Shorty chuckled. “It’s still hard for me to believe she struck up a friendship with Jasper Moore while she was here. I shake my head whenever I remember seeing them dancing together.”

“Yeah, well, he was Andy Smith then—a correctional officer at the prison. She wasn’t the only one who was fooled.”

“True.” Shorty straightened. “What’s up with him these days, anyway? He out of the infirmary yet?”

“He was just transferred back to his cell this week.”

“So he’s going to be okay.”

“That depends on how well he gets along with the other inmates moving forward. He’s not the type who makes friends easily—especially not now that the mask has come off.”

“Deserves whatever he gets. That’s my take.”

“A lot of people would agree. But Evelyn’s seen to it that they’ve suspended the guards who were responsible for him when it happened. They can’t let that kind of shit occur.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Shorty wasn’t one who stopped to chat for very long when he was working the bar. But with the wedding over, Amarok could tell he was warming up to the question he really wanted to ask.

After Shorty had put so much into making the wedding as nice as it had been, Amarok decided to save him the trouble of searching for the right lead-in. “I decided to invite her,” he said, out of the blue.

Amarok knew he was right, that Shorty had wanted to ask about Alistair’s appearance at the wedding, when Shorty didn’t say, Who?

“Change of heart, huh?” he said instead.

“I don’t know. Life just seems too short to carry that kind of resentment around.”

“She kept her distance and left as soon as it was over. I think she’s trying to respect your boundaries.”

“I got that, too. And I’m grateful.” Amarok wasn’t sure how much interaction he’d have with his mother in the future, but he supposed it was a step in the right direction.

He scratched off the label of his beer, lost in thought for a bit. Their relationship would become more of an issue now that she would have a grandchild through him. Deciding he didn’t want to have a relationship with her seemed selfish when it meant his daughter wouldn’t have one of her grandmothers.

Evelyn came up and rested her hand on his shoulder as she reached over to grab a handful of nuts. “I’m exhausted,” she said. “You about ready to head home?”

He slid his empty bottle toward Shorty. “I’ve just been waiting for you.”

She gave him the smile that never failed to steal his breath. “Then let’s go, Husband.”

They thanked Shorty and, her hand clasped in his, left the bar—only to find his truck decorated with so much shoe polish, balloons and crepe paper, he didn’t think he’d be able to see out of the windshield to drive.

“Good thing we hid my car around back,” she said, and they hurried to reach it—only to find that the locals hadn’t been fooled.