Even though Iminga had grown rapidly in the last five years, what with an influx of well-heeled retirees and affluent young couples buying second homes in this unspoiled corner of Mississippi, it was still a small town in many ways. Mary Beth knew it—and felt like privacy was a luxury granted only to those who guarded it fiercely. The older generation kept to boundaries set by church pews and front porches where just about everyone was made welcome. Alma in particular was a stickler for hospitality if not discretion.

But even Alma didn’t discuss the most personal matters.

Mary Beth was aware that something had happened to the Westons years ago, before they’d moved to Iminga—the kind of scandal that nice folks didn’t talk about. Just about everyone else’s business got covered at town gatherings, though, when people turned out in droves for Fourth of July picnics and fund-raising barbecues and the like.

When he’d started going places with her, hand in hand, lovey-dovey as could be, Mary Beth could tell he was being sized up by some in a way that said they didn’t think a Weston was worthy of a Caine.

Like most of the South, people had relatives and friends in distant communities who traded juicy tidbits, old and new, from far and wide. Gossip was a regional obsession. A family might move away and it would be as if they had never left to those who remained.

She didn’t want to ask him about what she had only sensed, and never dared to bring up the subject with her dad, who no doubt knew as much as anyone. Every family, she felt, was entitled to keep the past in the past.

She couldn’t help thinking, though, that maybe that was why Bobby Joe’s behavior at the engagement party had been hushed up so fast. The flow of friendly phone calls requesting updates from Alma had stopped even before Mary Beth’s family-only birthday party, as far as she could tell.

Which didn’t mean that people wouldn’t talk if a rumor got started about her and Parr. Mary Beth was running a risk by wearing the ruby strawberry. But no one could see the gem nestled between her breasts, not with her blouse done up to the collar on what promised to be a sultry day.

The necklace was hers, after all, a unique gift that Parr had chosen with care, and she didn’t see why it should languish in a dresser drawer. However, even though Bobby Joe hadn’t seen it, she’d taken the precaution of lengthening the fine gold chain with a shorter, plainer one clipped to each end.