What he didn’t know was that if she squinted just so, he reminded her of someone else. And maybe that was why she couldn’t let herself love him.

Thankfully, the howl in the next room squashed her thoughts and her guilt.

“He’s up,” Marisol said. The monitor seconded her announcement. “Three bits of advice from a woman who’s raised four. One, relax. Two, take command. And three,” she paused, leaned in close and smiled gently. “Remember, he’s a dog.”

By nine o’clock, Henry had fallen asleep at Tess’s feet. Three parts Labrador retriever, two parts English Pointer, one-part surprise, Tess had rescued him six weeks ago. She’d been working at the rescue center for two years and this was the first time she’d brought a dog home. Maybe it was the hopefulness in the animal’s eyes, or the way he followed Tess around. But the real reason probably had to do with the fact that Henry looked an awful lot like a dog from Magdalena—Cash’s dog.

After more than eight years of studying psychology, she still couldn’t bury the memory of her ex-fiancé. She’d tried. Many times. There’d been wine, medication, and eventually, therapy. They’d all helped in certain degrees, but none achieved the goal she sought: pure and complete obliteration.

There had been so many failures that she’d finally turned to self-analysis. Nobody knew her as well as she knew herself or how one night could set off a chain reaction of self-destruction. And no matter how she tried to relay the feelings tied to the pain of losing a brother and a fiancé, nobody really understood. Or how the action she’d taken spurred by those losses had left her more damaged than JJ’s death or Cash’s part in it.

Tess no longer relied on drink, pills, or therapy to blur the edges of her pain. She’d faced that pain head on when she’d decided to pursue studies in psychology, an ongoing attempt to understand the cause and effect of life-changing events in a person’s life, especially her own. When she eventually emerged with a Ph.D. and an offer to teach at a university, she’d latched on, hoping she’d found a way to climb out of her quiet misery.

It hadn’t quite happened, but the teaching did help. Neal helped too, giving her balance and support with his quiet strength and boundless patience. She could love this man—if she let herself. It would be different from loving Cash. With him, it had been all-consuming. Raw. Needy.

She told herself youth had made the fire between them explosive, and if she met him now, he would not singe her with his nearness, or his words. He would be nothing to her but a stranger.

And that’s exactly how she wanted to keep it.

She no longer blamed him for JJ’s death. The forgiveness came over time as the pain faded, a season here, a birthday there. When she turned twenty-seven, she thought of their dream to have their first child. At twenty-nine, they would have baby number two. And now, at thirty, Tess would be a pediatric nurse practitioner and Cash would be on the SWAT team. Big dreams. But none of them had turned true.