out with plastic cups of ice water for them. “Why don’t you bring those into the house? I’ll call Ellie and get her to come down and go through them next week.”

Sam gave him a careful look and shook her head, forestalling anything he might say. “Sure thing.”

“You’re making a lot of progress,” his mother said. “It’s like a treasure hunt.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sort of.”
A sad, twisted one with nothing good to find.

“I’m making lunch now, so I’ll call you in when it’s ready.” Then she left, pointedly not sparing a glance at the collection of liquor bottles that outsized everything but the trash pile.

“Ellie’s not going to come down here. When will Mom accept that?”

While their family dynamics might politely be called “complicated” and “requiring therapy,” Ellie’s husband had made his stand very clear very early on. There was no polite whitewashing of the truth by him: Frank Harris was a violent alcoholic who abused his family. Doug hated the father-in-law he’d never met—which was probably a good thing, as even the kind, even-keeled Doug might not be able to resist dealing out some justice on his wife’s behalf. Doug might pity his mother-in-law, but he could not forgive her for not protecting her children and he didn’t exactly encourage Ellie to visit the old homestead.

Tate liked Doug a lot for that.

“I know,” Sam said. “But do you really want to get into that with her right now?” She shot a look at the house.

“At some point we’re going to have to. That much denial can’t be healthy.”

“Can it wait until I have my own place again?”

Hell, they’d avoided it for twenty-something years now, so what was the real rush? He nodded.

“Good. I’ll go through those boxes later and see what’s in there. I’ll call Ellie, and if she wants any of it, one of us can take it next time we go up.”

“What will you tell Mom?”

“I don’t have to tell her anything. She knows Doug doesn’t like her, even if she doesn’t know the truth why. She likes playing the poor, mistreated, and misunderstood mother-in-law.”

“Our family is so messed up.”

Sam laughed, but it was the hollow, humorless kind of laugh that spoke to resignation more than anything else. “There’s no such thing as a functional family anyway. Every family is messed up in its own way.” She slid
Ellie’s boxes off to one side with her foot. “At least
we’re
not too screwed up from it.”

“That’s debatable.”

“‘We cannot let the hurts others inflict on us darken our own souls.’”

It was such an un-Sam-like statement that he nearly dropped the box he was carrying. “What the hell?”

“It’s a quote from a book Molly loaned me. I’m finding it very helpful.” There was a defensive edge to her voice, daring him to make fun of her.

“Molly’s loaning you self-help books?”

“Yes. And I appreciate it, too. They make a lot of sense.”

“I never thought you’d be the type to go for that new-agey drivel.” He wouldn’t have thought Molly would be, either. She seemed so happy and well balanced. Why on earth would she need self-help books? On the other hand, hadn’t he just realized that Molly might not be exactly what she presented? Maybe the self-help books were part of that mystery.

“Molly said that book really helped her, so I’m inclined to think it’s not drivel.” She shrugged a shoulder. “Or at least I’m willing to give drivel a try.”

Maybe Sam had some answers. “You and Molly must be getting pretty tight, then.”

“I wouldn’t say we’re ‘tight’—Molly’s not the tell-you-everything type—but when things get slow, we talk.” Sam looked at him and smiled. “I like her. I can see why she and Helena are such good friends.”

“Oh?”

“Helena and Molly both run deeper than they appear. I mean, you
think
you know them, but when you try to put your finger on it, you realize you really don’t.”

He knew Helena better than anyone. But Molly? Sam was right about that.

“Say, did you know that Jane’s pregnant?”

He was still examining this new information about Molly and her self-help needs, so it took him a second to catch up after Sam’s non sequitur. “Jane Searcy?”

“Yeah. She’s just starting to tell people.”

“Tell her congratulations for me.”

“I will, but I’m telling you because that’s good news for me.”

“Because . . .”

“
Because
Jane’s going to cut down on her hours at Latte Dah, probably going to part-time once the baby arrives. That means more hours for me. Rachel and Holly can’t pick up many extra hours because of their school schedules. I may even get a promotion.”

“Did Molly tell you that?”

“No, Jane did.”

“And you want a long-term career as a barista?”

“I like the job. The money’s good and the people are nice. I can’t complain about it.”

“I’m glad.”

She shot him a cheeky grin. “Glad I can’t complain?”

“Well, yes. But more glad that you’re getting it all sorted out.” He knew that Sam had secretly hoped her marriage would turn out like Ellie’s, keeping her away from all this. It took guts for her to come back and start over when that didn’t pan out. He just wished Sam would let him clear the path a bit. It was the very least he owed her.

“We all make mistakes.” She shrugged a shoulder. “I could be worse off than I am, you know. I have a
place to live, I’m in no danger of starving, and I’m digging myself out of my mess. It’s all good.”