But now that her sister’s family and her own children were gone, she wasn’t sure being alone felt any better, which was why she’d gone to the coffee shop in the first place.

You busy tonight? If not, can you come by the store? I want you to try my new cookies. I think I’m really onto something with this one.

Tobias smiled as he read that text from Maya. He’d just pulled into his driveway and parked in front of his house after spending the afternoon skating with quite a few of the students at New Horizons. Although he hadn’t had much experience with ice-skating when he was a kid—someone who’d grown up in sunny LA, and as poor as he’d been, didn’t have much opportunity to get on the ice—he’d been a natural on rollerblades and that skill had easily transferred over. He’d gotten good enough that he wished he’d had the chance to play hockey, or any other organized sport, when he was a kid. Prison had taken such a huge chunk of his life.

But he couldn’t feel sorry for himself. It was because of him that Atticus hadn’t had the chance to play sports, either. Atticus couldn’t ice-skate or do anything else that required the use of his legs even now. Which was the only reason Tobias wasn’t already backing up to go try those cookies at Sugar Mama. He was leery of going anywhere near the cookie shop. He never knew when he might run into Susan—Maya’s grandmother and Jada’s mother—who owned the store. Susan hated him so much she gave new meaning to the saying “If looks could kill.” One night back in August, she came over to his house and physically attacked him. He deserved that and more—honestly, he didn’t blame her for her hurt and anger—but that didn’t mean he was going to put himself in a situation where she might go off on him again.

While he was staring at his phone, trying to decide whether to take the risk for Maya’s sake, Uriah knocked on his window.

Tobias jumped. He hadn’t seen the old man coming. “Hey, what’s up?” he asked after rolling down his window.

“Would you like to come in and have some dinner? Hazel Saunders brought over a delicious taco casserole an hour ago, and I’ve got it warming in the oven.”

Tobias wasn’t one to miss a home-cooked meal. After having a mother who rarely bothered to feed them, and then eating prison grub for thirteen years, there wasn’t anything he enjoyed more. He was hungry, too. But when he saw movement from the corner of his eye, he realized Carl was standing in the shadows, looking on, and hesitated.