“Yeah,” she said shakily. “I took more than I meant to.” Addison glanced back the way River had gone. “There was a fire at Baker’s a couple of years ago. His grandfather died, and I wanted to ease his guilt.” She leaned her head back against her truck and closed her eyes. “But I took every good feeling tied to that guilt—about his grandfather, about the family business. It’s why he’s not working at Baker’s anymore.”

“Shit,” Kaden said.

“The worst part is, I still love him.” She laughed through her tears. “Sorry. I hardly know you… It’s just nice to talk to someone who doesn’t have years of preconceived ideas about me and this town and… my abilities—or lack thereof.”

“Don’t apologize for your pain,” Kaden said.

“I wish I could fix it,” Addison said. “But I don’t know how.”

“The shadow garden made all of this possible,” he said with a nod toward the distillery. “Maybe there’s some way it can help you heal.”

Addison shook her head. The garden couldn’t take her pain. There was only one way for her to heal from this heartache. The old-fashioned way. On her own—with time.

Chapter 14

Kaden

The gate code separating the Bonner mansion from the rest of the distillery grounds hadn’t changed since Kaden left twenty-five years ago—almost as if his mother knew he’d one day be back. He’d considered waiting until the funeral to see her, but after yesterday, he had more questions than answers.

What he’d said to Addison had been true: once, he’d wanted to believe he could be a kind of healer—that he could provide a form of comfort, that what the bourbon did was truly revolutionary. But after stealing that woman’s memories in the bar, he wondered if what his family had done was worse. Much worse.

He took one last look over the distillery grounds behind him. The Ohio River hugged the eastern edge of the property, where limestone naturally filtered the water, before the property gave way to the distillery itself. Five warehouses surrounded the periphery of the complex where the barrels expanded in the hot Kentucky summers and contracted in the cold Kentucky winters. The bourbon bled into the wood, the wood into the bourbon, until flavor and nostalgia had aged to perfection.

He’d missed it.