He felt the curious stares as he rode down Main Street, and couldn’t help but remember the day he left Blessings. Back then, no one even noticed he was leaving, because they would have assumed he would be back. The memory was as vivid now as it was the day it happened.

* * *

It was the day he was supposed to leave for college when all hell broke loose. By the time the fight was over, his world and his future had been destroyed—betrayed by his own family.

His mother didn’t know he was gone or what had happened until she came back from dropping Birdie off at school and found her family in an uproar. She began begging them all to tell the truth about what happened, but Emma, Junior, and Ray clammed up, and his father, Parnell, told his wife the same thing he’d told Hunt.

“What was done was done, so get over it.”

What none of them knew was that Hunt left the house and went straight to Savannah to an army recruitment office and signed up. After testing revealed an aptitude for flying, he went from high school to flight school, and was still in flight school when the United States invaded Iraq.

His first deployment was to Fallujah, flying Apache helicopters, and for the next seven years, he went wherever he was deployed. He was shot at nearly every time he flew out—but somehow always managed to get back. He was fighting a war he didn’t fully understand, running from a betrayal he couldn’t forget.

And then the inevitable happened. After all those years of taking fire and limping back to base, they were shot down.

His gunner died, and the wounds Hunter suffered sent him stateside. It took eight months to fully heal, and then he mustered out.

It took another six months before he found a job doing the only thing he knew how to do—fly choppers. But now, instead of carrying Hellfire missiles, he ferried oil-field workers back and forth to offshore rigs, and had been doing it ever since. It was what he was doing before he got home to find his mother’s letter. And now he was here, carrying out his mother’s last wishes.

He found the lawyer’s office with ease, parked at the curb in front, then dismounted and went inside.

* * *

Betty Purejoy was at her desk when the stranger walked in. When she saw the bike helmet he was carrying, she guessed he must have been the rider on the motorcycle she heard outside.

“Good morning. How can I help you?” Betty asked.

“Morning, ma’am. My name is Hunt Knox. Marjorie Knox was my mother.”

Betty thought she remembered him as a teenager, but he’d certainly changed.

“Mr. Butterman is expecting you, and I’m so sorry about your mother. I’ll let him know you’re here.”