Instead, Cait thought of her life as it was. The uncles with their fruit trees. Their obsession with organic.

And her father. In spite of all the people who lived close to them, it had always been the two of them. No one had ever come close to breaking their bond. “Just the two of us” had been their motto. Their siren song. Escaping to go camping, horseback riding, spending weekends in some backwoods town in Nebraska, Missouri or their beloved Kansas.

No, she thought. She liked one-on-one better. She was needed. And wanted in a way a big family couldn’t provide.

But she wasn’t the only one involved. If it weren’t for her, would her father have left Kansas and joined Vera Exton on her trek around the world?

Back then, it hadn’t been long since he’d been to the war in Vietnam. His stab wound had hardly healed. All he’d wanted to do was stay home. But she and the uncles knew that in the years since then he’d come to love to travel. He went to New York every year. Miami. The summer when Cait was eleven, the uncles sent him to England to collect grafts of old fruit trees that were growing in remote areas. He was gone for over two months and he’d loved it.

Did I hold him back? Cait wondered. Did he stop his own life because of me?

The thought of that made her sick to her stomach.

I wish I could give that time back to him, she thought. But you can’t redo the past.

It was getting late and she needed to go home. With a heavy heart, she packed the photos and the pages of stories Kelly had collected and put them back in the box. Standing, she looked at it. If she took it home, someone would see her with it and ask questions.

She went upstairs and shoved the box on the top shelf of one of the tiny closets.

Coop will have to make some walk-ins when he remodels, she thought, then grimaced. Dr. Coop was no longer part of her life. As her dad said, the vet had been swallowed up by the Hattens.

But I wasn’t. That thought made her feel the best she had in days. Instead of thinking about what she couldn’t change, she was going to be happy with what she had.

By the time she got home, she was smiling. As she got out of her Jeep, a big black Mercedes pulled into the yard.

Oh, good! Cait thought. A customer. She hoped it was someone with thousands of acres and they wanted a zillion organic fruit trees. She’d like to be overwhelmed with work.

She was grinning widely as the tinted window went down.