At Shay’s house, a very subdued Ivy took over the making of the salad. When Mitch arrived she started and looked even more guilty and disconsolate than before.

Mitch gave Shay a quick kiss on the lips and turned to his sister, who tossed him a defiant look and made a face.

Mitch laughed and then reached out to rumple Ivy’s gossamer hair, but he spoke to Shay. “Ivy didn’t know why I wanted to rent that RV until it was too late.”

Ivy startled everyone by bursting into tears and fleeing through the back door. Todd started to follow, but Shay stopped him with a gesture of one hand and a quiet “No. I’ll talk to her.”

She found Ivy sitting at the picnic table, her head resting on her folded arms, her small shoulders shaking.

Shay laid a hand on her friend’s quivering back and said, “Hey. It’s all right, Ivy. I’m not mad at you.”

“I could kill that brother of mine!” Ivy wailed, sniffling intermittently. “Oh, Shay, I never thought he’d do anything like that!”

Shay couldn’t help smiling a little. “No harm was done. Let’s forget it.”

Ivy turned and flung herself into Shay’s arms for a quick hug. After that, she recovered quickly.

During dinner, served on that same picnic table, the conversation centered mostly on the house Shay was thinking of taking for her catering business and her ideas about renting out the other rooms as small shops.

Mitch said very little, but the light in his brown eyes revealed a certain amused respect that told Shay he liked the idea. Ivy, of course, was bursting with suggestions: she knew a woman who made beautiful candles and would be overjoyed to be a part of such a project, was acquainted with another who had been wanting to import Christmas ornaments to sell to the tourists as souvenirs but had had no luck in finding a shop she could afford.

When the pizza and salad were gone and the paper plates had been thrown away, Ivy and Todd made an abrupt, if cheerful, exit.

“Was it something I said?” Shay said with a frown.

Mitch grinned. “Don’t be naive,” he replied.

While Mitch brewed a pot of coffee, seeming as at home in Shay’s kitchen as if it had been his own, she settled onto the couch with the pages of his manuscript. She had never known a writer before, but she had expected a first draft to be a mass of scribbles and cross-outs and have scrawled notes in the margins. Mitch’s pages were remarkably neat and there was something in his style that grabbed Shay’s attention, made her read as someone who had never met Rosamond Dallas might.

Presently, Mitch set a steaming cup on the coffee table in front of her, but she didn’t pause to reach for it. She was fascinated, seeing a side of Rosamond that she hadn’t consciously noticed before.

By the time she’d raced through a hundred and fifty pages of concise, perceptive copy, her coffee was cold in the cup and her view of Rosamond—and Mitch himself—had been broadened by the length of a horizon.