Then his mother had called for the first time. He’d thought she wanted to check on Gran, but he should have known better. After all, this was the woman who’d accepted money from him, wired when he was abroad still on active duty, to travel from her home in New Mexico to Magnolia in order to be with his grandmother after her surgery.

But she’d never come to Magnolia. Iris had been alone, first in the hospital and then in the rehabilitation wing of Shady Acres until Gabe had finally arrived almost a month after her fall.

Okay, it might be an exaggeration to say she was totally alone. She’d lived in the small town for over half her life and had many close friends. People loved her. But there had been no family. Gabe and Poppy were her only family.

Now his mother was hinting that she anticipated her own mother’s death so she could claim an inheritance and that the money coming to her was more important than Gran’s quality of life.

“I’m going to go, Mom,” he said flatly. “If you want me to keep the business going so it’s worth something to you, I need to work.”

“I want her moved to another facility,” his mother told him, and his stomach churned with acid. He’d met with his grandmother’s attorney, Douglas Damon, shortly after arriving in Magnolia but still knew very little about Iris’s will. He’d been granted power of attorney, but if his mom decided to challenge him, it could get messy.

Gabe didn’t have time for messy.

“Let’s get through the holidays,” he said, forcing fake cheer into his tone. “I’ll talk to the people at Shady Acres about the money, and if we can’t work something out, I’ll look at other places.” That was a bald-faced lie. If his grandmother was happy at the home, he’d do anything to keep her there.

He also wanted to get Poppy off his back.

“We used to be a team,” his mother said.

We were never a team, he thought.

“I love you, Gaby.”

Yeah, now that she thought he was giving her what she wanted.

“Goodbye, Mom.”

He hung up and fisted both his hands in front of him, trying hard to resist the urge to punch his fist into a wall or hurl a ceramic pot across the store. Anything to get rid of some of the tension curling inside him.

Except he’d just have to clean up the mess, and he had more than his share of those at the moment.

A feminine throat cleared behind him, and Gabe whirled to find Angi standing just inside the shop’s entrance.

“You didn’t hear me come in,” she said, as if that wasn’t obvious.

“How much did you hear?”

She lifted one shoulder. “Enough from your end to understand why you’ve let this place go the way you have.” She stepped forward, one long finger trailing over the leaf of a poinsettia. “I don’t remember ever meeting your mom during the summers you stayed with Iris.”