When Sydney finally turned the chair back around, the people around her applauded.

Claire couldn’t believe what she saw. Sydney had taken off at least twelve inches of length. The cut angled down so that it was longer in the front, but high and full in the back. The thin bangs made Claire’s eyes look beautiful and sparkling, not flat and judgmental. There in the mirror was someone who looked like Claire had always wanted to be.

Sydney didn’t ask her if she liked it. There was no question. It was a transformation performed by a master. Everyone was looking at Sydney with such awe, and Sydney was shining like polished silver.

Claire felt tears come to her eyes, a joy of birth, of redemption. Somewhere deep inside her, Claire had always known. It had been the source of all her jealousy when they were kids. Sydney had been born here. That was a gift, and this had always been inside Sydney, just waiting for her to embrace it.

“You can’t deny it anymore,” Claire said.

“Deny what?” Sydney asked.

“This is your Waverley magic.”

CHAPTER

7

Lester Hopkins sat in an aluminum lawn chair under the chestnut tree in his front yard. A ribbon of dust followed a car in the distance, coming up the long driveway to the house next to the dairy.

Lester had come back from his stroke last year with a limp and a corner of his mouth that wouldn’t quite turn up, so he kept a handkerchief handy to wipe away the spittle that collected there. Didn’t want to offend the ladies. He spent a lot of time sitting these days, which he didn’t mind so much. It gave him time to think. Truth be told, he had always looked forward to this time in his life. When he was a boy, his grandfather lived the life of Reilly, his days full of big breakfasts, hunting when he felt like it, sleeping in the afternoons, and picking the banjo in the evenings. That, Lester thought, was the way to live. You even got money in the mail every month, like clockwork. So Lester decided early on that he wanted to grow up and be retired.

But there were a few glitches along the way. He had to work harder than he imagined after his father died when Lester was seventeen, which left him to run the dairy by himself. And he and his wife were blessed with only one son. But his son married a hardworking woman and they all lived there in the house, and his son had a son and everything was all right. But then Lester’s wife got the cancer and his son died in a car accident two years later. Lost and grieving, his daughter-in-law wanted to move to Tuscaloosa, where her sister lived. But Henry, Lester’s grandson, then eleven years old, wanted to stay.

So Lester had known only two things of constant faith: his farm, and Henry.